Clod of Cthulhu: Moronic Mansion
Alright, enough faffing about describing the Cthulhu mythos. Most of you guys are already quite informed about the setting, which is ironic, because it’s based around knowledge that man was never meant to know. So, either this taboo voodoo elder god knowledge is overrated, or you guys are all gibbering lunatics at the fringe of sanity. Actually, judging by the comments section, I’ll acknowledge that the two are not mutually exclusive.
Anyway. Our tale begins in an insane asylum. There’s the typical insane asylum setpieces—walls that look like they’ve been soaked in gravy, grubby lanky-haired prisoners wailing up a storm, and an apathetic warden who looks like he’s contemplating how many baked hams he’s going to have on his lunch break. Then we see an inmate, his cell bedaubed in typical occult mumbo-jumbo scrawlings, preparing to hang himself. He gets in the noose, kicks away the chair, the warden comes in to try to save him—it’s not actually shown if he’s successful or not, but he’d have to be kind of an idiot not to figure out how to rescue a guy slowly hanging himself to death three feet off the ground when a.) he’s light enough to lift and b.) there’s a chair not two feet away.
The prisoner’s journal falls open, and we zoom in on the text. It is at about this point we assume the role of our protagonist, Jack Walters.
The game starts on a dark and stormy night, with you, a detective somewhere in the US, being summoned by the local police force. Apparently, you’ve got something of a reputation as a master sleuth—something that’s quite funny to me, given his proven inability to solve 2+2, not to mention ass+both hands. Anyway, the police are camping out outside some creepy cultist house full of heavily armed hostiles, and the cultists have asked Jack to come over and start talking to one of them. The cultist in question is standing in an eerie alleyway between the side door of the house and a fence. My first instinct is, “screw off, I’m not going over there,” but I acknowledge that my character doesn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter. It’d seem cowardly not to help out—after all, the cultists just want to talk to you, and they seem friendly enough so far. Now, if they were shooting at you, that’d be another story—
Oh crap, spoke too soon. Take five steps towards the cultist’s house and they suddenly begin opening fire from the windows. I’m really not certain why this happened, to be honest. I don’t think they wanted me dead, given what happens in a few minutes, and I didn’t do anything terribly threatening. The police stayed right where they were, just as instructed. I guess maybe they got bored of waiting? I dunno. Anyway, the police start yelling at me, and I panic, since I don’t have a weapon or any plot armor or anything. All I know is, I’m getting shot at, and I don’t want to get shot at. I run back over to where the cops are. They’re opening fire right back, running around and peppering the windows with bullet after bullet, but nobody seems to be actually hitting anything.
After a minute of having absolutely no idea what to do, I decide that I might as well run towards the side of the house. It’s a stupid plan by all accounts, but what else am I gonna do? There’s nobody still there, but the side door is unlocked, so I shrug and go in.
Gunshots still ringing upstairs, I begin searching the downstairs. There’s nobody there, which is a comfort. I steal some books about cults, comment on the fact that the paintings all look like rejects from Monster Manual #WeDon’tCareAnymore, and then, after making sure there was precisely nothing else I could be doing with my time, I went upstairs.
Now, this is a stupid idea. There are guys with guns up here. They were shooting at me, like, a minute ago. I don’t know where they are, and I don’t know what they’ll do when they see me. If I had any better ideas, I’d GTFO and let the police handle it. In fact, in real life, that’s what anybody would do in this situation. I was only doing this because I felt obligated to by the game, and it was starting to cheese me off that my character was such a self-destructive dunce.
Anyway, I find a lot of things upstairs. For one, a room full of corpses. All of the cultists are dead, which is, you know, kinda gross. I don’t know if it’s entirely clear what killed them, but it appears to be suicide.
(Now’s a good time to mention the Sanity mechanic. Basically, looking at creepy stuff makes you lose your shiz. Early on, when it’s just dead bodies and such, your heart rate increases and your vision gets blurry. Later, when the horrors grow more intense, you start hearing whispers and hallucinating. You have to calm yourself down by not looking at whatever’s disturbing you—an interesting mechanic, and one that I quite like.)
So, room full of dead bodies. That’s great. I don’t suppose now you’d like to get away from the intensely terrifying murder-suicide gun-wielding psychopaths? Of course not.
There’s two rooms facing the front yard. Inside the first one us one of the cultist gunners, who appears to be dead. Apparently, the world’s worst marksmen can get lucky occasionally.
The next room contains a guy still hale, hearty, and firing down at the cops. His back is turned to you, and he seems distracted. Hm. I make a mental note that if I find a weapon, I’ll come back and deal with this guy. Then I close the door and move on.
I can’t find any more rooms available to me.
Oh…kay.
So, now what? I’ve got a house full of dead bodies, a few pieces of stoutly incriminating evidence, and a cultist who seems hellbent on killing all of us. Seems like now would be the time to leave, while I’m still 100% lead-free. Except, of course, you can’t. You’ve apparently got to stick this thing out to the bitter, hemorrhaging end.
After a while, I decide there must be something in the room with the shooter that I missed before. Of course, I have to investigate it without attracting the attention of the wackjob cultist. So I switch into stealth mode, open the door very carefully, and look around. He’s still occupied. I step in very quietly…
…and it switches to a first-person cutscene, in which Jack walks right towards the cultist and introduces himself.
The cultist turns. He says something like, “Ah, we’ve been expecting you,” and it is at this moment that the police downstairs figure out which end the bullets come out of and manage to tag the guy. Great.
I find a key on the guy and unlock the remaining door. Inside are…photographs of me. Lots of them. And newspaper articles with me in them. Basically, a little shrine to myself. It’s terrifying, obviously, and Jack is so disturbed by this turn of events that he leaves the house immediately and lets the police carry on with their inquiries.
Wait, no, that doesn’t happen. He keeps poking around. The cops are still firing on the window for some reason, so they’re not around to help or anything. It’s pretty much just you screwing around for no reason.
Eventually, you find a tunnel in the library leading down to the sound of human suffering. Jack comments, “This tunnel looks like it could collapse at any moment!” He’s right, too. It looks flimsy as hell, and will occasionally shudder, sending up clouds of dust. Really, that tunnel is the last place any sane man would want to be.
So Jack goes down the tunnel, emptying out into a massive foyer. On the opposite wall is an infernal, unheard-of artifice of pain. A massive spiked machine holds captive an injured man, keeping him in exquisite agony. There is the glow of green energy, and it is clear that the spikes are electrified somehow. In front of the man is a massive button.
Jack finally goes back to summon the police, and ask them to call the paramedics. They manage to get the man down, then start a thorough sweep of the tunnels after having them reinforced for safety. Then they manage to…
Wait, no, that doesn’t happen. Jack pushes the button. It kills the man strapped into the device.
Pushing the button frees up a small, green, glowing crystal. He takes the crystal (for no reason), plugs it into a socket in the next room (for no reason), pushes a button near the socket (for no reason), and starts a massive glowing ritual thing that ends up summoning an elder god and shattering his sanity.
That part’s actually not a joke. That’s what seems to happen. As far as I can tell, his meddling summons some sort of massive ancient one. The sight drives him mad, and he’s sent to an asylum for 6 years or so.
So…yeah. Jack has now endangered his life too many times to count, meddled recklessly in police affairs, killed an innocent man, and possibly doomed the entire world.
In the very first mission.
We’re in for a ride, folks.
Innocent People Confirmed to Have Been Killed By Jack’s Actions: 1
This is a little debatable, since the guy was probably a cultist and might not have been savable anyway, but it’s still stupid of Jack to just push random buttons attached to devices beyond the ken of mortal men.
There’s that whole ‘guided by forces above his own understanding’ thing that is hinted at in the cutscene that takes place just about right after where you would have left off in this article.
Doesn’t make him any less of an idiot, but it gives a vague quasi-understanding.
Great! Really awesome. I have no doubt this will be another hilarious LP. Also, having not played before, that sanity mechanic does sound interesting, and I’m glad it manifests itself in more than just a bar on the screen.
I look forward to the next one. Screenshots are always cool, though.
great, now i want to play this thing
You seem to be forgetting the suicidal curiosity that’s pretty much a given for all characters in most (if not all) Lovecraft stories. Wouldn’t be much of a story if the protagonist wasn’t too curious for his own good.
Apart from that, it’s great stuff. Very interesting reading.
All we need is for this guy to write down an intricate description of the inside of an elder god’s intestinal track and he’d be a real Lovecraftian protagonist.
Whenever I notice stories being powered by the protagonist’s [insert trait here], I always think to myself “Well, yes, she’s narcissistic, and yes, it gets her into trouble. That’s why the storyteller decided to tell a story about her.”
For all we know, the police tried everyone else already, and they were all too smart (read: At all intelligent) to go anywhere near the house. So they finally turned to Jack, he obliged them, and that’s why we’re being told this story at all.
In my playtrough, everything went exactly as you described here, all with the waiting in the opening shooting and the attempt at avoiding the cultist. I guess the developers suck at hiding their railroad tracks.
Dave: Actually, there’s no HUD, so there’s no Sanity bar at all.
Icyn: I was going to mention that later, but this goes above and beyond that. Besides, when you have to clean up after said hero’s messes, it’s less fun.
“Guided by forces above his own understanding” should mean “The player gets to make smart decisions even if the protagonist has the intelligence of a sack of frozen butter”.
Then again, if that force is something in the game, it could very well be anything. Opening a window is well beyond Jack’s understanding.
Maybe Cthulhu is whispering sweet “Would you kindly…”s in his ear?
I have to agree with the above comments that the sanity system is very well done, even if it makes the game quite tough in the end game if you’re not careful with what you stare. The sanity loss is cumulative after all. You may get over the shock, but you won’t recover.
Rutskarn: I can’t remember any bits where you had to clean up messes left by the hero. Though it’s been a while since I last played it, so it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
In any case I expect you’ll have many a delicious example for us in future installments.
I assumed that Jack was a hostage negotiator. I think that’s something I unconsciously imposed on the story in order to have it make sense.
If you figure that he’s got experience talking crazy people off a ledge, it makes some sense why he’d go into the house alone and talk to the crazy cult leader, and why he’d go exploring the basement to see if there were any hostages down there. Granted, he’d probably take a firearm, and he probably wouldn’t go pushing random buttons, but hey.
While I agree that Jack does some stupid things in this game, I wouldn’t be so harsh on him just yet. Maybe it’s because I imagined a background that would explain some of this stuff, but I didn’t get a big “main character = stupid” vibe in this sequence. More like “main character = too curious for his own good.”
I thought I’d try and clarify some of the backstory and why exactly Jack is at this house, as some people seem a bit confused. His being there is really the only part of this scene that makes any sense at all. Please note that the last time I played the game was about a year ago so this all from memory and may not be 100% correct.
When the game opens Jack isn’t a private detective yet, he’s still a rookie investigator with the Boston PD. If you read the back entries in your journal you can see that Jack Walters really isn’t all that great a detective, – he’s not bad, just nothing special – but when working on certain cases he often has odd flashes of inspiration and just feels like he knows what happened.
His uncanny deductive skills, he wisely doesn’t mention his psychic-like abilities, have recently garnered him a certain amount of newspaper attention after he solved a couple of high profile cases. When the cultists start negotiating with the police they refuse to deal with anyone other than Walters which is why he is called in. – This may also be why he doesn’t have his 38 with him because he’s going in as a negotiator. I can’t remember but doesn’t he give it to one of the other cops in the beginning? – Anyway the cultists cite the articles from the paper as why they want to talk with Walters specifically, it may be that these articles are the ones in the basement and what allowed them to find Jack and determine it was him they needed in the first place.
So there you have it, hopefully this makes the premise seem a little less nonsensical, though everything that happens after is still ridiculous, great atmosphere though.
Liking the LP. If anyone cares to watch the action, here’s a link to a video walkthrough I found: http://www.gameanyone.com/video/6816
FWIW, (nerd alert! also possibly spoilers) as I recall what the machine summons is one of the Great Race of Yith, who are able to send their minds forward in time to switch places with other beings, which is what accounts for Jack’s six years of lost time.
(Also, you left out all the fun details about the room with the cultist torture machine, like how the dude’s various internal organs are all in separate boxes around the walls, which are connected to his body by wires and tubes!)
New theory, perhaps the elder gods can drive you insane before the event that makes you crazy? So you can have apriori insanity!
Mmm. Gravy.
Possibly relevant to your interests.
Inside the first one us one of the cultist gunners, who appears to be dead.
s/us/is/
Why can’t I find a next button on these things? Ah well, back to the archives.
@Sydney: But when that trait is stupidity, it gives the very strong impression that it isn’t the character, but the writer who’s stupid. That they need things to occur, but they aren’t capable of thinking of logical ways to make them happen. “The protagonist does something mind-numbingly stupid” is the easy way out, and it’s especially offensive when it’s a game railroading you into doing the stupid thing.