Clod of Cthulhu: Maybe I Should Squid While I’m Ahead

I’m not going to use the whole “when we last left our hero” schtick for CoC:DCotE. This is because he’s only a hero in the Homer sense: he does luridly stupid things, gets other people killed, manages to survive himself, and gets hailed as awesome because of it.

So, yeah. The last time we left our bumbling chowderhead, he had decided to poke around in a rural port town known as Innsmouth in search of a missing shopkeeper. Obviously, the first thing I’m going to want to do is check out the ransacked shop and see if I can find any clues.

The shop is on the main street. It has a couple of big windows and a door, the latter of which is badly broken and seems to have been recently forced open. I try to go through it, but apparently that’s not an option.

So, go in through the back way, then? There is a back entrance, which you can access by way of an alley. There’s just one slight problem: the large, hostile, spitting-mad policeman who’s blocking your way.

Yes, apparently Innsmouth doesn’t trust the police tape to keep out snoopers, despite the fact that they have no reason to expect anyone would poke around after the missing shopkeeper. They know that there’s two ways to get into the building: a back entrance, accessible by alleyway, and a front entrance. If I were them, I’d just have the police offer stand at the mouth of the alleyway and watch both the front entrance and the only way to get into the alley, but managing more than one entrance requires the use of math and is thus beyond the capabilities of Innsmouth’s Finest. Instead, he patrols the length of the alleyway very slowly, going up and down, up and down, turning a corner as he does so and leaving himself blind to anyone coming in after him. Basically, what you’re supposed to do is wait until he starts walking down the alley, sneak after him, hide near the corner of the alley, wait for him to turn around and pass by you, and sneak in through the back door at the alley’s end. Again, my solution would have been waiting until he turned the corner and then walking in through the unguarded front, but that’s just me.

Once you get inside, the game helpfully recommends you barricade the back door with a bookshelf. Oh…kay. That shouldn’t be necessary, since Slappy McGills out there doesn’t know I’m in here, but I suppose I shouldn’t risk getting caught. For stealth’s sake, let’s block my only exit by dragging a large, heavy object slowly across the floor. It’s just what Solid Snake would do, perhaps after the senility sets in.

I poke around the place. The major feature of the store is in the office—there’s a safe, containing a bottle of rum and a wooden handle of some kind…? Huh? I mean, okay, I guess the guy was a party animal, but how about keeping that hooch in your desk drawer or something? And the wooden handle—what the hell is this? I pocket them both.

Suddenly, there’s a banging on the back door. Crap on a waffle, do those fish guys know I’m here? How? Did the patrolman reach the back door, try the handle on a whim, and notice that a bookcase was now inexplicably in front of it? That would just about do it, actually. Why did I barricade that thing? Okay, no time for questions, got to get out of here fast. Okay, try the front door…still can’t go through it? Really? Okay, desperate times, desperate measures. Let’s break a window! Except, I can’t, because I have nothing to break them with and they’re probably unbreakable anyway. Back door is out of the question—even if it wasn’t currently being hammered on by an angry officer of the law, it looks like some right bastard blocked the thing with a bookcase. So, I guess hide, then? I run into the side office with the safe and crouch behind the desk.

No dice. The cop runs right in, makes a beeline directly for my hiding spot, and crows triumphantly. Oh, crap, this is it for me. My only regret is not seeing Paris, and also losing six years of my memory, and taking this case, and actually just about everything I’ve ever…

“Taking evidence, eh?” he says, removing the things I took from the safe. “Get out!”

…really? I’m free to go? Despite the fact that I’m sticking my nose in a case you clearly don’t want me investigating, the fact that you hate my guts, and the fact that you have actually caught me red handed in committing a legitimate crime, you’re just going to turn me loose back into the city and start up your patrol route again? Hey, it’s a balance! I’m stupid, they’re stupid…it all sort of works out in the end.

I start poking around the rest of the city. First, I see the Innsmouth equivalent of the welcome wagon, which is a guy going around areas I’m about to enter and warning various citizens not to tell me anything. There’s a woman who’s cryptic about how things are bad in Innsmouth, a well-dressed outsider government inspector who’s cryptic about how things are bad in Innsmouth, and a publically-urinating singing drunkard who’s cryptic about how things are bad in Innsmouth. The first one gives me a dire and vague warning about, “the order”, the second one is more or less useless, and the third one actually gives me an honest to god quest. He claims to know things that will interest me, and will give me the information for the low, low price of one (1) bottle of quality alcohol.

Ah, so it starts to fit together. I need the hooch to get information from this hobo chap. I don’t suppose giving him money to buy likker would be an acceptable option? No, of course not. Got to enable him directly. Okay, old man, I’ll go get you your damn rum…just as soon as I figure out how to pull this whole tampering with evidence gambit without getting busted in the process.

Once again, I work my way down the alleyway and snake the old patrolman. You’d think he’d have tightened his security a bit: maybe gotten two police officers to guard the store…oh, right, math again…or just stationed one officer inside the place. Anyway, I go through the same motions of robbing the place, and he starts banging on the back door soon after.

Hastily, I start combing the store for a way out, or a hiding spot, or anything. I luck out—turns out, there’s a trap door in the floor that can be accessed using the wooden handle. I’m not sure how that works, or why he’d take the handle out and lock it in his safe, but whatever, it’s somewhere to hide! Almost certainly a dead end, but it’s better than hanging around here with my pants down, so let’s do it.

I stuff the handle in the trapdoor just as the back door bursts open. He has an enviable view of me stumbling through the hatch, only to hit a ladder that is so rotted and terrible that it breaks off the moment I touch it. Man, OSHA does not have a home in Innsmouth.

I collapse at the bottom, bruised and dazed. I see him approach the hatch, and he yells something to the tune of: “Whoever you are, you can rot down there!”

Yeah. “I don’t know who you might be, person who bore an uncanny resemblance to that nosy detective who was poking around this area and has actually broken in once already using the exact same methods, but you can just stay down there and think about what you’ve done!” Good call, Fishboy.

Of course, I find a way out, get the rum to the drunkard, and listen to his exposition. Turns out, Innsmouth? Yeah, things are bad there. He gives me some incredibly vague portents about the religious history of Innsmouth that may or may not be germane to my investigation, then gives me the key to the town poorhouse and tells me to visit a guy named Tom Waite, saying he’d give me additional information about the local religious doctrine.

Fascinating. So glad I nearly got arrested supplying some old stick with a bottle of sauce, just so he could give me some unrelated exposition and refer me to someone who could supply me with additional unrelated exposition.

At this point, the woman tracks me down again. She was extremely mysterious before, which is understandable—I can’t imagine there’s much of a future for people who start gabbing to outsiders about certain matters, especially when neither of the involved parties look like the bastard child of Rodney Dangerfield and a singing fish plaque. Anyway, for no real reason that I can follow, she’s more open now: she tells me that the cult here in Innsmouth is totally evil, man, and has killed before. Also, rumor has it that a variety store owned by Tom Waite contains some important mojo. Turns out that it might not be a flagrant waste of my time to go pay him a visit.

So I make my way to Tom Waite’s house. The door is answered by a slightly fish-faced young girl. I should really just copy a direct transcription of our conversation:

Jack: Hello, there, little lady.

Ramona: Soon, I think. You can wait inside if you like. Daddy won’t mind. I’m
drawing pictures with my crayons.

Not. Creepy.

For want of anything else (sensible) to do, I wander vaguely upstairs, poking around and looking for something, anything, to do but check the attic. I should mention that Jack will have occasional visions where he’ll be put in the shoes of something nearby, either a creature that’s following him or an ordinary human that’s about to learn a new meaning of the term, “fish fillet.” These can be cool and atmospheric, unless you keep dying and having to go through them over and over, because they’re completely unskippable and not nearly as scary the 32nd time. Anyway, I get one now of something pacing about in a dark, distinctly attic-like room.

It’s going to make me do this, isn’t it.

I go up to the attic door, and control is wrested from me in favor of one of the game’s many first-person cutscenes. I approach the door, slide back the hatch…hm, I can’t see anything inside. Allow me to lean in real close to the hatch…

(meanwhile, I’m counting under my breath: “3, 2, 1, aaaaand…”)

OH SNAP CREATURE LUNGES AGAINST THE DOOR. My character blacks out as this freakish fish-thing knocks the door down and scampers over him. When he comes to, his head is injured, the place is devastated, and the girl downstairs is dead in a pool of her own blood.

Quality work there, Jack.