Clod of Cthulhu: Checkout Time at the Baits Motel

I just want you guys to know that you stole all of my fish puns in the comment section to the last article. Cretins! This space is for ME to make the funny. You’re going to use up all my funny if you keep this sort of thing up! Just for that, this article is 100% free of any terrible, eye-gouging, tooth-gnashing puns involving aquatic life. Let this be a lesson for you! (In reality, this wasn’t so much because I couldn’t come up with any more, it’s really just that I didn’t want to encourage you guys to make even MORE puns. I thought I was capable of some truly brainbreaking punnage, but you guys kept pace. A mixture of respect, fear, and loathing is in order. Myself, I’m mostly gonna go with those last two.)

Moving on.

I’m not sure I can adequately summarize the mind-blowing stupidity of what Jack Walters just did in one paragraph. Even if I could, compressing that much moron into that small a space might actually damage my screen, and will most certainly damage my brain. Alright: because I love you guys, I’ll give it a shot.

Let’s see…you walk into a building in a town where everyone seems to want to kill you,  overhear a conversation where a guy says that he wants to kill you, overhear another conversation where an innkeeper plans to kill you, find evidence that the innkeeper has killed lots of people, go to your room, have a vision of the innkeeper killing someone…then you go to bed. You go to sleep. You crawl under the covers with your blankie and just sort of knock off for the night.

I don’t even…where do you begin, here? Okay, let’s start off with: why would you go to sleep? And even if you wanted to, perhaps because you thought the overheard conversations, rooms full of organs, and skull-splitting visions were all part of the world’s most elaborate prank show, how could you go to sleep? When I think forebodings of ritualistic torture-murder in a filthy room, far from anyone who cares whether I live or die, I don’t think top-notch insomnia cure. This isn’t a quaint fish-smelling bed and breakfast, it’s the Bates Motel mixed with Wicker Man mixed with, if Jack’s behavior is any indication, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

Naturally, Jack doesn’t have pleasant dreams. He has visions of a strange room, filled with odd creatures that look a lot like the thing that menaced us from the portal. Also, he gets little dream-snippets of activity going on outside.

For example: oh, hey, look, it’s a bunch of swarthy Innsmouth types, here to come up to my hotel room and gut me with a hook. Ho, hum, looks like some of them have shotguns. I’d get up, but I’m in the middle of this really pleasant dream involving creatures man was never meant to comprehend.

Oh, and now they’re coming upstairs. On the one hand, maybe I should wake up before they burst in and kill me. On the other hand, I did hang up the Do Not Disturb sign, so maybe they’ll go away.

Hm, looks like they’re trying the lock. Good thing I remembered to bolt it, I suppose.

I wonder if I should get up now?

Looks like they’re about to break it down…

Yeah, okay, I’ll get up. Man, it’s gonna be one of those mornings, huh? I sure hope there’s a coffee shop somewhere in town that serves fugitives. Alternately: I hope there’s coffee in Hell.

A new chapter has begun: we’ve moved from the strictly noncombat poking around part to our first real taste of danger, a chapter called Attack of the Fishmen. Its first sequence is, frankly, amazing.

That’s not sarcasm, or even a syntactically correct (yet damning) indictment of the game’s storytelling or gameplay. The sequence that follows is an intense thrill-ride the likes of which is promised in every game or movie’s tagline, but is very rarely delivered. It’s pulse-pounding excitement of the highest caliber, some of the most intense moments I’ve actually had with a videogame.

Here’s how the scene goes down. They’re breaking down your door, so you have to run into the adjoining room—fast. They will break in and kill you if you don’t absolutely scramble, so you better get the lead out, fast. Then you have to shut the door behind you and bolt it. Now you’ve got bolted doors on either wall, which they’re about to start breaking down, and the door to the next room is blocked with a wardrobe. Got to move it…wardrobe’s scraping along the floor at an agonizing rate, the sound of breaking wood is growing louder…finally, you grope for the doorknob, stumbling into the next room. You throw the door behind you and lock it, just as you hear the doors behind you breaking. Someone shouts something like, “Get through the hall door! It won’t be locked!” S***,  it isn’t! You run towards it, bolting it just in time. Man, these guys are chewing through doors like nobody’s business. Who pays for these? No time to think, got to keep focused…wow, maybe that’s how Jack feels all the time. That would explain a lot…dammit, move! You proceed…oh, crap, you’re trapped now. They’re coming in either door, and there’s nowhere to run to. No way out except…the window! Oh, damn, it’s blocked! You have to barricade the hall door first, then push away the obstruction at the window, slowly, slowly…you hear wood breaking behind you, and the door opens…you throw the window open, leading out onto a ledge. You can leap across…

You land on the other side as they begin firing at you. You have to flee through a door into a hallway, in which they start shooting through the windows…one shot hits me in the leg, and my vision goes blurry. No time to fix it here, got to keep moving! I hit a stairwell, but crap—there are more waiting for me on the stairwell! Bleary, vision getting so bad I could barely tell where I was going, I ran through rooms, one of which was occupied—their screams brought the mob after me. Oh god, oh god, which way am I going? Have I already gone that way? God dammit! I wish I could go back to provoking fishfaced constables and stealing rum!

You get the picture. If I have a criticism of the whole affair, it’s that it requires a bit too much precision. I died a few too many times, which sent me back to the start of the sequence–that killed a bit of the tension for me, but luckily, the scene had some to spare. Once I cleared the window, I managed until the next checkpoint, but it took a little trial-and-error to figure out exactly what I was supposed to do to survive up to that point.

Still, this part was great, and almost worth putting up with the gross stupidity that necessitated such heroics in the first place. Actually, know what? This is a game, and that was good gameplay, so it actually was worth putting up with the gross stupidty that necessitated such heroics in the first place. Rarely do I say, “Wow, this story is competent!” when I’m frustrated or bored, but I’m happy to say a story sucks as long as I’m having fun. And for the rest of Innsmouth, I generally am.

The next chunk of gameplay is spent sneaking around. Stealth in this game is tense, and often more than a little bit terror-inducing, but I have one bone to pick with it: it’s hands-down the most unrealistic stealth system I’ve ever seen in a video game. Didn’t these guys do any research? Let me give a few actual game examples, contrasting what should happen in real life with what actually happens.

Situation: I am squatting in mild shadow. There are several bright lights behind me, but I’m kind of sort of in the dark. A guard is patrolling fifteen feet in front of me, and there are no objects between me and him.

Obviously, in real life, the guard wouldn’t notice me at all, and would go about his patrolling with a spring in his step and a song in his heart. I could then crawl across the well-lit area into another, similar patch of lukewarm shadow. In this game, the guard will instead immediately spot me and begin shooting at me. It’s obvious that the developers didn’t bother to check elementary treatises on stealth and infiltration, like Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid.

Situation: I am sneaking around behind some crates. At some point, I accidentally edge into the view of a guard. He says, “I thought I saw something!”

In real life, you’d expect the guard to wait exactly three seconds without moving, blinking, or consulting his comrades. Then he’d say something like, “I guess it was just the merry prank of a fairy queen,” and resume his business. In this game, the AI is just slipshod—the guard will instead run over to check the spot where he’d seen an enemy a second before, not returning until he’s found and killed the infiltrator he’d clearly seen from about fifteen feet away.

Situation: There’s a guard in a warehouse. I want to get past him.

In real life, you’d expect him to walk around in circles like an obsessive-compulsive, patrolling a five-foot square of floor space in lockstep without glancing to the sides or trying to keep his lines of sight open, simultaneously ensuring that a.) an infiltrator with any pattern recognition skills can rumble them and b.) they’ll be dog-tired if something actually does happen. In this game, they only do that like half of the time, tops. Otherwise, they’re just gonna stand there and look over the parts of the building you would logically be in.

Jerks.