Clod of Cthlhu: Someone Set Us Up, The Bum

You know, Jack has a pretty poor track record as far as helping people goes. Jack’s very first mission was to help the police with a tense negotiation. A simple enough procedure—too simple for Jack’s tastes, apparently, because boring talking didn’t contain nearly enough opening a portal to madness for his refined tastes.

This fiasco concluded, he was asked to find a man named Robert Burnham and reunite him with his family. He was sought out specifically for this job, despite the fact that he doesn’t even take missing persons cases, because the father decided Jack was the only man who had a chance of rescuing his flesh and blood. This assumption is entirely correct, if by “rescue” you mean “get killed, and also get his girlfriend killed, and some random little girl, and her father, and a town drunk, and another woman.” This is a very selective interpretation of the word “helping,” and might be said–by linguistic purists–to be an entirely invalid one.

So, up until this point in the game, Jack’s been about as much help as colon cancer and is statistically more likely to kill you. So it really warms the cockles of my heart that I’m able to be of so much service to Hoover in these missions, running all of his errands flawlessly and succeeding where his highly-trained men failed. I guess the lessen here is that to access Jack’s hidden reserves of competence, you must first torture him for no reason and then threaten to ruin his life. All of the other saps he tried to help made the fatal flaw of being nice to him, trying to pay him, or trying to help him avoid meeting a gruesome fate at the hands of his enemies. If they’d just had the initiative to stick a hot iron into his nostril and threaten to punch him in the crotch every day for the rest of his life, they might still be alive right now.

Anyway, if you recall, Jack’s last instructions were to go back into the hellhole he’d just climbed out of, despite having just sabotaged the only way to access that area. Eventually, he manages to limp his way down, kill a shoggoth, and pilfer the gem from a Cthulhu statue for no adequately explored reason.

Then four FBI agents show up and let him know, “Hey, looks like the place is about to blow up. Let’s get out of here.”

What? Where did you come from? I had to rappel down a cable to get here, and then navigate this really confusing path that meant all sorts of crawling and climbing and jumping. Did you guys follow the same one? Why? What is the possible point of going all the way down here when you know that Hoover set us up the bomb, and that he’s planning to use it regardless of who’s down here at the time? Did you think I needed a reminder, as in, “FYI, this building’s going to explode, remember? There’s that thing where you might die under the weight of millions of bricks. Ring any bells?”

Anyway, we leave, and manage to get out just before the bombs go off. If I was just a bit slower, or if my AI companions had slightly worse pathfinding, then we would have both been killed by the tremendous wait just one god damn moment.

Why did Hoover blow up the building? He didn’t believe there was a shoggoth down there. What he did believe was there—what he knew existed, in fact, beyond the shadow of a doubt–were incriminating documents and records, thousands of unattended bars of gold, and, oh yeah, several of your agents. What possible purpose would nuking the site serve? Just get some of your people to look after it until the cavalry arrives, they can probably take the handful of fish guys they’d send to get it back.

Anyway, the raid is a success, which means good news and bad news. Good news is, Innsmouth is now under martial law, which means that national guardsmen everywhere are dogpiling the filthy burg like fat camp residents on a plate of chocolate donuts. The bad news is, Hoover has apparently volunteered me to “represent the FBI” in one of the attacking squads.

There is literally no part of that instruction that makes sense.

1.)    Why does the FBI need to send a guy along? This is a military maneuver; an FBI guy in a military operation is about as much use as a hot dog on a stick employee is during feeding time at the lion cages. There’s a vague connection between their jobs, but they require entirely different skill sets and they operate in very different environments. Maybe it’s a political thing, where the FBI just wants their name on the operation? Maybe they need FBI expertise for some reason? Either way:

2.)    Why wouldn’t the FBI represent themselves with someone who was, you know, actually in the FBI, as opposed to some random schlock Hoover’s decided to make his gofer?

3.)    Why would Jack agree to this instead of fleeing for the border? Why would he ever, ever, ever, ever, ever want to go back near Innsmouth?

Unfortunately, you have to do it anyway. The mission begins with you tailing these solider boys around the outskirts of the ‘smouth, rappelling down cliffsides onto icy rivers and trading potshots with cultists. Occasionally, the commander guy will tell you to do something, capping his instruction with, “That’s an order!” You’re not the boss of me! No, seriously, you’re not my boss, I’m not even in the Guard or FBI or whatever. I’m not even getting paid for this.

Blah blah rest of squad gets killed. You end up in this cave connected to an Innsmouth manor, and who should be imprisoned inside of it but our old pal Mackie. How ya doing, Mackey? How’s giving cryptic clues to strangers working out for you?

What’s that? You want me to free you at some point? Okay, I guess. You know—if I’m in the neighborhood.

No, thank you.