Clod of Cthulhu: All’s Whale that Ends Whale

When we last checked in on Jack, there were about four or five hours left in the game, and I’m going to be honest: I haven’t seen them. I probably never will.

When Steam started giving me troubles back in college, I had to take the whole thing down, which meant losing my installation, my savegames, and all of my progress. There was most likely a way around this; savegames available for download online, perhaps. As I put CoC on the download queue and browsed around half-abandoned fansites, I tried to remember where in the game I’d left off.

Ah, yes, that’s right. There was that ship. A bunch of people had asked Jack to do things that they should by all rights have been doing themselves, and after a lot of trial and error–and the deaths of absolutely everybody else aboard–he managed to kill a giant sea creature and get knocked onto the reef. Then, in a shocking plot twist, Jack died. About fifteen times, actually. Twenty at the outside.

Okay, no, that’s not how the story goes, but that’s what happened to me all the same. The game would give me a ten minute stretch in which I’d run around like a decapitated chicken, be presented with some all-or-nothing deathtrap, try to get around it, and suffer some gory demise. Then I’d get kicked back to the last save point, get through the same ten minutes, and die at the same deathtrap. Then I’d try again, get past that deathtrap by the skin of my teeth, and stumble into the next one. Then I’d reload and start over again. And again. And again.

Now that I think about it, I remember relatively clearly the point where I left off. There was this one spiked pit trap—I don’t remember the specifics, only that I wasn’t actually sure how the hell I was supposed to get around it. I also remembered that it was six minutes and two dangerous sequences away from the last save point. I also remembered that I was low on medical supplies. Then, most significantly of all, I remembered that this game can take a long tour of Innsmouth’s historic piers.

I am glad that somebody decided to make a faithful Lovecraft game. I am glad that I spent money on it. I am glad that I started my LP, and I am glad that I got to kick Jack Walters in the teeth for his relentlessly stupid decisions. I am thrilled to pieces that I made it this far, and I haven’t the foggiest desire to go any further. This game was always walking a fine line; one moment it was thrilling and immersive, and the next, it was stupid, frustrating, and vaguely insulting. I would spend so much time dying without quite knowing why and getting kicked back to the reload screen, but then, I’d have a moment of real panic and my heart rate would go up in a good way. I would wade through ten unrewarding bang-bang clunky gunfights, and then, out of nowhere, some unfathomable horror would make me want to run for my life. I would get so frustrated with Jack that I’d make him jump off of things and break his legs, and then I’d forgive him long enough to get him out of whatever mess he’d created. I guess you could say that this game was perpetually on probation—it’d never quite have enough points against it to throw it into the bin, because whenever it got stupid, it managed to backtrack and score a little bit of redemption.

And then we get to the reefs, I play for two hours without experiencing a single spasm of entertainment, and this game has run out of free passes. I’m sorry. It was a good run, but you’ve spent enough time toeing the line that you’ve managed to wear right through it. I no longer have patience for Jack Walters, for dying three times before I figure out how not to, for your checkpoint save system and your awful gunfights. Maybe the next section is awesome, but I’m not going to find out. Stop the boat; I’m going ashore for good.

The only reason I’d feel bad doing that is because you guys don’t get to see the end, but this was never really a proper LP, it was more me criticizing the parts of the plot that were stupid. It was like Quality’s Edge, but over a longer time span. The thing is, at a certain point, Jack stops making decisions and just starts surfing the awful consequences of them. From the synopses I’ve read, there’s nothing especially stupid about the finale, and in fact, it’s about what you’d expect. According to the special super secret double awesome ending you unlock by (and I’m being entirely serious here) not looking at any of the creepy stuff in this horror game, Jack’s father was actually some kind of nonhuman thing, and Jack’s mentally part-nonhumanthing. That’s why he’s psychic, that’s why the cultists wanted him in the beginning. Maybe that’s also why he’s a lunatic who hates people; I guess that part’s actually just implied. Whoop-dee doo. Maybe it’s more dramatic than it sounds on paper, but this really wasn’t much I hadn’t already guessed from the cutscenes. Certainly wasn’t worth wasting another ten hours of my life to see.

But you know what? It didn’t matter. I feel like this series did what it set out to do. I pointed out that Jack is the dumbest game protagonist in all creation. I showed that stealth can be scarier than gunplay, because if you have to kill something, you know for sure that it can be. Finally—and not insignificantly—I demonstrated the extant merits of a critically ignored game that demonstrates, occasionally, something like brilliance. The only part I didn’t get to was the alien BFG sections, which, I mean, let’s not.

CoC:DCotE has some parts that are scarier than anything else I’ve ever played, and it has some parts that are so stupid they cause me the beginnings of an actual, no-kidding headache. At the end of the day, I’ll remember the fun parts more than the general annoyance, and I do think I learned something about game design and storytelling from this game. I’ve got some memories from this purchase that I’ll file right there along with certain scenes from Half-Life 2 and the ending of Shadows of Amn. And if I should ever happen to run a Call of Cthulhu campaign, you can bet my players will run into Jack Walters.

Maybe I’ll even put some decent loot on his corpse.

-Fin-