This is a game I wanted to enjoy. It has a decent premise, but it just... doesn't have enough of actual substance to warrant playing it, at least in my opinion. Certainly not enough to stick through some of the worst aspects of the game.

Proper game mechanics are few and far between; for the most part, you'll be walking from room to room and clicking on whatever's in the environment until you click the right thing to progress. It is, for all intents and purposes, a walking sim with some Telltale-style dialogue mechanics mixed in.

What's worse is, sometimes the game doesn't like to give you actual feedback on what you have to do to progress, leaving you to pace between the same couple rooms for several minutes until you figure it out. There are quite a few small items that are interactable just to give 1 small snippet of dialogue and nothing else, which is sometimes even more frustrating than finding nothing at all. You'll be investigating the deaths of a family of 3, and yet, our protagonist will take interest in a random book on whaling sitting in a bookshelf in an absolutely massive library - just to tell us that it's a book on whaling, not do anything with it, and move on. This is not an exaggeration, and there are items like this all over in the early stages of the game.

You may be thinking the stat tree would alleviate the gameplay issue somewhat, but it's basically pointless. Some dialogue is locked behind passing or failing certain tasks depending on your respective stats. It seems to partially be based on random chance, as after at least one forced reset (see below), I ended up failing a check I had succeeded on my first attempt. Generally, none of this dialogue will actually affect the game in the long run, at best letting you bypass certain puzzles or make certain parts of the game easier on yourself.

At the very least, with such simple mechanics, you'd at least expect the game to function relatively well, right? And yet... 3 or 4 times during the 2 hours I played, the game would end up randomly locking up during dialogue trees. The options would all appear on-screen, but clicking them does nothing, and there's no backing out of the dialogue trees without pressing something, so it forced me to reset the game every time it happened and try again until it lets me through properly. I don't even know how this sort of thing ends up in a commercial release, to be honest, but it became a frequent part of my experience for the small segment of the game that I played.

And, as for the story? It's... not really enough to captivate for the long run, either. The voice acting sometimes feels clunky and awkward, with the voiced lines sometimes not even quite lining up with the captions; usually only very minor discrepancies, not enough to cause legitimate issues but enough to just be irritating.

I am aware that there is probably more to this game that I missed - I only played for around 2 hours in a game that seems to have a lot of content, and barely saw a scratch of anything actually befitting a horror game - and yet, its first impression doesn't leave me to believe sticking with it until it gets to actually being scary is even worth it. I can't recommend picking this one up in its current state.

Fun game

Call of Cthulhu was inspired by the tabletop RPG, set in 1924 and featuring a rather sullen private investigator. I swear, this game was made for people like me who go nuts for the Cthulhu Mythos. It was far from perfect with some poor character models / animations as well as some jank systems, but it ticked a lot of boxes: the atmosphere, the visuals, the cult shenanigans and sanity loss.
Any form of combat was minimal, instead it mostly consisted of stealth alongside its detective work of questioning various characters and searching for clues. While some sections were frustrating, I really appreciated the story and had more fun than expected.