Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

I went into Dark Corners of the Earth expecting a creaky old FPS with a Cthulhu skin slapped on top. What I got was something far stranger and more interesting: a game that is legitimately excellent at atmosphere and genuinely terrible at being a video game in 2025. Both of those things are true at the same time, and that tension is basically the whole review. Playing as Jack Walters, a private detective investigating a disappearance in the rotting 1920s port town of Innsmouth, you spend the first third of the game entirely unarmed. The opening hours lean into stealth, investigation, and slow-burn dread. There is no HUD at any point; your health is communicated through Jack's breathing, a pronounced limp, color bleeding out of the screen, and blood spatter on the edges of your view. The sanity system is the real centrepiece: witnessing horrific creatures or scenes triggers blurred vision, auditory hallucinations, Jack muttering to himself, panic-induced slowdown, and in extreme cases a self-inflicted death if you let the spiral run too far. It is one of the more genuinely unsettling mechanical implementations of psychological horror in any first-person game, drawing directly from Lovecraft's idea that knowledge itself is corrosive. When FPS combat eventually arrives, you manage limited ammunition, manually track your reload count with no in-game counter, and heal using medical kits found in the environment while enemies keep moving. A crowbar, a knife, a revolver, and later heavier weapons make up the sparse arsenal, and conservation matters throughout. Here is the problem. The game is buggy in ways that range from annoying to progress-blocking. A frame rate cap is mandatory because the game becomes unstable above 60 FPS, and on modern Windows you will likely need the community-made DCoTEPatch to bypass a well-documented gamebreaker late in the campaign. Save points are sparse Elder Sign checkpoints lifted straight from the Xbox console port, which means a crash or a stuck geometry bug can cost you a painful chunk of progress. Unskippable cutscenes compound this when you are forced to replay sections. The AI is forgiving to the point of embarrassment during combat, and the checkpoint system combined with insta-death puzzles will have you watching the same sequences on repeat. None of this is hidden or patched away; it is part of the deal. What the game does exceptionally well is atmosphere and story fidelity. The first half adapts Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth with surprising care, and the slow escalation from mundane investigation to cosmic dread is handled better here than in most horror games released since. The audio design is particularly strong: Jack's shallow breathing, the distant growls of things pursuing you through darkened corridors, and the way the sound design shifts when sanity deteriorates all create a layered unease that jump-scare-heavy modern horror rarely matches. The story eventually meanders in its final act and the ending feels rushed compared to the careful build-up, but the journey through Innsmouth and the sequences that follow are memorable in the way that only a handful of horror games manage. If you want a comfortable, well-maintained experience, look elsewhere. If you are willing to install a community patch, cap your frame rate, keep a walkthrough open for the two or three genuinely cryptic moments, and tolerate a combat system that never quite earns its place, there is a singular horror game buried in here. Lovecraft fans in particular will find it rewarding in ways the 2018 Call of Cthulhu RPG simply is not. Go in with lowered expectations for the technical side and heightened ones for the atmosphere, and Dark Corners of the Earth will probably get under your skin.

Alex · Scout Team

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