Cold and gloomy evening, friends. Today we will go to one deaf American town of the beginning of the 20th century. A city in which there are no sunny days and darkness reigns all the time;The city, being in which you easily risk going crazy, hearing an ominous whisper in your head;A city, along the streets of which harsh fishing lines roam, and at night the ministers of the Order of Dagon perform terrible rituals. In this place, the path of one famous detective began, which brought him to the devil’s reef and encountered unknown horror ..
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth It was one of those many long-term games of the first half of the 2000s that excited the minds and were so ambitious that their exit was transferred once after time, and due to the fact that in anticipation of the imagination of the players, almost future masterpieces, we did not see what we would like so much at the exit of the exit. Nevertheless, these games received cult statuses, divided the communities into two camps and became the subject of hot disputes, which lasted many years. Of course, not all the long-term construction of those times suffered such a fate, but our guest today from the past, which by the way in October has been hit for 14 years, and the PC version 13, was just that. Many still consider Dark Corners of the Earth the best game based on the stories of Howard Lovecraft, despite all its shortcomings, of which there were very many. In this video, I propose to figure out what the dark corners of the Earth distinguish against the backdrop of all other games inspired by the writer’s stories.
The start of the development of the game is considered to be the year 1999, when the members of the Headfirst Production team began to interview Lovecraft fans about how they would like to see the future game by myths Ktulhu.
As Discussed Here Before There Are A Few Mythos Inspired Computer Games
Around, Such as Aitd, Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
What I Want to Know Is, New Game Were to be Made Completely Based
On the Cthulhu Mythos, What Sort of Game Woup You Like to See? A
Quake-West Blast-Em-Up, A Resident Evil Style Action-Docketure, Or
Someting More RPG BASED? With Multiplayer Elements Aswell? And
Orientated More to Puzzle Solving, Throwh and Character Development, Or
MORE BASED On Action and Horror-Excitement?
All Comments and Suggggetations Appreciated,
– Andrew
"Hi all! As it was discussed here earlier, there are several computer games inspired by the myths of Ktulhu, like theLoneinThedark, residentevil Isilenthill. I would like to know if a new game was created, completely based on the myths of Ktulhu, what you would like to see it? Some kind of quiku-likeblast-em-up, an action-adaptation in the style of theResintentevil or something more rpgshny, with elements of multiplayer and oriented to solve puzzles, as well as with the development of a character? Or with a large accent on action and horror?"
The result of communication with Lovecraft’s fans was the decision to create a game in the genre of adventure horror-player in the first person. The development was in full swing, and it was supposed to end in 2001. But Headfirst ambitions played their job. In an effort to improve the game, make it closer to the original, add everything that was conceived to it, the company had to transfer the release. The main reasons were banal: lack of budget and time. But besides, the developers could not decide on the gaming design. Over time, the game switched to another engine, the concept of the protagonist changed several times, and many game elements had to be abandoned. So, for example, according to the initial idea, the player was given the choice of one of the four heroes, despite the fact that the remaining three were also introduced into the game as a NPC, and in the case of cooperative passage, other players could take control. Yes, Dark Corners of the Earth was supposed to be a coop, as well as a separate network mode with battles at specially created levels. The story was supposed to be non -linear and larger, the gameplay itself should have contained more role elements, a deeper system of the mental state and simply fierce interactivity of the environment, well, all this list ended with some types of weapons, which, together with all of the listed, was not embodied in the final product.
The state development of the game was aggravated by the fact that in parallel with the dark corners of the Earth Headfirst Productions created two more games announced in 2002: Call of Cthulhu: Destiny’s End, which was a direct continuation of Dark Corners of the Earth, and Call ofCTHULHU: Beond the Mountains of Madness, the action of which also unfolded in the setting of myths, however, it was not related to the above games. What the developers were counting on if they did not have enough money or time even for one project, it is fundamentally clear to me, and what all this action ended, I think you yourself know. Only one reached the release alive, and that, lame on both legs, others were lost in the sands of time. But let’s not talk about sad and move directly to our current subjug, remember what Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth ..
Six years have passed since the fatal day when Jack Walters arrived on his last task as a police detective in Boston. Then, in the old mansion, where the members of the Yit Brotherhood dug, he came across what neither he nor another person was ready to meet. It was something so frightening and unreal that when he saw him once, Detective Walters changed forever. After that case, he almost lost his mind and immediately thundered to the psychiatric hospital of Arkham with a heavy form of schizophrenia ..
This happened six years ago. For six years, Jack was out of work, and now in February 1922, he was realized that all these years have not been preserved in his memory. The only thing he remembered is countless works devoted to occultism, in search of which he traveled to half a might. Surrealistic dreams pursued him at night, and in the afternoon he began to overtake scraps of memories of that house, or rather that this house hid behind his walls. His own reflection scared Jack, but he was able to recover and restore mental balance. Almost…
Our protagonist … If the last six and a half years were not erased from his memories, he would have shot himself in place. Only at the end of the game did we learn what happened to him during these years.
Returning to detective activities, but already in private, Walters is Professor Wins casino again taking up the investigation of affairs. And so, one evening, the detective received a call from a certain Arthur Anderson. Recently, a man named Brian Burnham and Arthur asks Jack to find him in the town of Innsmaut or Innsmouth. Typically, Walters was not taken for such matters, but this time, something made him resist the refusal and start the investigation. But no matter how banal it seemed to the detective at the beginning, having arrived at the Innsmouth and met face to face with the local inhabitants, he soon realized that he had gotten into something dark. In this gloomy place, visions begin to pursue him, pairs of inhuman eyes sparkle in the shadows, and frightening sounds come from the lanes, from which the mental of Walters is barely put in order, begins to shake again.
Instead of helping Jack in search of a missing person, the local police only exacerbate the matter, and as soon as the detective encounters the minions of the Dagon Order, which secretly coping the bloody rites of his black cult, the case takes a completely different circulation and becomes much larger than the usual search, and the long -term point of non -return, forces Walters to the end.It became, whoever the detective had to face, and no matter what horrors he had to meet in his path ..
… And here is the first horror. The khar of this Innsmutz has just for me a symbol of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
Call of cthulhu without ktulhu?
Everyone who went through Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth from the beginning and a logical question could arise: why “Call Kthulhu”? Indeed, for the whole game this Great Ancient has never lit up, except for the statue sometimes caught by the hero and rare references in dialogs and records. The game included Dagon, Hydra, representatives of the alien race yit, but not Ktulhu. Whereas the name of the ancient fell into the name of the game? The answer to this question goes by its roots in 1981. It is then that Chaosium Inc publishing house. released the desktop role -playing game "Call of Cthulhu". So the Zova Ktulhu brand, which has survived 7 publications since then, but this is not important for us now. It is important that, like any other decent desktop system, Call of Cthulhu eventually began to replenish with additional game modules and gradually the name of the system began not to relate not to the specific story of Howard Phillips, but to all its fictional mythology, which is commonly called myths Kntulhu. In 1993, the first edition of additions called “Call of Cthulhu: Escape from Innsmouth” appeared. This gaming module has become the basis for the future game Headfirst Productions, and since Dark Corners of the Earth was created based on one of the elements of a large desktop system, the name of its brand also migrated to the name of the computer game.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth had a very heterogeneous structure. Usually, from games in such a genre you expect uniform distribution of action, and Stlax, and research, and puzzles, but Headfirst went a different path. In general, it was a first-person shooter with Stlace elements and Survival-Corror, but somewhere about a third of the game, if not more, we went through absolutely no weapons behind his bosom, and, as it is not paradoxically, but judging the whole gameplay of the game as a whole, it was its best third of it. Walters was not a hardened fighter, he was a detective, a bloodhound, besides with a broken psyche, and the beginning of the game clearly makes us understand that armed clashes were by no means his horse. As befits a detective, playing for Jack, we talked with the inhabitants of Innsmouth, investigated the city in search of hooks and tied evidence among themselves. And as soon as it became hot, we had to hide and quietly bypass the enemies.
Dark Corners of the Earth did not have a rescue shadow or help, crawling where Jack would become invisible to unwanted views, so in order to hide, it was necessary to cover shelter. Of course, Stealth did not always work: enemies could not notice the hero, without fear of running behind their backs, just as they could suddenly burn Walters, when, it would seem, he did not betray himself. To become less noticeable, the player had a special secrecy regime at his disposal, but he did not conclude anything special in himself: Jack simply crouched and slowly, trying not to creak in the floor, moved forward. This was the whole Stealth dark corners of the earth. Honestly, this could not be called a full-fledged stealth, but on the other hand, we played for the detective of Walters, and not for the seasoned thief Garetht. Although sometimes we had to open someone else’s safes, of course, not the methods that the Great Thief used in law. For everyone had to look for the right combination, which without hints seemed quite … unrealistic. And all the tips were kept in the documents found or slipped in dialogs, to rewind and listen to which it was impossible for the second time. So I had to be very careful. There were other puzzles in the game, but in all other cases there was no particularly to move the brains, it was just necessary to examine everything thoroughly and, again, just be careful.
“The people are quiet in Innsmouth,” he said, and stuck in the hero Myasnitsky Tesak! From local residents, only this is worth expecting, and everyone who is at least somehow knocked out of the local “norm” was awaiting a terrible reprisal.
Of course, not at all a secretive passage made the first third of the game of such a magnificent. In it, we were just starting to unravel a ball of mysterious incidents, when nothing was clear, but the intrigue fueled interest in the game, like nothing else. Here we were just starting to get acquainted with the Innsmouth, and I don’t know how you have, but these were the most atmospheric episodes in Dark Corners of the Earth, in which I plunged with my head, and literally physically felt the spirit of lavcraft works. But I will tell about the atmosphere separately.
There were also chic episodes with chases. Imagine: you spent another day in this ominous dark city, the case almost did not move off the ground, which means that you will not leave the Innsmouth soon;Having rejected all the negative thoughts, you go to bed, but instead of going to a sunny LA in a dream, you see nightmares, after which you suddenly wake up that someone is breaking into your room, and these people do not need to cut the cake … You desperately jump out of bed, barricade the door, carry your other ones, rush to your hands, try to shut up your hands with shaking hands.Skokold, and when you find yourself in the next room, lock the entrance again and run on, seize out the window, jump onto the next balcony, crawl along the corridor under a hail of bullets … I can’t tell in vain in this way, because in those days all this was felt simply incredibly cool. Adrenaline rode. Well, what, but the chases were a success to the developers to glory, it is a pity that there were so few of them ..
After two hours of dull stealth, the ability to charge the next fishing in a soft place and excited my consciousness! But even the action was not that "funny".
Everything someday ends, so the creators of the game decided that two powerful episodes with shoots would be enough. After two hours of hide and seeking into a subcortment of awareness of their own defenselessness and fragility, the gameplay changes dramatically, and the reason for this is the weapon. I have already said that in Dark Corners of the Earth, no matter how you try, but sometimes the hero was noticed even in the darkest noot, excuse me for the pun … Therefore, as soon as Walters got access to firearms, it became much easier to pave the way for the corpses of fishing fisheries, which would be tantamentIncorrectly. And over time, the possibility of secretive passage completely disappears, and here there is no getting away from the shooting component.
It was not that she was so bad, there was no highlight in it that could support interest in shooting for a long time, and sometimes shootings were simply unpleasant. Opponents, although very quickly, could prick Jack, but at the same time they were all stupid like a cork. They had to be laid on the sidewalk in crowds, and in some episodes they also revived somewhere in the rear. With ordinary opponents, it very quickly became frankly boring and uninteresting, but with bosses everything was much more complicated. Remember at least a fight with a priest, when we had only a knife at our disposal … That was Batthart! At the same time, since the beginning of the unrestrained action, everything that pleased us in the first third of the game disappeared, and the whole rest was almost entirely devoted to endless shooting with small breaks to katsen and staggering in caves.
At first, shooting in the game seemed a curve, although over time it was possible to get used to it, but even after that it did not bring any pleasure.
An interesting detail was the lack of an interface: we could not see how much our hero was falling during a secretive movement, did not see the health meter, there was no indicator of the charged clip and the number of cartridges in reserve. The level of ammunition had to be kept in my head, but everything else … It was already our problems with you. On the one hand, this greatly complicated the matter, but on the other, it made the game more realistic and to some extent hardcore. There was no small white cross in the center of the screen, so each time I had to aim “manually”, and after the shot, visibility sharply decreased due to powder smoke. We literally looked at the world through the eyes of Jack, and this was reflected not only in the absence of all sorts of indicators on the screen, to which we are so accustomed after many other genre games.
When the detective saw something terrifying-like monsters or brutally cut corpses, hallucinations began to overcome it because of the shock: we saw an incomprehensible ripples, then the screen became muddy, and what was happening before my eyes began to swim before. If the hero began to dizzy, we first learned about it – the image began to swing from side to side, which especially interfered with aiming and, when we crossed the abyss along narrow bridges, Jack was also afraid of the height! But this was far from everything: the detective heard the voices and sounds that were not really, or he himself began to mumble something incoherent;There were also scribbled hallucinations when the hero saw dead characters or visions that refer to the time spent by Walters in the madhouse … But the tin happened if the hero, throwing morphine, did not look away from those same shocking things for a long time. In this case, he becomes inclined to suicide, and then it would be better if you had no charged weapons at hand … Although even in the absence of cartridges, the hero just went crazy or received a heart attack, in general, in any case, the game ended on this.
Detective Walters reacted to such things very selectively. For example, the view of this gentleman did not bother him at all.
The morphine I mentioned could be used as an anesthetic, but, as you know, in this case I had to sacrifice the Walters psyche. There was no health indicator in the game, as I already said, but there was a very interesting system of wounds, and with it the methods of treatment. Our detective received wounds, broke the bones, was poisoned by poison – and for each of the above, special medicines were needed: for wounds – bandages and seams, with fractures it was necessary to lay the tire, and when poisoning it was logical to accept the antidote. At the same time, the trauma was not tried conditionally, but belonged to a particular part of the body: the head, to the torso, right hand or leg and, accordingly, left. And even this division was not only conditional: when wounded in the leg, the detective was limping, and if the aim worsened in the hand. To simplify treatment, this whole system was compactly turned into a special tablet, and we had to simply poke into a red cell illuminated by red. But it was very easy to get a wound (again an element of realism), therefore, there could be a lot of injuries, but the number of medicines was limited. I had to choose what to treat first of all, and what could and tolerate until the next first first -aid kit. However, if the wound was serious, and we did not have the right tool in the pocket, Jack very quickly lost blood, which eventually poured into the death of our character. Just in such cases, morphine saved us.
Needless to say, any worthy game of lavcraft should, yes, it must have tons of text painted in notes and diaries, such a tradition has developed. This element is part of the unique atmosphere of Lovecraft horrors, and it is reading the usual texts with descriptions of terrible rituals and mysterious phenomena, you get the very feeling when reading the stories of Howard Phillips. And these simple words were able to bring horuses much more than any creature popping up on the player from around the corner.
In order to completely immerse himself in the abyss of Lovecraft mysticism in Dark Corners of the Earth, it was necessary to reckon with all diary entries and documents found, otherwise the player lost the lion’s share of the same atmosphere.
Of course, the game was already very atmospheric. From the very beginning, the authors manage to convey the right mood to the player, I say this by their own feelings, and as soon as we got into the Innsmut, a feeling of doom, hopelessness, almost physically tangible viscous darkness of this place covered you up completely. Now Call of Ctulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is able to instill horror far from everyone, but the game still blows horror. The soundtrack played a special role in creating the atmosphere of Call of Cthulhu. Its not intricate, but causing goosebumps, the compositions perfectly set the tone for the narrative, and helped the player to keep a sense of discomfort and stress.
And generally the game sounded pretty good, except for the voice acting of the main character. NPC also did not always show themselves from the best side, but in general they did not want to catch up with them, but the voice of Jack Walters did not inspire anything but boredom and despondency. Moreover, this was equally extended to both English and Russian voice acting. But the voicing of a protagonist is a very important point that, alas, in Dark Corners of the Earth suffers much.
Everyone remembers what rage and indignation caused a huge number of bugs and glitches after porting the game on the PC and the subsequent release in 2006. Since then, a lot of water has flowed, but neither the GOG version of the game, nor the most complete repaki, in which all patches and fixes were collected, still do not correct all the problems of the call of Kntulhu. The last time I went through this game, I had to separately search and install fixes for two episodes, without which it was impossible to go through the game. Moreover, the most offensive is that the second fix was at the very end of the game ..
Everyone remembers this episode … In this place was not the first and far from the only, but the most popular bug of the game. Those who could not download a fix for its repair, lost the opportunity to go through the game until the end.
In the piggy bank, you can throw an outdated graphics, and insane physics, a curve shooting and a boring stealth. Yes, Dark Corners of the Earth has and remains really a lot, and all of them are more or less significant. However, if you look from the other side, its virtues are no less strong. Firstly, this is of course a deep, twisted plot. The story was written in such a way that you did not doubt that the authors are closely familiar with the original source, and it was not only about numerous references to the “shadow over the Innsmouth”, “Nightmare in Red Huka”, “Creatures on the threshold”, “Music of Erich Tsanna”, “Rats in the Walls”, “For Garni of the times” and many others, but in the very spirit, which is also in the spirit.I penetrated this story. The developers embodied in the game a magnificent system of the hero’s mental state, like which was nowhere else. A unique treatment system, the lack of an interface that I would record more to the pluses than to the minuses, and, despite many flaws, exciting the gameplay process.
It was not possible to put up with all the disadvantages of the game, but in my opinion, its advantages outweigh them, and therefore Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was and remains an important milestone both in the history of the works of Lovecraft’s works and in the development of Survival -Horror and Action/Horor. I believe that she is quite deservedly called cult and you need to be a friend. Is this the best game on the myths Ktulhu? I think not, and there was still no such game in this setting that could be put over all the others. Each of them is something good in something, and in some ways bad, the rest is only a matter of taste ..
