Despite efforts to the contrary I am still trapped in the “last generation” of hardware console games and have taken some free time to play games for the GameCube, Xbox, and PS2 that were purchased long ago but never fully explored.

Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth (original Xbox or PC) is a fun and interesting game that was, as far as I can tell, a commercial flop. Basically what they have done is grafted an adventure game into the a first person shooter engine, with some survival horror elements. The game is a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s Shadows Over Innsmouth, perhaps my favorite of all Lovecraft’s stories, and I would consider it a highly successful adaptation of a short story to the video game format (though I don’t have much to compare it to.) The story is well implemented, with appropriate considerations for building a spooky experience through great use of audio and ok graphics (given when the game was made.) The “interface” is one most striking elements of the game; where as most first person shooters would present a “Heads Up Display” to show weapon/health related status, Dark Corners of the Earth presents all such information in not-entirely-quantifiable adjustments to the visuals. The game tracks both health and sanity(!) and indicates the status of these by blurring vision, slowing the game down, and using the controller to simulate frantic heart rate (I thought this would be stupid but it is well done.) These way of controlling the experience combined with the exploration of nicely rendered Lovecraftian environments (ruins, old mansions, collapsed townships etc.) work well togehter. I don’t think I have been this successfully creeped out by the experience of playing a game since exploring a haunted mine in “Thief: the Dark Project” (circa 1999.)

The best part of the game (to me) is that it is a first person shooter in which one does not actually engage in much combat for about the first 6 hours of the game. I am huge fan of the adventure game genre so it is interesting to me to see how that type of gameplay can merged with the more popular genres such as a shooter. You explore a decaying town, solve light puzzles, engage in some “stealth action” style scenarios and such, all of which I think work well to present the environment for a “horror” game more successfully than simply advancing through rooms shooting adversaries. I am about 10 hours in at this point and now have a collection of handguns and the requisite shot gun with which I must now dispatch the good folk of Innsmouth, but the game seems to slow down and not really feel any different from any other shooter once the combat stage is reached. The story is interesting (more so than most FPSs) so I am compelled to play more but defeating zombies can only hold you for so long.

If you are looking for a short list of old Xbox games to check out I would probably put this on it. Though the graphics are dated this game stands out to me as being part of small set of games for the xbox that did particularly original things insofar as the gameplay/story experience. Other original xbox games I am particularly fond of that I don’t think got around much include Republic Commando, Psychonauts, and Chronicles of Riddick (don’t laugh).