Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a survival horror video game developed by British studio Headfirst Productions for the Xbox in 2005 and for Microsoft Windows in 2006. It combines an action-adventure game with a relatively realistic first-person shooter and elements of a stealth game.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Bethesda Softworks
2K (Xbox)
Ubisoft (PC, Europe)
Simon Woodroffe
Michael Woodroffe
Christopher Gray
Todd Vaughn
Joss Ellis
Christopher Gray
Gareth Clarke
David White
Rob Steptoe
Troy Tempest
Wilhelm Ogterop
Christopher Gray
Graeme Davis
Greg Chandler
The game is based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, author of "The Call of Cthulhu" and progenitor of the Cthulhu Mythos. It is a reimagining of Lovecraft's 1936 novella The Shadow over Innsmouth, taking large inspiration from another novella called The Shadow Out of Time as well as Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu role-playing game 1997 scenario Escape from Innsmouth. Set mostly in the year 1922, the story follows Jack Walters, a mentally unstable private detective hired to investigate in Innsmouth, a strange and mysterious town that has cut itself off from the rest of the United States.
In development since 1999, the project was repeatedly delayed, going through several revisions and having some of its most ambitious and immersive features abandoned and the initially planned PlayStation 2 version cancelled. Although well received by critics, Dark Corners of the Earth was a commercial failure. At least two more Cthulhu Mythos games were planned by Headfirst Productions, including a direct sequel titled Call of Cthulhu: Destiny's End, but neither were completed due to Headfirst's bankruptcy.
Plot[edit]
On September 6, 1915, police detective Jack Walters (Milton Lawrence) is summoned to the siege of a decrepit manor house in Boston. The manor is inhabited by a bizarre cult called the Fellowship of the Yith, led by one Victor Holt (Marc Biagi) who has asked specifically for Walters to come and talk to him. Taking cover from an ensuing firefight, Walters separates from the police and goes inside the mansion. He finds the cultists dead by mass suicide and turns on a strange-looking contraption, revealing itself to be a portal. Walters sees two inter-dimensional beings emerge from the portal and blacks out. When the rest of the police finally break in, they find Walters apparently insane and with a different personality. He is briefly committed to Arkham Asylum, but is released and spends six years travelling and studying the occult. Exactly six years since entering the manor in Boston, his secondary personality disappears and his old personality returns. However, he suffers from amnesia surrounding the events of the past six years.
Walters becomes a private detective, whilst attempting to trace his own actions during the period of mental disturbance that he cannot remember. On February 6, 1922, he takes up a missing person case at Innsmouth, a xenophobic coastal town, and the site of the recent disappearance of Brian Burnham, a clerk that had been sent there to establish a local store for the First National Grocery chain. Arriving in the isolated town, which appears to be depopulated and in a state of collapse, Jack unsuccessfully asks around for Burnham. He stays the night at a hotel, where he barely escapes an assassination attempt and flees from a chase by an armed mob. From that point forward, Jack is forced to sneak through the alleys, buildings, and sewers of Innsmouth, avoiding murderous patrols of the town's corrupt police and the cultists looking for him. He acquires weapons to defend himself and meets undercover agent Lucas Mackey (John Nutten), who tells him that the town is under federal investigation. Jack eventually finds Burnham and his girlfriend Ruth (Lani Minella), but the two are killed as they escape from Innsmouth. Jack is taken in by the FBI squad led by J. Edgar Hoover (Ryan Drummond). Following a brutal interrogation, Jack agrees to help Hoover and the FBI raid the Marsh Gold Refinery, where he is attacked by an ancient creature known as a shoggoth and uncovers a Cthulhu shrine before the building is demolished.
After the refinery raid, the U.S. military begins a combined land-and-sea assault on Innsmouth. The only part of the town that proves resistant to the attack is the headquarters of the Esoteric Order of Dagon, a cult that holds the whole town under its grip, devoted to two undersea demigods, Dagon and Mother Hydra, as well as the Great Old One Cthulhu. The building proves unbreachable by the Coast Guard and the Marines, but Jack finds a way in through an old smuggling entrance that is guarded by a star-spawn of Cthulhu. Inside, Jack saves Mackey, who had been kidnapped for a ritual sacrifice, and brings down the magical shield protecting the building. After discovering a secret chamber, he falls through the floor of a tunnel which leads into the sea.
Jack is rescued by the USS Urania, a Coast Guard vessel which is part of a group heading to Devil's Reef, following up on a lead provided by the FBI. On the way there, wizards on the reef summon powerful tidal waves to destroy the flotilla, but Jack kills them with the Urania's deck gun. The humanoid fish-men known as Deep Ones launch a mass attack on the Urania and eventually Dagon emerges, too. Despite almost the entirety of the ship's crew being wiped out by the attack, Jack manages to defeat the gigantic demigod, again with the deck gun, but the Urania sinks.
Jack finds himself on Devil's Reef, where he discovers old smuggling tunnels beneath the seabed, leading him to the underwater city of Y'ha-nthlei. The city is found to be located below Devil's Reef and is the home of the Deep Ones and members of the Order. U.S. Navy submarines attempt to torpedo Y'ha-nthlei, but are stopped by a magical barrier protecting the city. The Temple of Dagon is the source of the barrier, but the entrance is sealed off to prevent any interference. Jack finds another way in through ancient tunnels feared by the Deep Ones at the bottom of the city's foundations. Apparently, this passage, which leads to the temple, is an ancient prison for flying polyps, the enemy of the Great Race of Yith. Jack manages to defeat them with the help of a Yithian energy weapon. Jack enters the Temple of Dagon and kills Mother Hydra – whose song is generating the barrier – by deafening himself to her song, allowing him to take control of the Deep Ones. With the barrier down, the submarines attack the city, while Jack escapes through a portal leading back to the Order's headquarters and collapses in front of Hoover and Mackey.
Fragments of Jack's memory from his six years of amnesia return. A member of the Great Race of Yith explains that when he made contact with the Yith in the Boston manor, a Yithian swapped minds with him, leaving his body in control of a member of the Great Race of Yith, while his own mind was projected into the Yithian world. It is for this reason that Walters had a secondary personality when he was incarcerated in the Asylum and in the six years that followed – it was the mind of a Yithian in Jack's body. The same Yithian then explains that he swapped minds with Jack's father during the moment of Jack's conception, that Jack is only partially human as a result, and that he has two fathers: his human father and his Yithian father. In flesh, Jack is human, but he inherited Yithian psychic powers, which explains the cultists' interest in him, his ability to solve cases with clues retrieved from his dreams, his visions of coming danger and of the Yithian library-city of Pnakotus, and his ability to control Deep Ones in the Temple of Dagon. After six years living in Pnakotus in a Yithian body, a war with the Flying Polypous Creatures forces the Yith to send Jack's mind back to his own body. Simultaneously, they erase six years of his memory to protect his sanity, with the promise that "When the time is comes, you will remember... we will be waiting in the shadows of your dreams." His memories returned, Jack is confined in Arkham Asylum once more, where he attempts suicide by hanging himself, unable to handle the reality of himself and what he has witnessed.[a]
Development[edit]
The game was in development by British independent studio Headfirst Productions for at least six years, and the development can be traced back to August 1999 and a discussion on the Usenet group alt.horror.cthulhu in which the Mythos fans contributed ideas for the game to Headfirst's Andrew Brazier.[4] This and other feedback was later used to create the game,[5] which Brazier termed "FPHAS – a First Person Horror Adventure Shooter".[6] The game's protagonist Jack Walters has been repeatedly redesigned before his final look was created by Tim Appleton. Headfirst initially used the game engine NDL NetImmerse for rendering graphics combined with the Havok physics engine but later developed its own engine.[7]
The first screenshots were shown in December 1999,[8] and the game, originally planned for the PC and PlayStation 2, was scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2001.[9] In 2000, Headfirst secured rights from Chaosium, publisher of Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.[10] Before E3 2001 the game was stated to be "70 percent complete",[11] but was then repeatedly delayed. In late 2002, the game's original publisher Ravensburger Interactive Media was taken over by JoWooD Productions, which had no interest in the title. The developers then signed a deal with Bethesda to release the game for the PC and Xbox,[12] and the development of the PlayStation 2 version was aborted.
Headfirst Productions originally intended for a much larger, nonlinear role-playing-type storyline to be fitted within the game, including more characters and locations, as well as a cooperative gameplay system for up to four players. The latter would have enabled the players to pick one of four characters and either carry out their own investigation independently or team up with the others (in case of single-player gameplay, the other three investigators would be under AI control).[10][13] A competitive multiplayer mode would have allowed for online deathmatch rounds in specifically designed levels. Several other ambitious features, such as a deeper sanity system and a high degree of environment interactivity,[10][13][14] were also scrapped due to budget and time constraints and problems with the level design. The game was always supposed to use first-person view, but the screenshots from 2001 showed some third-person perspective stealth gameplay.[15] Much of a promised "wide array of weapons"[1] at the player's disposal was conceived but ultimately removed from the game,[16] including a wooden club,[17] a Mauser C96 automatic pistol,[1] and a pump-action shotgun.[18] Various weapon models and concept arts from the game were released by a former Headfirst artist Niel Venter via DeviantArt.[19]
Release[edit]
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was released on October 24, 2005, for the Xbox,[20] and on March 27, 2006, for the PC.[21] In the PC version, only the English and Russian versions of game have full dubbing (audio, subtitles, interface, main menu voices), while the Italian, French and German versions have only localized subtitles and interface. The game contains a number of software bugs, which have never been officially patched; these bugs are generally intermittent, and restoring from an earlier saved game can be enough to get past them. There is also an unofficial patch available that fixes some glitches and lowers the game's overall difficulty level.[22][23] The Xbox version is officially compatible with the Xbox 360 in certain regions.[24]
More Call of Cthulhu franchise games were announced by Headfirst Productions. Due to the very long development cycle of Dark Corners of the Earth, the other titles were being developed alongside it.
Both games were cancelled when the company failed to find a new publisher for them in 2006, resulting in the bankruptcy and liquidation of Headfirst.[55][56] UGO.com's Marissa Meli included Destiny's End on her 2011 list of 25 cancelled video games that "could have been some of the greatest games of all time"[57] and Bloody Disgusting's Adam Dodd put both follow-up titles on their 2013 list of six cancelled horror video games "that could've been amazing".[58]