Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss Review – Clever Yet Frustrating Detective Horror

Step into the shoes of an occult investigator up against the growing corruption of Cthulhu, gather clues for careful analysis, and choose how to solve puzzles to either stave off the corruption or let it spread.

As a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories and anything based on them, I was intrigued by Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss when I heard about it. This first-person adventure game puts you in the role of Noah, an investigator for an agency that specializes in occult incidents. That’s an interesting perspective to take for this sort of story, and at first, I was concerned it might diminish the cosmic horror feeling. Fortunately, it doesn’t. While Noah has heard of Cthulhu before, the narrative still very much feels like he’s up against forces far beyond humanity. This is clear not only in the documents and logs left behind by the mining team whose disappearance you’re investigating, but also in how Noah himself reacts to the situation. As for the story itself, it’s fine, but nothing exceptional. Instead, its slow-paced, detective-oriented gameplay is the central draw here.

The game is split into chapters, each with its own self-contained area. While you can’t backtrack to a previous chapter’s location, each area itself has a lot to explore. Many times, I found myself stuck only to discover a whole new section I hadn’t explored yet, which was both frustrating and rewarding. Exploration can also yield important finds, such as lichens that replenish your energy and equipable “evolutions” that grant passive perks, such as protecting you from corruption or increasing the range of your sonar.

This use of sonar is one of the unique things that sets this game apart. You have a sonar ping that highlights objects in your environment, but you need to set a frequency to search for. You get these frequencies by analyzing items. For example, an early puzzle required me to use a certain key card. I had already found a different one, and analyzing it gave me the item’s frequency. I set my sonar to that frequency, and it led me to the necessary key card, which was hidden well enough that it was very difficult to find with a regular visual search. You can also set a combination of up to three frequencies to search for items that have that specific combination. While this is mostly useful for finding hidden or overlooked items or figuring out which direction you should check for another path, later parts of the game use it in ways that are pretty clever.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is very much a detective game, where the primary focus of gameplay is gathering clues to figure out what the game wants you to do next. Every clue you gather is contained in “the Vault,” which includes a mental map view that lets you organize your clues, track their location, link them to one another, and test them against certain key questions to make deductions and gain new clues. At first, this might seem like overkill, but after a while, I was grateful for the ability to group clues to more easily scour everything for information I had missed. My only complaint is that, by default, the mental map places clues so far apart that I always have to drag them closer together first. Meanwhile, analyzing clues is a balancing act because analysis costs energy. If you run out of energy, continued analysis will instead increase your corruption. As a result, you need to stop and think carefully about what’s worth analyzing and what isn’t. I like gathering as much information as possible, so that took some getting used to, but I do appreciate its strategic aspect.

All of this clue-gathering and analysis eventually leads to you solving puzzles in the game world, which can range from learning how to turn a metal cube into a sphere that will power an energy field to finding your way through a passage that keeps looping you back to the start. Several chapters also have a major, overarching puzzle with two solutions: one that will increase the spread of Cthulhu’s corruption and one that will help hold it back. The solutions you choose, along with the corruption you encounter through methods such as analysis without energy, determine which ending you get. These puzzles can be pretty challenging, although it all comes down to reading over every clue carefully to find connections and hints.

Now, there are difficulty options to make all of this easier, with two preset modes and the ability to set each option separately. For example, you can enable an option to allow free analysis of items without worrying about energy. Another option lets you ask Noah’s AI companion (voiced by a real human, as the developer was quick to point out when introducing the character ahead of launch) for clues to point you in the right direction on puzzles. This customizable difficulty is a nice feature in a game that could otherwise get quite frustrating.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss also features beautiful environments and strong attention to detail, but it’s not without its technical struggles. The game sometimes lagged during cutscenes, and I encountered a handful of bugs as I played. At one point, I couldn’t interact with anything, and I paused the game after wandering uselessly for a while. When I un-paused, dialogue suddenly played, and I could interact with things again. Another time, I was blocked by an invisible force and spent some time assuming it was a puzzle, until I reloaded and had a clear path again. My biggest criticism, however, is that this game exclusively uses auto-save, which is not a good choice for this sort of game. When the primary gameplay is spent slowly exploring an area and combing over clues, it’s not a good feeling to take a break and come back to learn your auto-save was before that last batch of clues you found. A manual save or even a simple “save and quit” option would be a much-appreciated feature.

Overall, it’s an interesting game. Sometimes I loved it, and sometimes I hated it, but I can’t deny that it had some clever ideas both in its approach to puzzles and in the overall gameplay.