#98: Shadow of the Comet

Shadow of the Comet

Infogrames
Initial release: March 25, 1993 (France)
Platform: PC (reviewed), PC-98
Also known as: Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet (rerelease)

images c/o MobyGames

When Chaosium, publisher of the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG in the early 80s, decided to get into the video game business, there weren't a whole lot of obvious options. The obvious question is what kind of game to make; surprisingly, rather than an RPG, they chose to hire Infogrames, the legendary French developer. Infogrames had made a name for themselves the previous year with Alone in the Dark, a genre-busting title that tried to take adventure games — at the time a popular genre for a refined PC audience — to the next level. Shadow of the Comet nevertheless was a far more traditional adventure game, with all of the quirks (read: irritating bullshit) that came with the genre back in the day.

It’s 1910 and John Parker, a young photojournalist from England, visits “Illsmouth,” a sleepy New England fishing village, three days before the passing of Haley’s Comet, to find out why a certain Lord Boleskine went mad during the last time the comet swung around, seventy-odd years prior. While the game shamelessly borrows elements from Lovecraft’s stories “Shadow over Innsmouth” (obviously) and “The Dunwich Horror,” among others, it’s otherwise a fairly original take on the mythos, using the comet as a sort of astrological anchor necessary for ritual summoning.

Illsmouth is as far from Innsmouth as you can get — where Lovecraft wrote Innsmouth as a rotting, slummy little town teeming with hostile residents, Illsmouth is just this quiet little burg with mostly normal inhabitants, though not everyone there is exactly a God-fearing Christian. The game does try hard to convey the creep factor of actually reading a Lovecraft story, but let’s be honest, time has not been kind to this game at all. It’s mostly a frustrating mess of wandering around wondering what the hell to do next. Worse, sometimes you can paint yourself into a corner by forgetting to grab something or talk to someone, or talking to the wrong person, or whatever, and you only have ten save slots. One small mercy is that Parker will look at items that can be picked up.

There’s also the fact that the game wasn’t originally designed with point and click in mind, and it shows. The game came in a couple of different versions, with both floppy disk and CD-ROM versions available. Eventually it wound up on PC-98 and Windows too. I played the CD version and its inclusion of mouse support is haphazard at best. The interface in general is just a nightmare. Making matters worse is that there’s no general ability to “look,” it’s context-sensitive and sometimes very difficult to use. What this means is that the game is quite short on the writing. And what writing there is, is riddled with typos and other errors. What this all adds up to is a game that is frustratingly short on details and sparse with clues, leaving you to basically have to follow a guide step by step to get through this thing before you tear your hair out and/or die of old age.

It’s not all bad. Character sprites are fairly well animated, and occasionally you’ll get full-screen animations by way of rotoscope, similar to Delphine Software’s legendary adventure games Out of this World or Flashback. Most of the full-screen portraits model after one actor or another, giving it a bit of a kitschy cinematic flavor. The CD-ROM version adds full voice acting, though it’s severely flawed. First, it outpaces the text, which renders the text fairly useless. (It’s also mixed horribly loud.) The voice acting is also generally wooden, so really, you might as well turn it off.

The sound design in general is fairly anemic. While the game utilizes sound effects and ambient noises in some spots, in others it’s just dead silent. The music is quite good, however, despite being limited to only a handful of crunchy synth tunes using Adlib FM.

All in all, while it’s a good early effort at bringing the Lovecraft mythos (as opposed to other cosmic horror properties) to video games, there are other, later efforts that, if not necessarily better, are at least less inherently frustrating at the outset.

-june❤

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