Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss review: "This Lovecraftian horror challenges my detective skills in the best ways, even if it can be a bit fiddly at times"

Mean, green, and far from lean (he's an incomprehensibly massive elder god), HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu has become a cosmic horror icon for good reason. Much like breaking free from R'lyeh, the monster has long been freed from the shackles of novellas to become a multimedia sensation. And yet, the Cthulhu mythos has always struggled to make the leap into video games. Hear me, then, when I say that Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is one of the best, with detailed investigation mechanics that tempt you to corrupt your mind with the unknowable – perfectly fitting the tone of the source material.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss isn't perfect. This cosmic horror mystery is often fiddly to interact with, can be a little dense, and has some technical issues and grumble-inducing sporadic save points. But, like the script in the Necronomicon, developer Big Bad Wolf Studio (who also made the excellent and underrated Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong and The Council) has crafted a detective story that can be dangerously compelling. When you're nose deep in unravelling what happened to the doomed undersea expedition protagonist Noah is on the trail of, losing yourself in a huge mind map of potential clues, it's enthralling.

Green machine

Set in the near future, the effects of climate change causing rising tides, exploring a half-flooded bayou home is the perfect introduction to create a menacing, Lovecraftian-encroaching atmosphere. Quickly, hero Noah ends up thrust into a mission to dive into the depths of the sea to explore an abandoned mining station, following their secret mission to reach a buried underwater city and uncover what's imprisoned within its impossibly twisting halls.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss has no combat, and no real time pressure – though the thick atmosphere of dread still creates plenty of tension. Throughout each chapter, the nature of being just behind this team that went missing means you need to investigate what happened to them right after some serious nastiness. You'll also have to find a solution for how to progress and follow the dwindling survivors deeper, whether that's how to pass through an underwater maze that seems to always loop you back to the beginning, or how to reach a strange portal on the other side of a lake with something lurking within. Lovecraftian threats often lose their sting even the best action game takes on the genre, and puzzling out events and threats that feel just around the corner better captures the genre's intended flavor.

Noah's investigation skills are some of the most detailed I've seen in a detective game (and I'm a real genre fan), simply because of how you interact with its world through first-person view. Many interactable objects can be picked up, rotated, and placed back down – and for many puzzle solutions you'll need to do so, which often revolves around making sure you correctly deduce which objects are useful, and how to progress through strange environments.

The sonar system is a clever way of balancing object density with allowing you to zero-in on what you need. You can scan and track certain elements of an object, and then narrow down similar results with a sonar ping in an area. Early on, examining rope hooks allows me to use a copper ping to identify a path the expedition took ahead of me by scanning for all possible copper hooks. Later on, you may need to follow the trail of a certain type of blood, track down batteries that haven't been mysteriously corroded by combining specific components, or sort out human bones from, well, other bones.

Not completely left to flounder, your AI companion Key plops in questions into a mind map where every clue is stored, asking you to fill in relevant evidence to meet deductive conclusions. Yes, you can brute force some of this, but the sheer quantity of evidence encourages you to actually think about the answers and, crucially, getting an answer correct just provides you with information to carve a path forward, and doesn't actually hand you a key on a platter. In Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, learning final deductions and actually carrying out what they mean are quite different from one another. It's always up to you to take action.

I also like that, technically, you don't have to use the mind map to progress, either. With a couple of problems, I simply deduced the solutions from context, and could put them into practice without having to formally input anything. It feels like at times there are a few different ways to reach conclusions of your own accord, especially with how you choose to use the sonar. Detailed difficulty options mean you can get extra helping nudges, like simply telling you how many clues are obtainable in each sub-area of a chapter so you at least know where you might have missed something.

Many chapters also have two distinct ways to actually finish them, too – a corrupt path and a non-corrupt path. The former is often a bit simpler and faster to carry out, but will raise your corruption level, not only affecting the ending you're going to get, but potentially destroying certain upgrades (though I never found any of those abilities – like expanded sonar range – particularly useful anyway). It's a nice touch, and feels like you're being rewarded for really paying attention to all the detailed information each area has to hoover up.

Noah's ark

Some abilities in Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss are gated behind an energy resource – specifically analyzing objects. Early on, this feels like a nice idea, teasing me with the possibility of sorting through only evidence I really need to use, or avoiding scanning cosmically strange things to remain uncorrupt.

But, this doesn't really come together. It feels like you should just scan everything anyway, and there are plenty of glowing mushrooms to give you enough energy to do so, so it ultimately feels like a bit of a pointless mechanic if you're paying attention to pick-ups. The investigations are compelling enough on their own to not really need this additional consideration. It's not really a problem (you can also just turn it off), but it feels a bit odd by the end of the game when you've stopped thinking about it.

There are times when Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss' detailed interaction system can be annoying, as well. Some later puzzles require you to manipulate objects in certain directions, requiring you dip in and out of examination screens to manually spin them, and the game is picky about how it reflects those spins in Noah's hands. One late game cube-engraving puzzle becomes a chore even once you've figured out its tricky solution, simply because manipulating the shape is so annoying.

Likewise, relying on autosaves can be a real pain as the unclear save points can feel arbitrary, and, in my experience, counterintuitively don't always match up with checkpoints at which you can respawn. A couple of times I solved a particularly tough puzzle and stepped away, only to find my save was still back at that previous area and I'd have to clear the puzzle yet again, which doesn't pair nicely with the fiddlier bits. With large puzzle areas and in-depth solutions, it feels like a stumble to not make it easier to be able to step away from the game to ponder the possibilities without worrying about losing significant progress.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is one of the most ambitious detective games I've played, and it really manages to execute its goals well, connecting me deeply with the environments I have to puzzle through. While occasional clunkiness can pull me out in a way that doesn't gel well with its otherwise really smart puzzling, the heights of this adventure have given me some chin-stroking highlights for sure. My mind isn't warped, and, despite my brain cells sometimes feeling a bit annoyed, they also feel well-stretched. This is the kind of Cthulhu game that understands the appeal of the source material, and no fan of the big green one should miss this.

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