Cthulhu Saves the World (Xbox Live, PC, Xbox 360 [in that order])

If you’d rather just see the game being played then I’ve got a shameless shill for you! I’ve actually got a full let’s play of this game available on my youtube channel.

Cthulhu. A being who’s stories has spread fear across the century. A being so grossly powerful and from a realm so foreign to our limited perceptions that he drives men insane at the sight of him and would destroy our planet on accident. He lives in his underwater fortress city of R’lyeh, with its non-euclidean geometry, and works through his Deep One agents. His dreams are so powerful that the nightmares inspired by the sheer power have kept humanity afraid of the dark for millenia. Now is the time for his rise from the deeps, when he collects the souls of mankind to fuel his dark designs in the cosmos, for a purpose we could never understand.

His awakening is interrupted by a powerful wizard who curses Cthulhu and strips his powers away from him. The curse has a catch though. If the Tentacle faced dragon man can become a true hero then his powers will return and he will finally be able to destroy the world. But will he instead learn to love the people he’s come to know and protect? Find out in CTHULHU SAVES THE WORLD!

Well… he’s probably not gonna learn the whole friendship thing.

History

Cthulhu Saves the World was developed by Zeboyd games. Founded in 2009 in by Robert Boyd and William Stiernberg they began their careers with Interactive Novels such as Molly the Were-Zompire released in 2009 for Xbox Live.

Their first video game project was for a 2-D, turn-based RPG by the name of Breath of Death VII: The Beginning. It innovated on the classic RPG framework by awarding different choices of abilities for leveling up, increasing animation speed to make fights quicker, and offering limited random battle encounters per area to ease exploration. Cthulhu Saves the World followed suit and also included the ability to force a fight on the spot if you just wanted to get them all over with or farm gold and experience points. It was originally only available for Xbox Live but a quick Kickstarter campaign brought it to the 360 and PC dubbed the Super Hyper Enhanced Championship Edition Alpha Diamond DX Plus Alpha FES HD – Premium Enhanced Game of the Year Collector’s Edition (without Avatars!)

Cthulhu Saves the World was released on December 10th, 2010. It’s competition was Secret of Mana (iOS), the Oddboxx of Oddworld games (PC), and Shining Force II (PC).

Experiences

I find the evolution of Cthulhu to be fascinating. He’s gone from a minor monster thought up by Lovecraft and evolved into a world-wide phenomena over the last century. Creating and sustaining the genre of eldritch horror. Reminding humanity that there are things out there in the world that are so large that they do not care about us and would destroy us without even meaning to. Held aloft by teenagers as the pinnacle of horror via creepy-pastas and poorly informed fellow teens. And finally turned into a joke by the adults who grew up with him and can’t help but laugh in the face of madness and how silly powerful he is, evidenced by this game.

It’s just that simple folks.

Gameplay

This game is the most stock turn-based RPG that has ever turn-based RPG. You walk around, delve into dungeons, choose your party members, find sweet loot, and use abilities to destroy your enemies — and try not to die, of course. The game is filled with, and truly held aloft by, comedic references to both RPGs and Lovecraft’s mythos that will render fans of either doubled over in joy.

What? Bars serve milk… right?

The big mechanic in this game is that Cthulhu and others can inflict enemies with insanity. Insanity has a lot of bizarre effects on enemies. Near as I could tell it generally lowers their defenses. Be careful though, some enemies grow more powerful when they’re driven mad but it makes sense as to which enemies benefit. Drive elder gods insane is a recipe for disaster, but turning a zombie into a wreckless corpse is a safe bet.

The Gush

After you beat the game for your first time new modes of play are unlocked. Some of which change the game entirely like Highlander which limits the party to one member but increases XP gains dramatically — who’s the best for what situation, experiment and find out. And Cthulhu’s Angels which presents an all female party to help Cthulhu save the world because he’s too lazy… I mean busy!

This game mode could be the best thing related to Cthulhu ever invented.

I can’t properly emphasize here how many Lovecraft and RPG jokes there are in this game. Some of them were so deep that they went over my head. Like the powerful Belt Man, made as a mockery of Tetsuya Nomura’s penchant for adding belts upon belts to his characters. A living sword joins the party and his class title is swordsword for wielding himself. Or the game’s use of classical Lovecraftian locales as the towns and settlements of the game.

There’s a lot of humor and references to the Lovecraft source and the game’s a little alienating if you don’t get them.

The Kvetch

Taking a few wrong abilities at level ups can make things really rough. I tried playing Cthulhu as a mage because I was getting a lot of magic options I thought I could make good use of… boy was I wrong. That run ended in a total reset, the farming time for getting through the second dungeon was just plain untenable.

The Verdict

For a game with a 3 dollar price tag this is a bargain. That being said it’s a niche title. If you’re not a fan of Cthulhu or old-school turn-based RPGs then you might have a hard time getting into this title. But if you can Cthulhu Fhtagn and still remember Final Fantasy IV fondly then this game will bring a lot of great laughs and enjoyable experiences.

Next Week: Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Darkest Dungeon (PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, and PS Vita)

A distant Uncle(?) has left you the family estate but, like Luigi’s Mansion or the estate from Eternal Darkness, all is not as it seems. As it turns out this Great Uncle(?)  dug too deep, performed dark experiments, communed with Outer Gods, and basically did every bad thing Lovecraft ever wrote about. As the sole beneficiary it lies to you to restore the homestead and the nearby hamlet. And defeat the evil your… Father(?) unleashed. Hire some eager adventurers and set them on the monsters of the dark — or have I gotten that the wrong way around?

This disclaimer shows up everytime you boot up the game reminding you that this isn’t a game you win, it’s a game you survive.

History

Darkest Dungeon started out as a conversation between Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman about how a real person might react to a crazy dungeon delving scenario filled with monsters, demons, cultists, undead, and giant vermin. Inspired by psychologically heroes, particularly Hudson from Alien, they formed Red Hook Studios in order to make this a reality. They funded the game through Kickstarter, raising $75,000 for the project. Darkest Dungeon is still in Early access and as of yet is incomplete.

Darkest Dungeon entered Early Access on February 3rd, 2015. It’s competition was Hand of Fate (Linux, PC, Mac, PS4, and XBox One), Oddworld New and Tasty (PC, Mac, Linux), and Evolve (PC, PS4, XBox One)

Experiences

It’s natural that the player connect with the party… and doing so will hurt you. Eventually the character you rely on will fail you. The best of them will go mad and jeopardize everything. The one you love the most, the one you named after yourself perhaps, will die. At this point, after 30 expeditions, I’ve grown cold to the lives of the adventurers in my employ. I send them with no supplies sound in the knowledge that if they die then I can replace them. If they survive they’ll soon join the higher ups who perform the really dangerous tasks. The whole while the cash keeps coming in and I keep getting ready for a huge expedition with my most powerful party members. But the bodies are piling and I almost feel a tinge of guilt that my best must stand on the corpses of so many others… almost.

So far, the dead number 22 and the game keeps track of their names and how they died.

Gameplay

You take control of a party of adventurers who are about to learn what horrors live below, and in, the estate — I love the eagerness they begin with and how it turns into jaded paranoia and fear of having to go back. They move forward in a formation of four ranks, with certain combat abilities only being usable in and of certain ranks — your opponents will try to fuck up your formation… but you can also mess up theirs. Every quest has a certain objective and when it’s complete your people can go on home. They can also leave prematurely but that’ll stress them out.

And too much stress is really dangerous.

Speaking of stress, when your characters reach 100 stress points they’ll reach a breaking point which will typically cause them to acquire an affliction which makes their behavior more unpredictable and stresses everyone else out — but rarely causes them to fight more powerfully against the darkness. When a character reaches 200 stress they suffer a massive heart attack and die. Characters don’t die when they run out of health, they instead enter a state called ‘Death’s Door’ at which point the next attack against them has a chance of killing them.

Being on Death’s Door stresses them out and it’ll stress you out.

Completing quests nets you Heirlooms, gold, and trinkets which you can take back to the Hamlet and spend. The Hamlet is equipped with buildings that relieve stress, train and upgrade your adventurers, buy trinkets, and remove negative traits from characters such as phobias or diseases. Buildings are upgraded with heirlooms– which can never be taken away– and adventurers are improved with gold — which can easily be spent on expeditions that end in disaster.

The game has got his marvelous pre-Victorianesque setting where crossbows and flintlock pistols cohabit.

The game’s still in early access and as such has no definite goal. Doing quests in areas unlocks bosses and conquering the challenge is a reward in itself but other than that there’s not great conclusion yet.

The Gush

The designs of all the characters is unique and expressive. The different color palettes of the heads alone allow me to differentiate between characters of the same class. After so many battles animations get a little old and sometimes they drag and make battles seem like they take forever. The characters convey a lot based on appearance alone.

There’s something immensely satisfying about my party having their back to the wall and someone reaching their breaking point and becomes virtuous. The pause between the initiation and the reveal builds so much tension. It’s a small victory and I usually pump my fist or launch my hands into the air shouting, “YES!” repeatedly whenever it happens

YOU GET ‘EM PLAGUEY!

The game has created this bizarre system where the town’s upgrades are really what push the difficulty down. Nothing can be done to harm it or undo the work you’ve done to it. You can dump comically large sacks of money into an adventurer, keeping their mind and weapons sharp, when they suddenly turn into a critical hit magnet and die.

If you put together a particular team of adventurers the game will sometimes give them a themed title. I don’t know why I like this so much but I will occasionally mix and match team members just to see if they’re ‘The Misbegotten’ or ‘The Merciless’ or something.

The Kvetch

This game relies a lot on luck. Between your crits, enemy crits, getting surprised, surprising other parties, where the goal is in the dungeon, whether you scout or not, what every interactible item in the game does, and what enemies you fight, it’s difficult to determine where your strategy ends and the Random Number Generator begins.

Sometimes you get the triple crits, and sometimes they get you.

The game has got this really weird difficulty curve. Instead of getting more difficult as the game goes on, the game kind of gets easier. It takes more time to keep your high level characters in ship shape but it’s easier now than it’s ever been to me to reduce the stress of my characters or upgrade their gear. The big reason my people keep dying is because I use them like cannon fodder and pinch my pennies a little too hard, not because the challenge has gone up. Then again, higher level enemies grow more powerful to match the skills of your higher leveled characters.

The Verdict

This game scratched an itch that I didn’t even know that I had. It’s wonderfully eldritch and addictive in the same way that the Binding of Isaac is but it gives me a little more control. I’m really curious about what they turn it into, what classes they make next, and what or if there will be a grand conclusion to this all. I’m not sure if it’s worth 20 dollars but it’s definitely worth 15 so I’d recommend catching it when Steam runs its next sale.