Call of Cthulhu

TL;DR:
If you are looking for a stealth horror game, or a survival horror game with first person shooting and inventory management, or a game that is actually scary do not buy this. If you want a game that's kind of a walking simulator, where you talk to a lot of npcs, investigate stuff by interacting with various things, is very cheap on sale (according to steamdb it goes for like 5 bucks), and experience a horror story that's not really scary imo buy this game.
If you are wondering if this game is similar to that OTHER Call of Cthulhu game which was Dark Corners of the Earth... ehhh not really gameplay wise? Although there are some similarities, both star a detective and you are in a port town.
Well straight up one of the major issues with the game is that it crashes when ever you try to play it. If you actually want to buy this game and you run into crashing issues just follow the steps below in this link.
From what I understand apparently the game doesn't like running on newer CPUs. Kind of inexcusable imo to have a game that was only released back in 2018 to not work properly on modern hardware. People shouldn't have to come home from working 8 hours at their job or from school and then come home and buy a modernish game that doesn't work and have to look online on how to get it to work. It's much more excusable for much more older games to not work on modern hardware, but whatever. Also fyi if your game is still crashing ignore the step in the link that tells you to reset your computer after entering and saving those system variables. For me personally for some reason they kept going away after I reset my computer, but the game ran fine with no crashes after entering the variables and not resetting.
Personally I actually didn't really like this game, but I felt compelled to finishing it and I am giving it a positive review mainly because I think it's not really a bad game, you just need to have a mind set that this game is actually more of a "walking simulator" with talking to a lot of npcs and investigating by interacting with objects. I think the overwhelming majority of the game is mostly talking to npcs and interacting with things. Well I guess you could argue if this game is or isn't a walking simulator, a lot of the time you are in a openish zone or map or whatever you call it where you can walk around and talk to various npcs and do some snooping, but the game is still fairly linear.
There is "stealth" in this game, I went into buying this blind expecting (and wanting) a game with intense stealth horror similar to like Amnesia or Outlast, but only to be very underwhelmed and dissatisfied. What I got was a horror game that I didn't think was very scary with very minimal stealth sections and superficial stealth mechanics. There is quite literally imo only one "real" stealth section in the game, and by that I mean a part in the game where you are in a map where you are stuck with enemies that patrol around or they are actively try seeking you and you have to stay away from them while trying to do objectives. There is one part where you are stuck in a medical prison area and need to create a distraction from guards blocking an exit. That part is quite literally imo the truest stealth has ever gotten in the game because the guards have patrols and will examine and chase you down if they think they saw you. There is even hiding spots, all though running away from the guards is very easy. It takes a while for the guards to actually spot you though, they get a white icon over their heads if they think they spotted someone and its fairly easy to move away from them to remove that icon. One issue I had with that section was that apparently there are multiple ways in distracting the guards from their post. One of them was to activate an electric chair which I found first, but instead of doing that I somehow did the distraction where I busted some pipes. I didn't realize that got the guards guarding the exit attention so I went around wondering why I couldn't interact with switches to activate the chair until I looked it up and apparently the prompts for activating the switches goes away if you managed to get the guards distracted some other way.
The other "stealth" sections are VERY straight forward usually, for example I think the first time in the game where you have to I guess technically sneak is when the main character first runs into cultists. But the cultists are all conveniently facing in one direction paying attention to someone laying down on a altar, and then a guard is scripted to walk down one specific path to the other cultists allowing you to walk to the exit that he was guarding. Sometimes the game places enemies in spots purely just to make the player not go there and to direct them by sneaking in a very specific direction. One other stealth section involved with I guess the games first boss fight. You are stuck in a room with a monster and have to trial and error find a correct dagger to stab a painting. I could never sneak properly around the boss and thought it was kind of shitty how it patrolled the area so I just looked up online where the correct dagger was, ran to it and picked it up and then ran to the painting and stabbed it.
The stealth parts in the game genuinely made me feel kind of conflicted because I think they are pretty bad. It kind of makes me wonder if the game would have been a lot better without it and just was entirely a detective game that's kind of a walking simulator, investigating, and talking to npcs. From what I read online I think a lot of people who played this game didn't really like the stealth sections and much preferred the story parts.
The game also has "rpg" mechanics, randomly as you progress through the game you get points which can be distributed through some skills. The skills are usually used in the conversations for certain dialogue choices. If your skill is high enough the game allows you to choose new branches of dialogue when talking to npcs. At the beginning of the game it allows you to make a "build" by allocating points into the skills that the game offers. The only skills that the game does not give you points for free as you play through the game is medicine and occultism, those two you have to either read books you find throughout the game or by interacting with something that gives you points for those for some reason.
The game has four endings, depending on the dialogue choices you made through the game and some other actions you will get a different ending.
You do get a "gun" in the game, but you don't get it until quite literally at near the end of the game. When you do it's kind of weird how they handled the shooting. Basically when you get close enough to an enemy they get a fist icon over their heads and that indicates that the character you are playing can shoot and kill them. The shooting is purely auto aim so you always hit and kill the monsters in one shot, and in the map where you finally get the gun they give you more than enough ammo to the point where I only had like a couple of enemies I legit had to sneak past which wasn't very hard.
The other Call of Cthulhu game Dark Corners of the Earth imo is better than this game even though it's kind of jank. That game has stealth, gunplay, and in general feels more like an actual video game, this 2018 game I thought was boring. The weird thing about Dark Corners is that it's more of a Shadow over Innsmouth game than it is Cthulhu because you are primarily fighting fish people. This 2018 game has cultists which some of them have squidlike features, and there is a doctor similar to the one in HP Lovecrafts story Herbert West–Reanimator which was about a doctor who was obsessed with reanimating the dead.

You know it's a good game when it convinces a non-avid reader like me, who finds reading boring and tedious, to purchase The Complete Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft. I'm not certain which chapter in the game inspired me, but feeling inspired to pick up a book is an extremely rare occurrence for me. Additionally, I'm motivated to unlock all the achievements.

I write this review because of a noticeable group of people who played this game expecting more action into it. This is supposed to be an first person RPG and not a FPS, focused almost exclusively to the story; no side stories and limited exploration. Think of this as an Immersive Visual Novel with choice making for the endings with a 3h playthrough in average definitely worth the play.

I played Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth back in 2008-2009. It was creepy as h*ll and I loved it. When this game was announced i got really excited. When i saw all the negative stuff that the people threw at the game i started to wonder if it was worth to play it. One day, a Steam friend (thank you Ramo) gifted me the game, tried it out but still did not convinced me. In 2023 i gave it another chance and oh my god. Apparently is a good game. The atmosphere is creepy and it makes you stay on guard all the time (the mansion location as example). Cyanide and Focus are not a well known companies and with a "bad" reputation but i think here they did a great job (not amazing, but good enough). The unique thing that this game offers is how you want to play: Use your strength for solve the problems quickly, dialogue skills, lockpicking, etc. Recommended to all lovecraft fans!
7 / 10

A surprisingly good game for what it is. I expected something mediocre, but it turned out to be a very strong "above average" grade gaming experience. Would rate it 7/10 easy, maybe even 8/10, and that's coming from a guy who would much rather prefer to blast eldrich horrors from a shotgun to the face DooM-style, than solve puzzles and stealth around an asylum. We really need a Painkiller/Doom-style game set in a Lovecraftian universe.

Why do creepy doctors always wear John Lennon glasses?

Slight annoyance with some of the trial and error aspects of solutions to checkpoints, otherwise a solid game.

There are multiple endings and your choices through the game dictate your future. Creepiness factor is high: there are some psychologically horrifying parts to the game. There was only one time where I noted a plot inconsistency but it didn't take much away from the experience at that point. The graphics were pretty good, gameplay smooth and it required several different gaming strategy skills in order to complete. It was also fairly narrative and never seemed like "work" that some overly-routine games can feel like.