Way back when, some time in the 1980s, came a little game by that seminal animator Don Bluth known as Dragons Lair. It was a perilous quest of a knight for his lost love. The game was flashy, bouncy, and a good bit different than the pixels that were hopping around at the time. It was popular enough to spawn sequels both direct and spiritual, so it must've had something going for it.

Dragon's Lair was also relentlessly unforgiving. Its five button control scheme, four directions and a catch-all 'action', was simplistic enough. In any given scene, perfectly rendered with full animation, the action would pause for a (often all-too brief) moment and prompt the player to guide his avatar, Dirk the Daring. Guided by (often all-too weak) clues on the screen, the player would choose between one of his four direction buttons, or the action button. If he was successful the victor would be moved to the next random room, eventually reaching the goal of his quest, the princess.

But more than likely, considering the lack of detailed clues in most rooms and the 80% chance of choosing the wrong button, the player would fail and the arcade machine would immediately demand another quarter for the 'pleasure' of another expidient five second sequence that would almost assuredly end in another loss and another quarter.

Frankly, I don't know how them people back then dealt with it.

Just like mom used to make.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, a sort of horror-adventure-FPS fusion (semantically similar to the cult classic System Shock 2, but in nowhere near the range of 'awesome') is a game that's been languishing in "development hell" for something to the tune of six years. That the game is playable out of the gate is a miracle in itself, but that's not enough to carry the average gamer's interest. The question is whether or not Dark Corners of the Earth superseded "playable" and was actually "good". This is an especially difficult task for a game so beleagured by the industry, especially when it's got an extremely detailed pedigree to keep faithful to.

I'm going to assume you know who H.P. Lovecraft is and, by association, that you know that big fella by the name of Cthulhu. If not, Lovecraft was a guy who wrote a whole bunch of pulp sci-fi/horror stories back in the 20s and 30s and Cthulhu is his most famous and well-known character. He's a big evil green fellow with a tentacled mouth who, as the legend goes, is trapped under the sea and directs his evil minions via telepathic methods. It's been enough to inspire dozens of roleplaying games, short stories, and B-Movies. The excellent Eternal Darkness that graced the Gamecube a few years back flaunted its Lovecraftian-style mythology.

The game, in actuality, has very little to do with Cthulhu, but Lovecraft built up such a storied history and mythos for these things that there's plenty of room to breath. Some (idiots) people have actually formed real live religions after them. It's insane, I know, but if there's enough there for someone to believe that Googamooga is gonna come down from the sky and torture them for all eternity then there's probably a god or two on the side that Headfirst Games can take advantage of.

Dark Corners of the Earth, which seems to be a first in a series, relates most closely to the Lovecraft story "A Shadow Over Innsmouth", a story about a mysterious town filled with people carrying a strange infection. The game takes a similar path. I'm not going to spoil the story for you, as it's the game's strongest point (which probably isn't saying much), but suffice it to say it's not an infection and they really ARE all out to get you. Dark Corners of the Earth fulfills its legacy to a tee... at times maybe a little to closely, as, aside from super-surprise appearances of J. Edgar Hoover (he's not a monster, despite allegations of crossdressing) there's a good chunk of this game that the reader could've have garnered from spending forty-five minutes with Shadow Over Innsmouth. It's fun to play it in videogame form, but for something that's SUPPOSED to be an original tale (occurring five years earlier than the short story) there sure were a whole lot of familiarities, and maybe a plot hole or two.

The gameplay, then, is what we've gotta put under the screws. Dark Corners of the Earth has its fair share of innovations, like a view completely unobscured by the dials and doo-dads of your standard FPS hub, and a moderately interesting system of first aid involving bleeding wounds and broken legs that actually impair your character. The "Sanity System", though not as robust as the excellent one in Eternal Darkness, heightens a sense of realism that loser-FPS Breakdown could never accomplish with its motion sickness inducing "full" first person perspective. The player might be surprised the first time he looks down at a long drop before a crucial jump and his view goes wavery to simulate Vertigo. Dark Corners of the Earth is a significantly different experience than many FPSes on the market. Heck, the first third of the game takes place with your character, a private investigator by the name of Jack Walters, completely sans-weapon. It's a unique way to make a player feel helpless, just like a guy might in a situation where you've got a hundred scabby townsfolk out for your hide, but after the initial novelty of it wears off it starts feeling a bit like a gaudy videogame trinket. Shiny, but of little value.

Were on-rails car chase sequences EVER fun? I mean, really...

It's got to be a secret developer plot to frustrate the hell out of you. Dark Corners of the Earth is maybe one of the most frustrating I've played in recent time. Dark Corners of the Earth will frequently, and without remorse, throw high speed, intense situations into your face and expect you to muddle your way through them five, ten, fifteen times until you find the exact series of movements that will get you through a five minute sequence intact. Bolt the door, run, bolt the next door, move the dresser, bolt the door, move the next dresser, move the NEXT dresser, open the window, jump across, duck down, run down the hall, climb the ladder. Here the player realizes he's trapped! There's no room for creativity or improvisation. In any given run on an action sequence the player will garner the next segment of the route he needs before suffering a brutal death and being forced to try again. And the time after that put your next quarter in and, if you're lucky, you'll get the NEXT clue. Repeat ad nauseam.

I bet you wondered where that Dragon's Lair connection was gonna come in. Don't ever say I did you wrong.

These high paced sequences don't comprise the whole game, but there's at least one or two of them in each of the game's five subdivisions and from surviving a tidal wave to ringing a gong they're all equally unintuitive. What's even more infuriating is that the shooting sequences in the game are often so pathetically easy as to be a joke. The game's AI (and hit detection) is barely a step above the laughable creatures in Quake II, with enemies staring you right in the face like you weren't even there while you line up your shot or blasting off a shotgun point blank and missing you entirely. One of my most favorite is shooting an unaware townsfolk in the back of the head, garnering exactly NO reaction from the braindead slob. Provided you aren't caught from behind by a cheap shot -- a pretty frequent occurrence, to be fair -- you'll breeze through the combat despite the cumbersome lack of a crosshair on your screen.

Look ma! No crosshair! No accuracy either!

When you're not falling down bottomless pits or dodging bullets, you'll be solving puzzles, many of which are so abstruse and convoluted as to make the most hardened mid-80s Sierra game cry in horror. Some, like using a chisel on a sewer grate or fetching medkits for wounded Coast Guards, are your standard pathetic action game mismatch. Where Dark Corners of the Earth REALLY shines are the times when it dares you to remember the ONE green crystal you passed in a cavern two hours ago, that it wasn't just part of the background, that you're actually going to need it to power a device, and that the seemingly random item you just picked up is gonna let you get it.

For those infatuated with H.P. Lovecraft, and it is a pretty cool continuity to be "down with", the game offers scads in the way of fan-service. A myriad of races, people, and locales will be familiar to even the casual observer of the Cthulhu mythos, and they're integrated in such a way as to feel natural instead of forced trivia tidbits. Creatures such as the Yithians and the Polyps and (especially) the Deep Ones are rendered in great detail, and their actions are consistent with what you'd expect. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that so much of the game is stripped right out of the events of A Shadow Over Innsmouth the story could accurately be described as good.

It's awesome to experience some of the things from Lovecraft's story come to life. Great to see them rendered in a medium that isn't a clumsily programmed MUD or a "Sci-Fi Pictures Original". But occult references and giant monsters, as cool as they are, aren't enough to bear the weight of something that just doesn't have enough genuinely exciting gameplay. The game starts out well enough, and there are a good amount of legitimately fun moments, but it's just not $40 worth of fun. Maybe a rental, but I can't see it as a purchase. Dark Corners of the Earth gets points for being a good try, but at the end of the day it's another flashy, bouncy, infuriating-beyond-belief experience, and it doesn't have Dragon's Lair's exquisite Don Bluth character designs to carry its weight. Dark Corners of Earth gets the atmosphere right, but, ironically, it's a long way from being the next Eternal Darkness.