Doom-haunted Call of Cthulhu game finally gets a release date

If you're partial to mountains of madness or things on doorsteps, this is your year. Cyanide's Call of Cthulhu adaptation will release on 30th October for PC, Xbox One and PS4, publisher Focus Home Interactive has announced.

Charmingly subtitled "The Official Video Game", the adaptation has had a rough time in development - it began life back in 2014 at Adventures of Sherlock Holmes studio Frogwares, known and feared for its teleporting Watson, only to fetch up in Cyanide's hands after a reported two years of inactivity. Of course, it won't be a proper HP Lovecraft adaptation unless everybody involved with the project vanishes in eerie circumstances save for a single QA tester who spends the rest of their days babbling about angles you can smell and colours you can taste.

I had a chance to see this at a Focus Home showcase a few months ago. The game stars private detective Edward Pierce, who travels to remote Darkwater Island near Boston, Massachussets to investigate the deaths of an entire family - and, presumably, stick it to any aeons-old tentacle beasts that happen to be in the neighbourhood.

As Pierce, you'll query mutinous locals about the deaths, examine documents for clues and do your best to avoid looking at/being looked at by anything that might kill you or drive you mad. Sanity is a mechanic in Call of Cthulhu, with all manner of unpleasant waking nightmare cropping up if you don't keep an eye on Pierce's mental faculties.

The game runs on Unreal Engine 4 and takes inspiration from the 1981 Call of Cthulhu boardgame rather than Lovecraft's original short story. I do hope it features something like the story's final scene, though.

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