Great visuals and an investigation system that rewards you for paying attention make Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss an enjoyable experience.
I’ve played a lot of Lovecraftian games over the years, from the classic Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, to more modern entries like The Sinking City, as well as plenty of bizarre ones in between. Very few of them manage to get the whole madness element of Cthulhu and the old gods completely right, as it’s such a difficult thing to transition into a medium like video games. Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss suffers in the same way, but there’s a visually glorious investigative adventure to enjoy here, and I had a very good time playing through it.
You play as Noah, a man who works for an agency that researches strange and occult phenomena. On an investigation with your partner Else into the disappearance of another agent, you find that said agent has been conducting their own research, which has driven them mad and caused them to open a rift to another reality. After suffering serious injuries and only barely escaping, your recovery is interrupted by you being informed that the artefacts involved in that research match those discovered in a now abandoned undersea research centre. So off you go to find out just what the hell is going on, and where the hell that other reality is.
The overall narrative is really quite engaging, with you finding out what the people in this sea base were working on, and where they ended up. You’ll find tons of logs, objects, and scrawled notes that fill in how different people were affected by what they were doing, and you can really put together how the systems down here worked. If there’s one thing that stood out though, it’s why on Earth was Noah sent to investigate this on his own?! Is there no one else at the agency? Considering they seem to have access to equipment to get him there safely in the first place, you’d think they could afford some backup. As odd as that seems, Noah isn’t completely alone, as his AI companion Key will assist him in his investigation, as well as try to maintain his mental state.
When it comes to actual gameplay, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is an investigative exploration game first and foremost. Each chapter will have an overall goal, mostly around gaining access to an area the researchers went to. This is rarely as simple as booting open a door of course, and tends to involve you finding and manipulating various artefacts in some way. The twist here is that most chapters have more than one way of solving their overall puzzle. One of these will increase your corruption level more rapidly, whilst the other will slow it. Your level of corruption at the end of the game will determine the ending, of which there are six, you will get. Whilst I haven’t seen all six endings, the more corruption you have, the darker your ending will be.
Finding the solutions to a puzzle will involve you finding and reading a great deal of those logs, as well as esoteric objects, and human or otherwise remains. As you find these, they’ll be added to your vault, with some of them posing questions that you can answer by attaching an appropriate piece of evidence you have found. By engaging with this, and reading carefully, you’ll figure out what the solution to a puzzle is. Often though, by being very diligent, you’ll figure out which solution would be better for your corruption level. I really enjoyed this, and found trying to work out which people’s logs were following a more dangerous path to be very engaging.
If you’re someone who doesn’t like reading text in games, then this is absolutely not for you though! There’s reams of information to sift through, and you’ll need to use the vault to arrange evidence in ways that make it easier for you to navigate. There’s a fairly solid hint system through Key though, that can guide you if you’re utterly stuck, so you’ve got back up if you need it.
An issue I came across is that some interactive items can be a little hard to spot as the environments are pretty cluttered. Thankfully, the devs gave you a neat sonar system that allows you to locate items, as well as find your way through dark areas. This isn’t like an Arkham Asylum detective vision that practically solves problems for you. Instead, you need to find items and analyse them to find what they are made of. This material is then added to your sonar and when you equip that material to the sonar, activating it will reveal items that contain that material. This leans strongly into the problem solving you’ll need to engage with. If you need to find a dead creature that still has its scales, if you find and analyse something with scales on it, your sonar will help you find what you’re looking for. It’s a neat system that made me feel smart when I managed to solve a problem.
You’ve got a few more systems as well that reward exploration. Analysis requires increasing corruption if you don’t have enough energy, so searching for energy-giving growths helps you lean towards a better ending. There’s also an evolution system that grants your perks when you find special eldritch markers. I didn’t really feel I needed to engage too strongly with the latter, as I tended to find enough energy around to get by and the perks didn’t offer a huge amount of benefit. Perhaps I just didn’t manage to find any good ones!
So, I really enjoyed the gameplay, and this was boosted by a strong presentation too. The visuals are excellent for the most part, and this is one of those games that makes good use of Unreal Engine 5. Environments look fantastic, with lots of detail and great use of lighting for not just ambiance, but also highlighting where you should go. I wish there was more time spent underwater in the research base, as the visuals there were genuinely uncomfortable. Character models are mostly very good too. I was genuinely impressed during one of the early cutscenes when you and your partner end up in another world thanks to how good the models and animation were. There are a few cases where this is less impressive, with some of the creature models looking a little goofy, and another character, Andrew, feeling a bit too uncanny, but they aren’t really on screen very long.
Then there’s the sound, which is equally strong. There’s limited music, only really being used to punctuate scenes, but the sound effects are used very well. Ambient sound in caverns and huge otherworldly expenses do well to sell the experience. Throw in strong voice acting too and you’ve got a winner. There’s an odd issue with some characters being able to speak to each other normally in spite of being several rooms away, and it’s only thanks to the subtitles that I knew what was being said whilst Noah was chatting away quite happily, but that’s a minor gripe.
Other little gripes are that there are a couple of bugs here and there. Nothing major, but there’s an irritating one when climbing out of water in some spots where after the animation completes you drop straight back into the water. It’s a little thing and you just find another place to mantle out, but it’s annoying nonetheless. Aside from that and the occasional visual glitch, this is very well put together and tested.
The biggest missed opportunity is the lack of horror though. Yes, cosmic horror isn’t jump scares and violence, but I didn’t really feel all that threatened or uncomfortable. Yes, you can die in places, but you’re warned that you’re putting yourself in peril and that you should back up. I appreciate that this is a puzzle game rather than an action game, so horror is trickier, but those early sections swimming around the sea base made me feel really uneasy. That’s lost fairly quickly after that chapter. As I mentioned earlier though, getting cosmic horror and madness right is very hard in a video game, so maybe I’m expecting a lot.
Regardless, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is a very well put together investigation game with a great story and investigation system. Those visuals and sound give you something of a complete package, and so long as you’re not looking for a terrifying horror game, fans of the mythos will probably have a good time.
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is available now on PC, Xbox, and Playstation.
