Call of Cthulhu’s Main Path Will Take 12-15 Hours; Devs Explain How Sanity and Phobias Will Work

Alessio Palumbo

2018 should be an exciting year for Call of Cthulhu fans. There's The Sinking City by Frogwares, an open world investigation game inspired by Lovecraft's beloved mythos, due this year.

Meanwhile, Cyanide and Focus Home Interactive have been working on an adaption of the official Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, set to release for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2018.

Related Story Xbox Games With Gold Offers Call of Cthulhu and Classic Star Wars Battlefront in February

Cyanide's Romain Wiart, Lead Level Designer on Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game, was interviewed in the latest Official PlayStation Magazine UK (March 2018, issue 146). He described the in-game sanity mechanic and how it feeds into the game's length while adding that the main path should take between twelve and fifteen hours to complete.

It’s very simple. As in the novel or in the pen-and-paper RPG, your sanity will go down, so this will be the case in the game. So, the only control you have over it is a little gap of ‘sanity’. The better you manage it by making the right choices, the higher your sanity will be, you will remain in control of your will at the end of the game, so it will mainly affect the ending, whether you will have some choices or not and whether you will experience things or not. That’s how it works. At the end of the game you have several endings, but if your insanity grows you have less endings, less options because your character can’t make rational choices.

Choices affect the ending, but also some parts of the game. During missions, you can’t access certain paths because of your stamina creation, your skills, and your way of doing things. Your choices open ways and close others.

You can replay to find other ways, but you will experience the same story. It’s more the way you play because there are other things to discover.

If you go through the main way of doing it, about 12 to 15 hours, but there are many things to do, so it can be longer than that.

Of course, it wouldn't be Call of Cthulhu without the phobias and according to Wiart players will find all of them in the game, though they won't be experienced at once (thankfully).

You can have all the phobias. Yeah, you can experience all of them. Not at once, every setting of the area triggers one phobia at a time. So you can go, “Okay, I see the entrance space – no, I won’t go there, I’ll choose this because I prefer not to have a reminder of what happened before.”

Stay tuned for more coverage of Call of Cthulhu ahead of its release.

Alessio Palumbo Photo

About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.

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