Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss Review – Lovecraftian Puzzles and Goo

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is the latest Lovecraftian-themed game to hit the shelves, and while I can’t speak for its contemporaries, I have to imagine it stands towards the top of any ranking list, because it is, in many ways, an incredible experience. There’s a lot here for puzzle fans to love, there’s a little for horror fans to love, and woven through all of it is a narrative that doesn’t ever try to reinvent the wheel but is able to solidly execute and deliver a good payoff by the time you hit credits.

If you ever get there, that is. And that’s not to discredit your puzzling abilities, since the ‘difficulty’ level of Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is derived entirely from how tough you find its puzzles to be, and how many help modifiers you choose (or don’t choose) to use. The idea that you might not get there is just a recognition of the fact that you may hit multiple progression-blocking bugs along the way, as I did, that add hours to your playthrough if not almost force you to restart entirely.

That’s the unfortunate situation the game is in, at least at launch. It's pretty buggy, and while I'm hopeful those issues will be ironed out, there's a non-zero chance they'll be part of the game you buy at launch. The other unfortunate element for the game and developer Big Bad Wolf is that despite its stellar puzzles, it's by no means a perfect game, and falls short of being the kind of game that sticks with you after you've seen all seven chapters.

Cthulhu? More Like Goothulhu

Part of what had me interested in Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss and what drove me to try it out and ultimately include it in my Steam Next Fest round-up is how it presents as a horror game. Set in the fairly distant future of 2053, play as Noah, a member of an organization called Ancile. It's a secret organization specializing in investigating the occult, and the story kicks off when you, your partner Elsa, and an AI companion that is essentially a constant voice in your head called Key are trying to find out why one of your coworkers, Mei, has essentially disappeared.

You show up at her house by boat, and as the game starts tutorializing how all of its puzzle mechanics work, between how you keep track of clues and solve smaller queries in order to solve the bigger question you're currently facing, the eerie feeling that some great dark power is ever present starts to creep in. Between Mei's ramblings in voice recordings and hastily scratched notes, mixed with clear signs that something awful has happened and will happen again, mixed with some solid sound design, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is off and running right away by making you feel like the mind-warping god is ever so slightly starting to sink its tentacles into you.

You head to the basement, and you see concrete evidence of Cthulhu's presence and corruption by way of this brownish-green goo. That's not its official name, of course, but that's what it is. It's goo, and you see it everywhere; from Mei's basement to the very end of the game, Cthulhu's corruption and presence are felt, at least in part, through this goo.

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That would be fine if you felt that presence in other ways, or if there were simply more to the horror of it all. But that's where the way the game presents itself, and its actual adventuring and puzzling core are at odds. The Lovecraft of it all is just wrapping for what is a pretty good adventure game with some really intriguing puzzles to piece together, but it leaves more than a bit to be desired when it comes to trying to pay off any of the tension it builds up.

You don't have a traditional health bar, outside of falling to your death there are few actual threats to your person at any time, and with no survival elements to speak of outside of keeping your corruption bar at bay (which is also your non-traditional health bar), any tension the game is able to create in its early chapters thins out once you realize you have all the time in the world to explore and think on all of the clues you've found.

Which is all fine and well for an adventure game, but it cuts at the idea that you're supposed to feel a dark presence constantly trying to creep further into your mind. That could, in part, come down to how I ended up beating the game without ever exceeding the corruption threshold. The solutions I was drawn to, and the ways I always tried to move forward, always ended up being the ones that drove Cthulhu's corruption away, instead of pushing Noah deeper into the abyss.

If I had made different choices and Noah felt Cthulhu's corruption reach its peak, then perhaps more of what I'm missing out of the horror and atmosphere the game leads with would've stuck around through to the end in a stronger way. But it doesn't exactly feel like strong design for half of the experience players can have (there are two possible endings, Low Corruption and High Corruption) to be devoid of elements that make the experience stronger.

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I also don't believe this is a case of me having horror expectations, and Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss never pretending to be a horror game. You play as someone investigating the occult. The game really kicks off when you're sent thousands of leagues deep into the ocean to try and uncover why a group of miners working at this base built by someone with more money than sense have all disappeared. There's a steady stream of voice recordings, wall scratchings, notes, and ancient script that all point to the darkness and the madness that Cthulhu drives people towards through its machinations. And every new chapter involves you heading deeper into the ancient sunken city of R'lyeh, mostly by having to actually dive into dark waters that could hide all kinds of ancient terrors.

If all you knew about Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss were those few facts, you'd guess it was a horror game. But those are just the thin wrapping for what the game actually is, and while its core is incredibly solid, the two sides ultimately ended up clashing. Like finding sour cherry gummy candy inside a box of M&M's. Not bad by any means, but not what you expected.

For Fans of Puzzles and Tentacles

Putting aside how Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss presents as horror, when digging into what it actually is, which is an adventure puzzle game, once again, there is a lot to love here. There are a lot of really well put-together investigation mechanics that do a great job of making you feel like you're actually evaluating clues and doing some solid detective work that keep you constantly engaged and drive you to explore every space you walk or swim into with your finest comb.

It's mentally tiring in the best way for puzzle game fans, especially if you turn off all of the hand-holding modifiers that can make those puzzles easier. You see, difficulty levels in Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss are handled through several modifiers rather than pre-determined modes. There are two modes designed for you to choose from: Exploration and Investigation. Exploration, as the name suggests, is geared more towards allowing you to focus more on just exploring your environment, instead of worrying about certain elements of the puzzle solving. Investigation is the opposite, and it's the one I'd recommend if you are like me and love a good puzzle game.

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You don't have to choose either of those modes, though, since you can also adjust the five core modifiers to your own liking. My preference was not to use any of them (which is also what the 'Investigation' default mode is), and my experience was frankly better than I could've hoped. Solving each deduction was an incredible rush that made me want to keep combing over every detail, spending just as much time in menus as I did walking around R'lyeh.

Speaking of menus, this is where those investigation mechanics I've been talking up come in. You piece your way through all of the game's puzzles with the help of your Vault and your Sonar. Your Vault is a menu that can be organized in multiple ways, but the main way is via a mental map where you are (quite literally) connecting the dots to solve the larger investigation you're working on. Your Sonar is a device that can tell you where traces of different elements lie in your environment, helping you spot where other clues might be located that could help your investigation.

As you find clues, you'll analyze them to reveal their frequencies which is what lets you use the Sonar to track down other clues with traces of that frequency. But analyzing clues costs energy points, and if you run out of energy points, you can risk taking on a bit of corruption to analyze more clues. You can restore your energy points with this special orange juice you stick into your arm from these glowing mushrooms you find on walls, but there's a limited amount of them so you really have to explore to find them.

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All of this creates a really fun loop and risk/reward system. You have to be careful about which clues you choose to analyze since some of them won't really provide you with a great deal of useful information, and recognizing which clues are worth spending points on becomes its own skill by the end of the game. You're also constantly experimenting with your Sonar, not only to reveal other clues based on individual frequencies you've already discovered, but mixing and matching different frequencies to reveal what an individual frequency never could.

It's also critical to know that since there are two ways an investigation can be completed, either with the Low Corruption solution or the High Corruption solution, you don't have to puzzle out the meaning behind every clue. That both takes the weight off a bit if you're struggling to follow one thread while keeping you dialed in on paying attention to everything.

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You can pin clues to the left side of your screen so you don't have to enter the menu to reference them, which also makes them act as objective lists of sorts without the game ever actually telling you exactly where to go. And trying to scrounge more energy points encourages you to think more deeply about your environment, which also helps lead towards finding more clues, and on and on we go.

These extremely tight mechanics help keep the Lovecraftian wrapping to everything even more interesting, and it's where all of the fun in Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss can be found. This makes the bugs and a few other issues, beyond those already mentioned, even more of a shame.

Corrupted Save Files and Storytelling

It took me a little more than 18 hours to play through Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, according to Steam, but I can tell you that number should be closer to 15 if not less, since a good chunk of that time can be boiled down to replaying late-game chapters in order to try and get past a corrupted save file bug. After hitting a bug in Chapter 5, I was thankfully able to get past it, only to hit another in Chapter 6 that kept me in a room with no doors or windows.

Some clues that were tied directly to deductions wouldn't solve, despite connecting the correct clue, the game crashed on my PC multiple times, and the hands-down most annoying bug was one that kept a pulsing visual effect going long after it was supposed to have stopped.

Thankfully, entirely restarting Chapter 5 created a new save file, one that by the grace of Cthulhu wasn't corrupted, and I was able to move through to the end of the game without issue. But these bugs were more than just a slight annoyance, and while I've been told a patch is being pushed for launch that should iron them out, it's just worth noting that this game seems to be 'coming in hot,' to say the least.

Another element worth noting, though one that doesn't rank as highly as the lack of horror payoff, is a pretty odd decision when it comes to the game's story. At different points in the game, an option to talk to your AI companion Key will appear in the bottom left corner of the screen, but you have to be quick enough to spot and activate it. If not, you miss it, and you don't get to hear those lines.

Now, look. If they were really significant lines, surely the writers and narrative designers at Big Bad Wolf would have included them without hiding them behind a mini quick-time event. But when I rolled credits, I realized that all of those moments were incredibly informative for one of the main threads of the narrative. There's a particular element that is introduced quite literally within Noah and Elsa's opening lines, and if I had missed those moments, I know the ending would not have been as impactful or felt like a proper payoff for an arc that, once again, begins with the first few words your player character utters.

It's odd, to say the least, to place those moments somewhere in the game where players will likely miss them, and it feels like a bit of a disservice to one of the strengths in the game's story.

One last point with regard to something being a disservice, but there's an entire layer of mechanics and collectibles that you could just straight up ignore that have little to no bearing on your experience.

There's a whole string of Evolutions that are somehow capable of increasing Key's abilities in particular ways (which, Noah even hilariously admits at one point, "doesn't make sense"), and if you just stripped them from the game, it would be just fine. It wouldn't be any worse or better off without it, which is unfortunately a disservice to the rest of the game's mechanics, which are all very well put together.

Into the Abyss and Back Again

Overall, I cannot stress enough how much fun I had with the puzzle mechanics and adventure game core at the center of Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss. The caveat being that more hardcore puzzle fans will likely only really enjoy solving the puzzles without any of the helpful modifiers, in that sense, I can't recommend it enough if you're looking to spend a few hours solving some fun puzzles in a cool atmosphere.

It's unfortunate then that the atmosphere and several of the horror elements included aren't leaned into further, and that they remain a thin veil that ultimately feels like it didn't need to be there and could be replaced by almost anything else. Though the bugs and technical problems included at launch are definitely the most unfortunate bit.

But when it's all working as it should, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is an incredibly fun investigative adventure that puzzle fans should absolutely check out.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

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