Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet

Get past the clunky controls and opaque puzzles, and this classic Lovecraftian adventure is worth it for Illsmouth's damp, oppressive atmosphere alone. Even its unfriendliness feels less like a flaw and more like another piece of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Although it has an interesting story, it is unplayable due to the lack of information provided by the game for the player to navigate and know what they have to do, and I'm not talking about puzzles, I'm talking about the fact that mechanically the game only progresses if you do exactly one action but you have no clues to know that you should do that action. Additionally, my gameplay got stuck after I couldn't progress past a dialogue; there's only one correct answer, yet it marks all four options as incorrect.

I don't think it's a good adventure game. The game gives you zero feedback, e.g: you can't examine items in your inventory to figure out what they even are or might be used for, you must be standing in the exact correct spot to examine environment objects or nothing happens. The brooch didn't do anything when I used it before I needed to to progress. I've seen screenshots where other people have used it before then, I'm not sure if this is a bug. There are doorways that lead to death pits, you can't even examine them to see that there's anything wrong. Hope you saved before entering. Invisible death pits in the centre of several rooms. Rats kill you by touching you, I'm not sure why. They don't even seem to be eldritch rats or anything. I don't know what's with the spiders, their sprites look like something from an 8-bit game. It was bugging me trying to think what they looked like, I figured it out - the crab-type Space Invaders. Long pauses at the end of voice lines, and the voice lines often run on past the displayed dialogue so if you skip ahead it skips the following dialogue boxes for that line and fast forwards the entire conversation. A few moon logic puzzles, particularly the feather one and what I don't think is even a puzzle - walk around a random room for a minute until a secret door opens in the wall. There's absolutely no indication to do this. Hope you know which chemicals and order to use them in for the process for developing photographs, that's actually a puzzle. You only have about a 1/3500 chance of guessing it, so you'd better look it up. I got stuck in unwinnable states twice, once by using the book before getting the key for it, the game would not allow me to use the book again, had to reload and get the key first before looking at it. Second time was if Bishop walks off the screen without giving you a key, you are stuck in an unwinnable state with no idea that anything is actually wrong unless you look it up. I'm unclear as to what was supposed to be happening at the end of the Hambleton house. The protagonist started running but I had no idea what he was running from. Apparently there's supposed to be a fire? I didn't see anything. Maybe it's some kind of emulation error. The voice actors' attempts at eldritch gibbering are pretty amusing. I also liked that the cat runs around inside your inventory window. It occasionally looks quite nice, the cemetery at night particularly stood out to me. Other times it's some sort of digitized photograph background, it works sometimes, but I'm not really a fan of the effect overall. I'm pretty disappointed with it since I had heard positive things about it before. Excavation of Hob's Barrow is more like what I thought this game would be.

Напевно найцікавіший, і найважчий з огляду на вік гри квест у який я грав.Фанатам творчості Лавкрафта повинно сподобатись! Probably the most interesting, and the most difficult quest in view of the age of the game that I have played. Lovecraft fans should like it!

Хороший, короткий и старый квестик с корявым управлением, корявым расположением субтитров, но все равно его стоит пройти [spoiler]*Poor Parker... So young... And already in the next world...*[/spoiler]

If you like to take a nostalgic trip with hardcore point and click game with lots of ways to die and difficult puzzles, you might like it

Loved it. Completed it 100% without looking anything up. It's hard though, there are no easy puzzles and the most difficult ones will give you as little clues as humanly possible and no rule applies, so every puzzle requires a different logical approach. Some require different degrees of brute forcing, a common situation is being given incomplete instructions on how to perform something, so you have to figure out the obscure parts. The art, characters and soundtrack are all great. It's the best possible game for any seasoned old school adventurer that craves real challenge and likes Lovecraft. Avoid if you usually have to look at walkthrough to finish a point and click. This isn't technically a point and click though, as it can and should be played entirely with keyboard. Some minor bugs here and there, nothing game breaking but you could be forced to reload at times. Oh and save as frequently as possible, it's that kind of game. There are many ways to die and none to properly see it coming 10/10 chtulu old school adventure

┌──────────────────────── ∘°❉°∘ ────────────────────────┐ from the depths of oceanside the curios lapped through festering sanguine marbled layers upon reactions to visual expedience from adventuresome signs and similar visages written for the thrilling enjoyment of ambiguous genus from unfamiliar taxonomy a galore of trepid novel classics that cosmically pulls asunder from looming stars └──────────────────────── °∘❉∘° ────────────────────────┘ truely a classic of its era. mostly fully voice acted with inventory menu point and click adventure brilliant pixel art efforts deeply hindered by its visual timing programming audio offsets and long pauses break the immersion enough to want a fix, which there are none. perhaps alternates to dosbox may offer more "exact" style gameplay without it, we're left with the simplest efforts to playthrough accordingly, the floppy disk came first and the voice over additions really dont sync no matter what you attempt its either slow as beans or too fast, you can live with slow or ignore the long pauses not to say the game is without faults. infact there are some glaring issues, softlocks, moonlogic, even figuring out just what youre supposed to do. there are no hints in the game like many better adventure games which nudge you ex: "maybe you could do this" saving often is often a requirement for older games because you can die, softlock, or do progress out of order such said, to save my insanity, i use a walkthrough which may lack some more hilarious (save and die) trial and error bonus editions with a lore gallery museum and paper documents floppy disk & demos have differences from the full cd version pc98 japanese computer fully playable in dosbox-x or np2kai a vast library of mythos to pull ideas from, lovecraft still continues to proliferate ┏━━━ •◦இ•◦ ━━━┓ steamplay for 🐧 gnu/linux 🐧 boxtron -> 💾 dosbox-staging 💾 ┗━━━ •◦இ•◦ ━━━┛

A classic adventure game with a horror tale based heavily on the Cthulhu mythos, as evident from its title. Fans of the mythos will find some good fun in this title. However, in my opinion, the game is best played with a guide at hand for when you get stuck - because you will get stuck. There are a lot of puzzles that requires leaps of logic, and just as many that require trial and error. On top of that there are many times there is just no pointers to what you're supposed to do next to move the story along, so you just have to stumble upon it. This is not helped by the player's character, Mr. Parker, not giving his thoughts about almost anything, and when he finally does decide to comment on something it's usually not with any practical value for the sake of progression of the game or the story. Speaking of story, some of its elements feel a bit shoehorned in, or rushed, with certain dialogue options not even making any sense in their context. And the ending is surprisingly happy for cosmic horror. But all in all it's good fun. The graphics are quite nice, and for the most part I really like them. There are some things that are just hard to make out what is, though. Also, did they just digitize the faces of famous actors for the various characters? Though one or two of the animation sequences had more of a CDi Zelda feel to them, there's a lot of fun, rotoscoped animation used, which reminded me of The Last Express. There were some minor graphical glitches, where things that ought to have been transparent in image assets became dark red instead, but these things were few and far between, and didn't cause any actual problems. I assume these were probably related to the DOSBox emulation of the game. The audio of this game is one of its greatest strengths, in my opinion. The ambience and music pieces all work really, really well. The voice acting is also pretty good, with a couple exceptions - though the VA directing is sometimes lacking, as if the voice actors had to guess the context of each line, and getting it right only 80% of the time. And everyone that had to act out the various chants in unknown languages really gave it their all, absolutely hamming it up! All in all, there's a lot of fun to be had for fans of the Cthulhu mythos, or people into old school adventure games in general. The game plays a bit differently than you might be used to, not using the classic point & click system, but also not using a parser system. Instead you use either keyboard or mouse to choose a direction to walk in, and you equip items that Mr. Parker will automatically use when he's at the right spot. It's an interesting system, and you do get used to it quite quickly. But definitely have a guide at the ready. This is a game made for a time when you'd play a single adventure game for weeks or even months, slowly inching your way further through the game. And this might be the most cryptic of all old school adventure games I've played. Don't let that stop you from playing the game, just have that walkthrough at hand for whenever you get stuck. Took me about 9 hours to get through, though you can absolutely get through it much, much faster if you want to.

This game is one of the hardest and unforgiving adventure games I saw. So hard in fact that I first really enjoyed it on my second playtrough. If you look over the high difficulty demands this game puts on you you will find a brilliant adaption of the famous Lovecraft Story "Shadow over Innsmouth". This is from the same guys that were responsible for the first Alone in The Dark Games which are considered as one of the most influential genre changers in the world of survival horror.