Cthulhu: Cosmic Abyss Review (PC)

Detective games are becoming a bit of a trend lately. From smaller fare like Detective: Rainy Night to recent FMV title Hacked: The Streamer, it seems we’re not wanting for games that will push our inner Sherlock to solve the mystery. Cthulhu: Cosmic Abyss is another such game. Although, unlike those other examples, there is some proper detective work to do here and, as such, it can be quite tricky to get into.

We play as an agent named Noah, looking for an agent who has gone off the grid. Upon finding her hideout in some swampy marshes, he enters hoping to find at least some evidence of her fate – alive or dead. However, what he is instead confronted with is the beginning of an eldritch tale of sacrificial rituals, monsters, and the deep, dark sea. 

While the tale is fine enough, it will require work on the part of the player to discover it all. This comes in via the detective work we’ll need to do to survive. 

As we explore, we’re left to our own devices to find clues, figure out what we need to do to progress, and solve the mystery of what is going on. While the locales aren’t overly large, they can still hide plenty of small items of note, and finding them all – or at least the ones that are important – is going to take time and patience.

Noah has an AI companion that can help arrange clues and analyse certain items for specific signatures. These can then be ‘pulsed’ out to scan the environment for other similar items. This is very much a little hack to help players along – and is welcome – but the handholding pretty much stops there. We’re never explicitly told what it is we’re looking for, or where we should look. Exploring, taking notes, and utilising the map of clues in our menu is vital to keep track of what is going on. 

Which, in our opinion, results in a bit of a mixed bag of enjoyment. Starting out, it was quite entertaining to be let loose. Each new clue was a revelation towards progression, and linking the right clues in the clue map menu was satisfying. It really does pay to go through rooms with a fine toothcomb, opening drawers, reading emails, and inspecting piles of debris for hidden objects. 

And this would certainly make for a compelling experience for some, we’re sure. Hell, this should make for one for us. But despite being able to pin certain clues to the HUD and rearrange others to keep relevant threads together, we found it all too easy to lose the scent of our investigation and end up running around in circles.

Each of the levels has two options to progress; both a high and low corruption path. Corruption is Cthulhu’s influence on Noah, and ideally we want to keep it as low as possible. Using certain items and analysing clues increases corruption, and so we really need to focus on the low corruption path to keep it down. It’s not explicitly clear which of the threads we’re pulling at is which though. Our first foray into the game’s second chapter saw us trying to complete both paths simultaneously without realizing it. Again, it falls on the player to deduce which is likely to be which, and hope for the best.

Our bugbear comes in when it comes to keeping track of our progression. I’m often pulled in a few directions over the weeks and, after spending a few nights with Cthulhu: Cosmic Abyss, I had to put it down for a while to focus on other things. Coming back, I was completely lost as to what we were looking for, where we’d been, and with very little help getting going again it was tricky to find our footing once more. The easiest of the two difficulties does at least let our AI give us hints on what we need, but even with those we still need to find the actual items and clues, which can be tricky. On a few occasions, clues were frustratingly easy to overlook: a keycard on a desk that we’d walked past dozens of times turned out to be a critical item we needed, but it just looked like part of the set dressing.

Conclusion

Of course, this won’t be an issue for everyone, and if you’ve the time to commit to the mystery we think there is something compelling about Cthulhu: Cosmic Abyss. A game that isn’t afraid to let players muddle through it on their own is an idea to be lauded, and here there is a core mystery that will provide a compelling enough reason to continue if you can get into the rhythm of the puzzling.

This game was tested and reviewed on PC (via Steam). All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by the publisher.