The Innsmouth Case Review

Inspired by the oft-used world of H.P Lovecraft, The Innsmouth Case is a digital take on the choose your own adventure books of my youth. I’ve always had a fondness for this type of adventure, and the more I played Innsmouth, the more I wanted to see the different permutations. With 27 different endings in total to find there’s a good few hours content here, and all that I’ve seen so far has been nothing but utterly enjoyable.

We take the role of a private dete3ctive after he’s approached by a mysterious woman looking for her lost daughter. We’re immediately suspect of her true motives, but decide that we didn’t get complete an online course certificate in investigating to not use it and so we play along. The sultry damsel hands a photo of the girl with an address to bring her to should we find her, and tells us to head to Innsmouth to begin our search.

It’s this set-up that provides the springboard into the weird wonderful, and often funny tale of The Innsmouth Case. Presented entirely as words on the page of a book, it’s simply a case of reading along and occasionally making dialogue or directional choices. Sometimes these will simply fill in a bit more story or character, but more often than not they will be the catalyst for the tale to spin off in a wide number of ways. In just my first 4 play throughs I died of a heart attack, escaped the town successfully, got sacrificed to Cthulhu, and got ambushed in an alley. As mentioned there are 27 endings to find in all, and these are the tip if the iceberg in terms of potential outcomes.

It’s not just the end that is different; indeed, a simple choice can lead us to entirely new areas of the town, with new characters, options, and more to find. All of it is wittily written, packed with vivid imagery as well as more than a few pop culture references. Even after a long day of work, barely able to keep my eyes open I found myself captivated by the writing. Seeing as that is 99% of the game that’s to be expected I suppose, but even re-reading sections (that can be skipped entirely to get to the next choice with a single button press) was fun enough to keep me engaged.

It’s all words then, but there are some visual flourishes to accompany them. The residents of Innsmouth are all deformed, unique looking creatures, and what they lack in animation they make up for in style. The words are presented on a page as mentioned, but the book is shown laying on a table adorned by various objects that help give this world a bit more of a feel to it. Audio plays a key part too, with a great ambient track giving way to custom tunes at specific moments (listen out for the Boom! one in particular). This adds up to a surprisingly nice looking and sounding game considering we’re pretty much just reading throughout.

We can even go back after a run and select a specific chapter to continue on if we don’t fancy playing from the very beginning again, or to see the alternate outcomes in a specific area. It’s recommended that we don’t stop playing until we see the fade to black load screen and save icon, which initially had me concerned that it’d require a long session of play so as to avoid lost progress but in reality each chapter is only a matter of minutes long at most so this proved to be a non-issue.

In all honesty I’m struggling ot think of any reason that this might not be worth a recommend and I’m struggling. It might not be for everyone if you don’t fancy reading what amounts to a digital book, and very occasionally a failure or ending will come out of nowhere, but then that is kind of the idea of these types of games. Getting back to where we were might not be quite as easy as holding our thumb on the page before we commit to turning to a new one, but the chapter and area select is as good as we need really. Any other criticisms to me feel more like picking on something for the sake of it.

Conclusion

As you can hopefully tell, I very much enjoyed.  The Innsmouth Case. It’s easy to pick up and get into, full of interesting and witty writing, plenty of alternate routes and options, and even surprisingly decent in the audio/visual department. Fans of the choose your own adventure style books of old should absolutely be checking this one out.

This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox Series X/S. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.