Fans of the Cthulhu universe will be excited to know that the development of Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game seems to be proceeding well. The game is being developed by Cyanide, and in a recent interview with Official PlayStation Magazine UK (Issue 146, March 2018), the developers discussed some of the important aspects of the game including the sanity mechanic and how the phobias work in the game.
One of the very interesting parts about the sanity mechanic is that it affects the choices that players can make in the game, and may even determine what kind of ending players see in the game. Romain Wiart, the game’s lead level designer explains it as follows, “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.” Additionally, he goes on to state the game as a whole will take up to 12 to 15 hours to complete.
Wiart also goes on to discuss how the phobias in the game work, “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.” Overall, the game sounds really interesting so far and sounds like a faithful adaptation of the Lovecraftian mythology. Call of Cthulhu: The Video Game is set to release for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC in 2018.
