User reviews

Fans of Myst and Oblivion will most likely enjoy this game. It's immersive, dark, and dreary. The gameplay is heavy on puzzles, character dialogue is well developed, but running is neither necessary nor an option. As far as I got, it would work just as well as a point-and-click.

If you like to look around as opposed to tearing through the game at hyper speed, this title is NOT for you. Every disturbing image--and there are plenty--costs you insanity points. What this does is make the screen pulse, especially when you are looking at enemies. By Chapter 3 this made the game unplayable for me personally. I've never got sick to my stomach from a game before, and sadly it was not for a good reason.

Another thing that the insanity score will do is slow down your character's movement speed. Yes, it's a great thing to experience the first few times it happens, but after that it makes the game extremely tedious.

I'm currently rating this title a 7/10 for the initial story, ambiance, level of immersion and the novel approach to interacting with the game world. There is no HUD, so very little is left to remind you of the separation between you and the crazy world which you just entered.

Unfortunately, some of the puzzles feel too contrived to be enjoyable...and this breaks the flow of the game. When it comes down to stepping on exactly the right pixel at the right time, the game ceases to be fun.

If you like shoot-'em-up atmospheric horror, check out The Suffering.

I will be watching a playthrough of this game, and when I'm done I will update my review.

This game is great! And by a secure margin, it's better than 99% of adaptations of Lovecraft's stories to the cinema...

And I don't have even finished it yet...

For nowadays kind of game, the Graphics aren't the best, of course, this one is from 2005...

But even that can't ruin the game, it's tense, and frightening.

But it requires full working brain to finish without any walk-through, but I can't say if you will finish it with your brain intact... :)

This is a must if you ever wanted to play a great tense movie, ops, game :)

I'm not a big horror fan but when i played this game i was committed to beating it and i did. the first part of the game builds up the tensions where you explore and chat with some locals or minor characters with no trouble but eventually you have to run for your life. at first you are running, hiding from the enemies since you are unarmed, plenty of creepy moments and jump scares to really get your blood going, eventually you find weapons that help you out. Lots of reading and puzzle solving to get you to the next areas and some running sequences that annoyed me at times but got through them. Plenty of disturbing images which help the flow of the horror game. This isn't just some straight shoot em up, at least not at first an a good challenging aspect is the lack of a HUD you must manage your ammo and health status. I can't give this game a 10 since there are some game breaking bugs that will force you to restart the game as i had to a couple of times where i got half way thru the game and i had to restart or the game file gets corrupted

Overall i would recommend this game for survival horror enthusiast

I started playing this game about one week ago, and all I can say is that I can't get my hands of this true master-piece. Why do I call it a master-piece? That is very simple. If you have read Lovecraft, you know that while you read, you feel in certain way. Of course, the game makes you feel the same, and if I dare say, even more. It is a FPS(first person shooter)-horror-adventure. It combines these genres perfectly, because being a FPS you feel "in the skin" of the character (detective Jack Walters), so the feeling is much more intense, unlike the third person games, where you are not affected directly because you can see the character, so the relationship between you and your "puppet" is a little distant. So, the first-person view increases the horror feeling and not only. Another interesting aspect is the fact that when you are hurt, you don't just use a med-pack. No...here, for each type of wound, you have a special type of medicine. This is a first-time, because, until now, you used a med-kit, and you were at 100% again. A little inconvenient is the fact that you can't run. The graphics is special, and even it doesn't look like the latest games, it is decent, and I can say that this type of graphics fits perfectly with the game. One advice: PLAY it, because it is unique, a true Lovecraftian experience.

But before we get into the content of the game itself, let me say that this game has the most unique gameplay of any recent FPS and could even be classified as a revolution. People who are not into Lovecraft may find the story and ending a bit strange since this title only covers a small portion of the Cthulu world but people who have already read Lovecraft's works may be familiar with the story. There has been no game with such high production values for a long time. The major weakness of this game is in the nonexistent lip syncing, which could have been much better given the amount of dialog in the game and its very difficult to make out what people are daying without reading the subtitles. There are also plenty of bugs in this game which affect gameplay often.