Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss

This game is so utterly broken. Controls go on the fritz every few minutes and require restart. But you can't save your progress manually so you end up having to replay sections of the game. What a mess. How did it get released in this state?!

Great graphics, sound and voice acting. Many fantastic ideas and it is refreshing to play a Mythos adventure in the future as opposed to in the 30s, etc. However the protagonist is not the best, the investigation/mystery mechanics is annoying and tedious. The fact that there is no fighting what so ever and the poor delivery of aspects of the game and the shortness is quite disappointing. As well as the lack of research on the mythos (for example it was the Elder Gods that imprisoned Cthulhu, not the Yithians) makes the game also disappointing. Lastly the game is fairly buggy which is also frustrating. I wanted so much to like this game but I can not. Skip this one unless you have money to burn! Overall it gets the 5/10

I started playing the game a few days ago and everything was fine for about two hours. Then the game-breaking bugs started, and they haven't stopped. In order: - Stuck cursor: After closing the investigation menu, the cursor stayed on screen and locked me out of looking around or interacting with anything. Opening and closing menus, alt-tabbing, and switching to a controller all did nothing. Restarting fixed it, but the autosave dropped me back roughly 30 minutes. - Dead controller input: Back at the same point, I switched to an Xbox controller to see if I could dodge the cursor bug. After a few interactions and menu opens, the A button simply stopped working. Locked out of interacting again. - Can't jump: At one point my character just lost the ability to jump, which hard-blocked progression through a section. - Black screen on respawn: (Vague on purpose, no spoilers.) After dying and being returned to the station, my screen went completely black. Menus still worked. Nothing else did. - The void: Restarted again and loaded in floating in water inside an empty black void instead of at the station. Restarting put me back in the void. The pause menu's respawn option put me back in the void. That's where my save lives now, and that's where I've left it. I could keep restarting and brute-forcing my way through, but the autosave system is either broken or just badly placed, every restart costs me the better part of an hour. Losing that much progress repeatedly because of bugs is not my idea of a good time. And the part that makes this a hard no rather than a "wait for a patch": Big Bad Wolf is reportedly being shut down by Nacon as part of its insolvency, weeks after this shipped. If that holds, there is nobody left to fix any of this. Shame, because what I played of it before it fell apart, I was enjoying. Don't buy it in this state.

The game is broken and so is my heart. Game looks gorgeous, but the level of incomplete style of glitches is to a level hard for the most fumbling indie studio's. Wrong language, buttons not working, objectives not activating, the list is wide enough to fill the page.

The game is cool, if you enjoy Lovecraft then there's definitely a great story in there. That being said, I would argue that this game is almost unsolvable without some sort of guide or something, I can't imagine a regular person figuring out the non-corrupt path to the second last level of the game. Also the game constantly starts breaking and the controls stop working. Only way to fix that is by quitting out to the menu. Honestly, I'd have loved to enjoy this but I cannot find any reason to recommend it. Just watch an Youtube LP honestly.

The narrative unfolds through investigations, documents, environmental clues, and conversations with your AI companion. The story rewards attentive players and offers multiple endings influenced by your choices and corruption level. However, puzzle quality is inconsistent. Some challenges are clever and satisfying, while others become overly obscure or unnecessarily cumbersome. Inventory management and object interaction can also feel awkward at times. Built with [i]Unreal Engine 5[/i], the game delivers impressive environmental detail and striking architecture that captures the alien nature of [i]R'lyeh[/i]. The audio design deserves particular praise, using distant sounds, ambient effects, and subtle distortions to maintain tension. [b]Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss[/b] is one of the more ambitious [i]Lovecraft[/i]-inspired games in recent years. It succeeds as a detective-driven cosmic horror experience thanks to its oppressive atmosphere, compelling mystery, and strong investigative mechanics. Its technical shortcomings and occasionally frustrating puzzles keep it from greatness, but fans of slow-burn horror and narrative adventures will find plenty to admire. [h1]8.5/10[/h1] DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | GOOD | [b][u]GREAT[/u][/b] |AMAZING| MASTERPIECE [quote] Reviewed on: Win11 Home 64-bit, Intel i5-11600K, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB PRIME, 32GB DDR4-3600 RAM, 2 x Kingston NV1 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, Internet Broadband 1000/1000 Mbit[/quote] [quote] If you like this review, then please consider giving it a thumbs up. I've also reviewed other games that you might find interesting. If so please follow [u][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/27418263/] Top of the Chart.[/url][/u]

IGNORE THE REVIEWS Currently, it shows all reviews mixed and the recent ones mixed as well. Those are primarily from around the time that the game was initially released. The biggest complaint was bugs that broke the game, player being stuck places, or graphical errors, those kinds of things. All of those problems are gone. The biggest annoyance I observed was a small framerate drop in certain areas that had a ton of biological growth. That was it. SO, now that we've established that all the old reviews complaining about all of that garbage is in fact no longer relevant, let me attempt to tell you why you should play the game. Lovecraft meets future-ish technology and investigation. You play as this agent of some organization that does who knows what and you find out that one of your other agents was looking into some cultish stuff and it goes on from there. What progresses from there is an incredible storyline about Cthulu and some other space faring race and you following some other organization that was looking into some things. The puzzles of each location allows you to choose two pathways of corrupting you, and perceivably releasing Cthulu eventually, or solving it in a non-corrupt way that will allow you to stave off Cthulus influence and keep on going. The puzzles are not simple either, you've got to solve the dilemma, discover new information, think outside the box a bit, and it is all immensely satisfying. I had thought this would be like a survival horror game to an extent, similar to Alien Isolation or Outlast, but no, that isn't this. It's horror to some point but primarily investigative mystery and that's great. Took me about 12.4 hours to go through the game and I can't say that I would play it again, but it was an excellent story. Buy this game.

Atmosphere top notch. But the gameplay is just baaaaad. Just watch the story on YT!! Movement and interaction with environment is annoying and sluggish. Puzzles are nonsense and not thought through. And the investigation/deduction mechanic is simply so annoying stupid that i can't force myself to play it any further.

i keep returning to this game attempting to pass at least chapter 2 and finally did that however I once again was met with the game breaking bugs that have been mentioned in other reviews, broken cursor is one of the biggest ones though today I ran into a new one! my screen was zoomed in and I couldn't see any of the usual hub icons like my inventory, that was fixed by simply restarting the entire chapter but at that point its a waste of time! I honestly really like the game for its looks and potential but I can barely progress for having to fight of the bugs constantly!