Developed Big Bad Wolf who also did the episodic, cult adventure The Council and Vampire: The Masquerade Swansong, both of which I really liked, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss pretty much leapt on my radar as soon as it was announced and so it naturally follows that I would look forward to seeing just how well its take on Lovecraftian legend would fare.
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss PS5 Review
Unlike many of the more recent video game adaptations that have adapted the sprawling Cthulhu mythology, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss eschews the more typical early 20th century settings for something altogether more futuristic. The year is 2053 and with the Earth’s natural surface resources all but exhausted, a powerful mining conglomerate by the name of Ocean-I has established a deep-sea facility within the darkness of the Pacific Abyss.
After contact is predictably lost with the Ocean-I facility (it usually goes that kinda way in these things), an Interpol-backed organisation called Ancile with a specialism in occult investigations is tasked with both locating the station’s missing CEO, Andrew Marsh, and uncovering just what the heck happened to the facility, given that occult-flavoured foul play is suspected. As Noah, a member of Ancile with a somewhat chequered past, you are thrust into a frenzied search for a missing colleague who may have been involved in the deep sea expedition and, as you can probably guess, it’s pretty much off to the races from there because what follows is a whole lotta investigation, clue finding, deductions and madness. Y’know, all the usual ingredients of any decent Cthulhu adventure worth its salt.
Taking place from an Unreal Engine 5 powered first-person perspective, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is a detective game through and through. It’s all about combing every inch of the scenery to read journals, tablet screens, scribbled notes and listen to audio recordings in order to discover clues to create logical deductions that can, in turn, solve puzzles. Helping you in the endeavour is ‘Key’, a friendly AI that sits in Noah’s cybernetically augmented brain and is owned by the organisation, Ancile, that employs him. Key aids your investigative instincts by providing you with ‘The Vault’ a virtual mind palace of sorts where you assemble all of your clues and attempt to draw connections between them. Put simply, if you’ve played any of Frogware’s really rather decent Sherlock Holmes titles, you’ll have a fair idea about what to expect here – no combat, just plenty of sleuthing.
To help you in your detecting however is an in-built sonar that Key provides, allowing you to spend energy to absorb the properties of a given object and then subsequently ping the environment for more of it, or, combine multiple sonar item types to find very specific items in order to help you along in your investigation. It’s worth noting too that the energy used to do this is not infinite and must be replenished either by harvesting certain types of biology, or by triggering ‘evolutions’ through progressing the game which can provide additional energy replenishment bonuses and buffs of that ilk. And certainly, if you’re a fan of detective games as I am, the various clues and deductions that you’ll have to make in Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss are actually pretty well judged and appropriately challenging for the most part without veering into the sort of obliqueness that this Lovecraftian so often invites.
Of course, this being a Cthulhu joint, corruption by the Old Ones plays a large role and this manifests itself in a number of ways, functionally speaking. Not only do you get all the usual hallucinations, nightmares and generally bad vibes that one would normally experience after a brush with the Old Ones, but so too can being exposed to various relics and runes also produce a similar effect. In Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss however, the level of corruption you can accumulate not only opens and closes various avenues in the narrative, but so too can it also lead to a variety of different endings as well, lending Big Bad Wolf’s latest offering the sort of replay value one would usually expect from their output.
Happily, I can also report that Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is absolutely dripping with atmosphere too. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, Big Bad Wolf has made the most of Epic’s technical toolset to breathe life into its various spooky locales and scenarios. From houses filled with floors of untidy rooms and cultic graffiti, through to sprawling underwater bases, otherworldly ruins and other places I won’t spoil here, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss absolutely looks the part and arguably does a pretty decent job of encapsulating that Cthulhu aesthetic throughout its duration. Indeed, there’s almost this whole Event Horizon vibe threaded through the whole affair, as you discover more and more twisted messages from crew members that have been to the other side of our reality and seen things that have utterly hewn the sanity from their minds, as yourself also find your sanity slipping into the titular cosmic abyss.
Put simply then, if you’re looking for more action in your Lovecraftian, video game wanderings, you’ll likely be better served by the likes of The Sinking City, its upcoming sequel or the imminently upcoming The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu. Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, much like the previous efforts from developer Big Bad Wolf continue that studio’s particular penchant of offering slower, more intellectually infused adventures to the player that rely more on your grey matter, rather than the twitch of your trigger finger.
However, as much as I did enjoy Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss on its own merits as a compelling investigative romp across Lovecraftian mythology, it’s also true that the game is in need of a whole chunk of additional polish. Starting with the visuals, though the Unreal Engine 5 powered grim wonders of Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss are frequently easy on the eyes, the framerate which underpins it all sadly isn’t. You get two modes here as you might well expect, Quality and Performance, both of which do pretty much what you would expect them to do, however it’s the latter mode that seemingly suffers a lot here.
Not only is the frame rate in Performance mode on PS5 Pro extremely variable, but whenever you use your sonar ability to ping the environment (which is often), the frame rate falls through the floor (I’m not sure to what specific numbers exactly, but it feels like 20-30 FPS) and is massively jarring to say the least. Quality mode on the other hand aims for 30 FPS and most hits that target, but is also subject to many random dips and of course larger drop offs when the sonar ability is triggered. With no real obvious PS5 Pro enhancements and a subpar level of performance, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss arguably should have stayed in development for longer to iron out these issues.
Speaking of issues, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss also has more than its fair share of bugs, glitches and technical maladies beyond its madly fluctuating visual performance. In one instance, I could reach through a solidly shut window and read some documents on the other side that I shouldn’t have been able to read, while in another instance, whole staircases disappeared which prevented me from continuing, but could be remedied by simply reloading my game – not an ideal workaround, but still. There are so many of these little issues and technical annoyances that when taken in accumulation, they did affect my enjoyment of the game. This was a shame, not least because I massively dig the setting and think that performance issues aside, the visual design is pretty remarkable and true to its source material.
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss does ample justice to its grim source material, fashioning a compelling investigative adventure which generously drips with atmosphere but one which is sadly somewhat undercut by a wealth of technical issues that take the sheen otherwise what is a highly enjoyable Lovecraftian romp.
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is out now on PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.