Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet

To get this out of the way, it still looks and sounds decent or even good. The story is generic Lovecraft shlock —there, I said it. You know what you're gettig right from the start as there is hardly anything original to it. To be fair, it might have been more interesting back when it was released. It also runs well on modern machines. So for those aspects, Shadow of the Comet receives two stars. But the actual game is terrible and I cannot excuse it with it being old. There's hardly ever any indication where to go or what to do. Or that something on the screen is interactable with the exception of items you can pick up; a lot of which are hidden behind not highlighted objects, though, so that kind of defeats the whole point. The puzzles themselves are either mindnumbingly simple or unfathomable and nothing in between. Most of those harder puzzles or "action" sequences – yes, they put those in the game despite its abysmal controls – are a frustrating exercise in trial and error, including frequent surprise deaths. On top of it, a lot of times things you need to progress only happen after you did something totally unrelated somewhere else without, again, any indication whatsoever why you cannot progress or what it is that you are trying to do to begin with. Overall, this feels more like a chore and the mediocre experience is not worth the effort at all.