Lovecraft's Untold Stories

Being a HPL reader myself, I really liked the atmosphere, music and story. Nice Cthulhu mythos all over the game. Gameplay was pretty straightforward with mouse and WASD. My BIG problem was a lack of saves.... After completing a round at 98% and wondering around, looking for some leftover loot, I died of a ground trap and reloaded at the beginning of the level. Sorry guys, but I'm too old for level replays

Imagine this. You spawn in a room, on top of some stairs. You can only move forward because the passage is narrow. As soon as you spawn you get rushed by melee monsters that block your only direction and start hitting you hard. Meanwhile, behind them, a tree thing outside your vision start machinegun firing dark energy orbs. Those inflict damage, a stun that makes you move even slower, and a sanity DOT. If you have something that lets you move faster, you can maybe get out of there and in the open. Too bad the whole area's covered with an absurd amount of obstacles; some of them just block you, other inflict even more negative status just for good measure. Now imagine an entire floor where this kind of situation repeats every 4 or 5 rooms. If that sounds like fun to you, or you you're one of those "iT's A rOgUeLiTe" guys, then I highly recommend you play this game. But for me, my patience has dried. Good riddance.

Lovecraft's Untold Stories Diabolo seems inspired by the games Diabolo, Gauntled and Alone in the Dark. This may sound very promising but unfortunately I found the game rather disappointing. Mainly because the shooter-elements are strongly dominating over role-playing- and adventure-elements and the quality of the puzzles and the story seem neglected. It provides a couple of hours of nice 2d-shooter-entertainment but after that it soon becomes boring and frustrating. The 16-bit-retro-look is neat, the soundtrack is good. That's all there is to be said from my side.

I got this game for free and was really excited about it. The idea of getting to play with different investigators that have different abilities and have different options for reacting to events depending on who you are playing while engaging with Lovecraftian themes seems like it should make for a pretty entertaining game. Slap on different ailments that require different cures and items that can make you immune to said ailments and you should be headed towards more than a mindless point and shoot game. The problem is the balance a mangled mess. Many "minievents" lead to massive sanity damage it is not uncommon to end up near self terminating crazy after just one. Chocolate bars heal sanity however they are rare, expensive, and may or may not be bugged as they don't always seem to work. That said I haven't actually had a game over due to sanity. The reason for that is that enemies are olympic level sprinters and hit hard as freight train. To make matters worse rooms are often full damaging tiles and assorted stage objects you cant pass through making it really easy to get cornered and slaughtered. Did I mention some monsters explode on death? So how does one fix damage? there are 3 types of health restoring items which isnt so bad unless you need to remove a negative effect such as bleeding, poison, a curse, or parasites which all require separate items to cure. Inventory space is quite small and likely to be taken up by items you want to sell in a desperate attempt to get enough money for the ludicrously over priced item you need or items that you dont need for this level but might need for the next. Finally I'm not sure the difficulty settings actually change anything. I want to like this game but it seems like it just wants to give me the finger.

The first couple of areas are fun, gloomy, atmospheric and lore focused. Really was having a good time and then something flipped and it just became a frustration cycle. There are so many cheap ways to lose health, from pods of enemies that will attach to you and take up stamina to inflict status effects to random fists that drop down and stun you. Rooms you should be able to manage but pile on the status effects (watch out for ice, you're pretty much done if you get frozen by a mob). Landmines. And some hallways will be so tight it's completely unavoidable. So you die. Over and over. It's like the game's entire goal is to infurirate. I gave this one too much of my time, moving on .