Call of the Sea

Call of the Sea is a first-person point-and-click adventure that tries to put a new spin on the Cthulhu mythos. With a colorful and vibrant art style, the game is unfortunately dragged down by clunky writing and questionable puzzle design.

It’s the 1930s and the protagonist is a white woman called Nora Everhart, who travels to a remote island in the Pacific in search of her husband, Harry. Harry was frustrated with his wife’s strange skin disease – which gives her some black spots – and decides to go search for a cure. One day, Nora receives a package detailing where Harry went to, an island southwest of Tahiti, and she decides to travel there and discover what happened to him.

Call of the Sea doesn’t make a great first impression. The game starts with a dream sequence – which is always a red flag, as they tend to be a narrative crutch – and as soon as Nora wakes up, the first words that come out of her mouth are cringeworthy in their blatant purpose of offering exposition: “Those horrible dreams again!” she cries and proceeds to explain things in such detail that it would have been much less awkward to just break the fourth wall and address the player directly, “I’ve had them repeatedly ever since my mother died and left me that music box in her will,” she says to herself, alone in the room. Maybe she didn’t say that and we are only hearing her thoughts, sure, but that doesn’t help the situation in the slightest.

And Nora doesn’t stop there, because there are more details the player should know about: “Harry always said that old family heirloom had something to do with my family’s strange disease. That’s why you took it with you when you left, isn’t it? Almost a year ago,” she says and then begins to imitate him, “If the doctors won’t give us an answer about your illness, I’ll search for one myself.” It’s a clunky opening that makes Nora sound insane: the right answer to the question “why is she thinking/saying all those things”, after all, is simply “so the player can know about them.”

What makes this even more mindboggling is the fact that Nora has a diary, which can be accessed with the press of a button. All these details could have been stored there, leaving Nora the room to think and act like a normal person. But it seems that developers were afraid the player was not going to bother with the diary, as they make Nora frequently repeat out loud everything that is written there – which, in turn, renders it completely useless.

In the prologue, for example, the player can access the diary to discover some details about Harry’s expedition. It says that he traveled far and wide to search for a cure for Nora’s illness, that one day his letters suddenly stopped arriving, that he sailed from San Francisco to Tahiti, and finally proceeded to a mysterious island feared by the locals. So, as soon as Chapter 1 begins and Nora is on a boat in course to the very same island – and it’s funny that she doesn’t seem to be rowing and yet the boat is still moving directly there – this is said out loud:

“You left a year ago to search for a cure for my affliction. The letters kept me close to you, but suddenly they stopped coming. What happened, old pal? What did you find? Whatever it was, it led you to hire a crew and set sail in San Francisco to Tahiti, and from there to this place. An island in the middle of the pacific that the locals refuse to even name.”

In other words, the game teaches you from the outset that one of its main features is pretty useless, despite treating it as an important thing, as Norma keeps writing in it, with the game framing her logs as a kind of collectible. And Nora will say “old pal” more times than Gatsby says “old sport”, which is saying something.

The problem is not even that she’s just repeating what is already written in the diary – although that is a problem – but that what she’s saying is, by itself, just pure, artificial exposition. And useless at that, too: if the player didn’t know Harry set sail from San Francisco, for example, they would still understand the story perfectly.

Call of the Sea’s story is very simple and yet it fails at what it attempts to do. Early on, Nora spots what appears to be Dagon, towering over the island in the distance. Add the statues of fish heads and murals depicting fish people scattered around the place and the game makes it clear to the player that it’s dealing with the Cthulhu Mythos. But the narrative tries to subvert it: instead of being horrified by the monsters and the island, Nora feels at home, sensing that she belongs there.

As with everything in the game, this is repeated often. Every chance she gets, Nora will wonder about how odd it is that the island feels safe to her despite its strange monuments; how she feels great there, free for the first time in her life. She tells us all those things all the time, but we still have to take her word for it because, at the same time, the murals on the island have pictures of human beings becoming slaves of the great ones. Nora feels free, but the lore is telling us that sea monsters will put shackles on her: it’s a contradiction that the narrative doesn’t even begin to touch upon. Coupled with some other issues – such as never making Nora’s disease appear painful, as she feels cured as soon as she steps foot on the island – this robs the final choice in the game of any dramatic force: one of the two options available for Nora still feels absurd to us despite all the “I feel great here” lines.

The dissonance between the player and Nora can be a constant thing if they choose to explore the environment out of the intended order. In Chapter 3, for example, you come across a tent with some pictures and a recording. Some words written behind one of the photos mention an “attack” to Harry’s crew, which prompts Nora to exclaim, worried: “An attack? What attack?!” The voice recording right next to it, then, explains in detail what happened in the attack, although Nora doesn’t react to that information. The dissonance comes if the player hears the recording before checking the picture, as Nora will keep ignoring the recording and being surprised by the note behind the photo. The opposite also happens: Nora may come across a piece of a puzzle and comment on how it’s just like the others – even though that is the first one you’ve encountered. This can happen often and it breaks immersion every single time, pulling the player right out of the game.

Call of the Sea functions as a point-and-click adventure, in which you control Nora in the first person and explore some environments in search of clues to solve a specific puzzle. There’s usually one big puzzle, with a lot of clues scattered around for you to find and for Nora to write in her journal. Then, with all the clues found, you go to the puzzle and try to figure out how they relate to each other: if the clues indicate the order you have to rotate things, for example, or if they show the shape of the thing you must build.

This puzzle design leads to some problems. The first one is the need to gather all the clues. You will often wonder if you are not cracking the puzzle because you are not seeing the link between the clues or if it’s because you don’t have all the information. This can lead you to sweep the whole area again for missing clues, which can be a real chore since Nora moves with the speed of a lazy paraplegic snail. Another issue with the act of searching for clues is that if you look at an important object and press the action button… nothing will happen. For Nora to react to the object you have to look at it from the right angle so an “eye” icon can appear over it. In other words, instead of the infamous “pixel hunting” that plagued many point-and-click adventures, Call of the Sea has a new “angle hunting” that is just as frustrating.

But let’s say that you have gathered all the clues. What do you do with them? Here Call of the Sea also presents some problems. Sometimes the clues just straight up give you the answer, showing the exact order you have to do things, which means that the puzzle amounted to nothing more than busywork; nothing more than collecting clues in the environment. But sometimes the clues are just the beginning: they are a bit cryptic, so you still have to figure out what they mean, while the fantastic nature of the puzzle produces a good sense of wonder. These are the best puzzles, like the last one in Chapter 3 about a huge “organ” built into a rock, but they are a rare find in Call of the Sea.

Finally, you also have the case in which the clues misdirect you. I won’t be surprised to discover that most people found the last puzzle of Chapter 4 the most difficult in the game by a good margin. After all, it’s not their fault: the clues clearly direct you to the importance of joining symbols to form words, and then moving a dial to form sentences, but that’s of no help at all. It’s as if the puzzle were about counting how many times the word “heart” appears in a single cutscene in Kingdom Hearts and the clues were explaining the seven possible metaphorical uses of the term in the game. The puzzle is actually quite simple, but the clues make things much more confusing than they need to be.

What Call of the Sea has going for it is its art style. Few people would associate Lovecraft’s work with cell-shaded graphics, bright colors, and a vibrant aesthetic, but since the narrative never leans into the horror aspect of some of its elements, it fits the overall mood of the game and make the more impressive environments stand out a bit more.

Call of the Sea may have some good ideas and impressive visuals, but its foundations are too shaky: the writing is clunky and the puzzle design is problematic, leaving the player with an unmemorable experience.

February 07, 2021.