Chronicle of Innsmouth

Chronicle of Innsmouth is a point-and-click adventure game about Lovecraftian horror. For those not in the know, point-and-click adventure games are not exactly what you might think of when you hear the word “adventure”. The pointing and clicking is accurate, you'll be doing a lot of that. Basically you wander around clicking on things, picking up objects, and using them on other objects in various ways. Really, they're more like a puzzle game, but someone back in the eighties called them adventure games and the name stuck.

If you've never heard of H.P. Lovecraft and his brand of cosmic horror, well, the short version is that it explores a fear of beings so alien and so far beyond our comprehension that to witness them is to go mad. There's a bit more to it than that, but if you're interested, you can find a lot of his short stories online for free.

The story of this game is that you're travelling through the countryside, on your way to Arkham for business when you hear some strange rumours surrounding a small town called Innsmouth that doesn't appear on any maps. Having no sense of self-preservation, you decide to investigate, since it's on the way. Of course, there's plenty of obstacles in your way, from finding a place to stay for the night to getting a pen that works. Sorry, that sounds pretty boring, but it's not really boring.

It's not great either though. Most of the puzzle solving is pretty basic and uninspired. The original point-and-click adventure games of the 90s had interesting objects used in interesting ways. Okay, sometimes that made them impossible to solve, but let's not get into that here.

Speaking of impossible to solve though, I have to mention two very poorly made puzzles in this game. The first is you need a bottle of wine that a nun is drinking. If you talk to her, she'll tell you to go away and leave her to her drinking. To solve this puzzle, you need to talk to her several times in the same way. You say the same dialogue to her, and she responds with the same dialogue. In any other video game that means one thing: you're not getting anything further from talking to this person. But in this video game, you have to do this, I think, about 4 times before you get the desired response. And there is no hint in the game of how to do it, no reason to think it would work. By all rules of fair play, it shouldn't work. The only sensible way to solve this puzzle is to go online and read the walkthrough.

A good game shouldn't require a walkthrough, in my opinion. With a few exceptions. Sometimes you just can't be bothered, and you want to get on with the rest of the game. But when you do check out a walkthrough it should be the sort of thing where you slap your forehead and say “Of course!” Or maybe “Wow, I never would have made that connection.”. But you should be able to piece together how that problem was solvable. This one wasn't. I don't know who wrote the walkthrough, either the makers of the game or some poor, extremely frustrated player clicking the same dialogue over and over hoping for a different response.

Wow, I really went on a rant there. Okay, I'll try to wrap this up quickly. There's another unsolvable puzzle, and this one is even worse. I looked up the walkthrough for this one and I still couldn't get it to work. You need to eavesdrop on a conversation, but the game doesn't tell you that. And if you get close, you're forced out of the area. The trick is, you need to hide behind a couple of items. But they don't actually obscure the speaker's view of you, just the player's view, so it doesn't actually make sense. But that's not the real problem, the real problem is, you're only given seconds to hide and you have to hide in a very specific spot, and it doesn't tell you where that spot is. You have to guess. So, you walk into the room, click behind the totem pole, hope for the best, and are then ushered out of the room. Again and again and again. If you didn't know that was what you were supposed to be doing, it would be completely impossible. Even as it was, I could not find the safe area behind this stupid totem pole. I must have spent an hour just trying to get through that obstacle.

Then I gave up. It was just too many problems, not enough good stuff. Not clever enough, not funny enough, not playtested enough. 2/5 stars.