Call of the Elder Gods Review: Incredible Puzzles Save This Bland Eldritch Story

Many cosmic horror games are dark, sinister affairs where madness takes center stage. It’s natural, given the cursed subject matter. However, 2020’s Call of the Sea wasn’t exclusively a tentacle-laden nightmare, as it was merely an eldritch-tinted puzzle game that had vibrant colors and centered around a woman searching for her loving husband. Its sequel, Call of the Elder Gods, has a more openly Lovecraftian name, but is still just as refreshingly lush as its forebear. Although its cheery palette and excellent puzzles are paired with a dull story that somehow manages to make Cthulhu mythos boring.

Call of the Elder Gods is predominantly a puzzle game, so it’s a huge relief they are the best part of the experience. Almost every contraption in the game gives players a decently sized environment to explore in order to gather context clues and notes, many of which also neatly double as bits of lore. Players are forced to explore around and gather evidence in order to piece it all together.

Rating: 3/5

Call of the Elder Gods‘ Puzzles Are Rewarding to Piece Together

Solving these puzzles is a multistep endeavor that unfolds gradually and is often overwhelming in the early phases. It has a nifty journal that thankfully cuts right to the point with its abbreviated note summaries, yet it is still a lot to keep track of. But right as it starts to be too much, pieces start clicking into place and slowly reveal the bigger picture.

This act of comparing different notes, using the process of elimination, reading between the lines, and coming to a crucial revelation is often illuminating and is the lifeblood of any quality puzzle game. So many of its elaborate riddles require a fulfilling amount of critical thinking and reward careful players who pay attention. Solutions are too complicated to be brute forced, too. And thankfully, it does all this without talking down to or patronizing players; there are no sidekicks that constantly spout unneeded hints.

It is exhilarating to assemble all the clues, hit the appropriate button to confirm it all, and watch the door unlock or path open up, something that is most notably felt with its expertly composed Egypt-themed puzzle around halfway in the game. This example is a particularly notable enigma since it is initially baffling before it slowly starts coming together, piece by satisfying piece. Call of the Elder Gods is rarely too vague, but the pause menu’s gradual hint system is helpful for the handful of times it is a tad bit too mysterious for its own good.

Call of the Elder Gods Has a Boring, Superfluous Story to Tell

Call of the Elder Gods tries to contextualize these puzzles within a wider story that picks up a few years after the original. Call of the Sea had more than its share of narrative faults, but was buoyed by the sweet relationship at its core. Protagonist Norah’s love for her husband and the tragic nature of her affliction were enough to give the game some semblance of a heart. 

Call of the Elder Gods has no such heart and falters when it tries to artificially insert one. This sequel follows Norah’s widower, Harry, and newcomer, Evie, the daughter of the mechanic from Harry’s off-screen expedition from the first game.

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While well-acted, both characters are flawed from the jump. Harry is not deep enough to carry a game when his connection to Norah has been forcibly severed. He rarely seems more than a German translator for most of the story and doesn’t have any sort of arc or complexity. When the first game was so predicated on his relationship with Norah, it’s odd and disappointing how Call of the Elder Gods refuses to engage much with Harry’s loss and how that has changed him. If Norah wasn’t the overly chatty narrator, it would be easy to forget she even existed.

Evie is charming, yet she is mostly dragged down by the game’s ill-conceived decision to tie her to a nearly faceless character from Call of the Sea. Call of the Elder Gods’ attempts to retroactively inflate her father’s importance is laughable since it feels like a desperate way to try and mine the original for cheap emotional connections. Her father Frank wasn’t nearly important enough to mean anything to players and therefore the moments Evie feels sad about him don’t translate.

Call of the Elder Gods Ends on a Bad Cliffhanger

This disconnect is particularly egregious during the game’s terrible ending where he is poorly utilized during a sequence that is ridiculous even by Lovecraftian standards. It spends most of its time before that finale blandly following artifacts with very little human connection or soul — a disheartening twist of fate, given its predecessor’s heart — only to arrive at a disorienting ending that has the gall to leave off on a cliffhanger. When combined with the on-the-nose, “tell, don’t show” dialogue — players don’t need to be directly told an obviously villainous man flinging extra venom at a Black woman while working with Nazis is a racist — it becomes clear how troubled Call of the Elder Gods’ story is and how much it squanders the potential of its world. It is at least often a beautifully stylized world, though, with an appealing painterly aesthetic and a couple solid otherworldly vistas (although, admittedly, not enough of them).

Call of the Elder Gods likely should have just cut clean from the last game and starred new characters, but that wouldn’t have solved all (or even most) of its issues; its dialogue style, for example, would still have to be completely rethought. And while its narrative troubles are ever-present like a massive Elder God lingering on the horizon, its puzzles are wonderfully constructed enough to more or less make up for a vast majority of its glaring flaws. It’s silly how the puzzles are the best part of a Cthulhu-adjacent game and all the Cthulhu-adjacent elements are lackluster. Somehow that’s Call of the Elder Gods trickiest puzzle.

A PS5 copy of Call of the Elder Gods was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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