Call of the Elder Gods Review - Bay of the Tentacle

Barely Magic Mike
18 hours ago
5 min read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhxQ_veoBqs

Those seeing the name Call of the Elder Gods without the familiar context of Out of the Blue Games’ 2020 predecessor, Call of the Sea, might think I'm reviewing a horror game today. And while it's an understandable mistake, in truth, this is as much a horror game as I am a ballerina. While both games in the franchise feature heavy inspiration from the Cthulhu mythos, the overarching tone features no outright horror at all, instead opting for a puzzle-focused globetrotting adventure with some hints of classic detective fiction sprinkled throughout. Let's call its vibe… Indiana Holmes.

You also don't need any familiarity with Call of the Sea to play Call of the Elder Gods, despite its status as a direct sequel. In what I consider to be a very smart choice, starting a new game allows you to toggle whether or not you've played the original. Despite having played Call of the Sea myself, I decided to opt in because it's been 5 years and my decrepit old memory ain't what it used to be. Accordingly, I was treated to some short-form summaries of the original game's plot whenever they became relevant, sprinkled in a way that felt completely natural. And though Call of the Sea is worth playing in and of itself if you like this kind of game, Call of the Elder Gods is such a substantial improvement that it would be hard to fault you for starting here.

Call of the Elder Gods begins in the shoes of Evangeline Drayton, who’s being haunted by a recurring dream where she’s drawn to a mysterious artifact. She's also, concerningly, missing a few months - having befallen a bizarre ailment where she was walking, talking, and interacting with those around her but retaining no memory of it. Plagued by the need to know more, she reaches out to Professor Harry Everhart of Miskatonic University, who’s having some bizarre visions of his own.

Players of Call of the Sea will recognize Everhart as a key character, albeit looking quite a bit older, given that this sequel takes place about three decades after the original. Despite the significant time jump, I was deeply impressed by the game's ability to meaningfully add to the original’s self-contained tale to the degree that I prefer this story. Call of the Sea was a solid game that I enjoyed more or less from beginning to end, but had pacing that could get sluggish, and was let down by the occasional lack of direction and slow traversal from place to place. While Elder Gods sticks quite closely to the gameplay template of its predecessor, it ironically manages a major jump in quality all the same. Out of the Blue Games have clearly honed their craft, and that improvement starts with the game's puzzles.

Call of the Elder Gods, like its predecessor, is overwhelmingly a puzzle game, with each chapter playing out like a narrative-focused escape room full of lore both critical to the gameplay and there just to add some flavor. But the variety of the puzzles is where Elder Gods shines. You'll have to translate bits of ancient languages, channel a strange black goop through water tanks in a fun twist on a Tower of Hanoi puzzle, and in what is arguably my favorite chapter, identify a group of cultists Golden Idol-style using a mix of environmental clues and handwritten notes of them gossiping about one another. Who knew doomsday cults could be so catty? Mreow! There are even puzzles that will require you to switch back and forth between Everhart and Drayton while they’re separated and use their unique perspectives to glean information the other needs. It’s a clever twist that adds a welcome extra layer of complexity.

While Call of the Sea typically spread puzzles across open areas that required some walking back and forth, Call of the Elder Gods keeps these mostly contained within small locations and is all the better for it. The focus is easily on the exploration and puzzle-solving itself, and it feels like there's substantially less slow-paced walking sim-tinted filler. All of the game’s puzzles felt near-perfectly tuned - difficult at times, and yet constantly pushing you to discover more details that would fill in the blanks. Thankfully, if you truly get stuck, an option in the start menu allows you to request hints, but goes into enough detail to more or less become a walkthrough. I found the difficulty reasonable enough to never have to pester this feature for most of the game, though admittedly one puzzle in Chapter 5 stumped me enough that I was thankful to get a kick in the right direction. I did still find some moments in Call of the Elder Gods where the walking speed felt sluggish and the pace slowed accordingly, but these tended to be brief enough to be easily forgivable.

Another major step up for Call of the Elder Gods is in its visuals. There's an obvious fidelity increase in its upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 to 5, and it looks damn impressive in that regard, but that's not even what I mean. From its very opening moments, Call of the Elder Gods’ art direction is stunning, with a wide variety of beautiful environments to traverse from an otherworldly jungle full of glowing mushrooms to an eerily quiet mansion in the middle of a thunderstorm. Every location, no matter how banal on paper, is a feast for the eyes and never looks the same as any place before or after it. This may seem like a small thing, but for a game that requires you to carefully traverse each environment for up to an hour at a time, making it this nice to look at does wonders for the experience.

Impressively too, for an Unreal Engine 5 game, is that it runs well on Steam Deck even without upscaling, managing close to 60 fps in most areas with a drop to 45ish in some areas depending on your settings. So anybody looking to play some puzzles on the go should consider this one a great option.

Bring some earbuds with you though, because the game's sound design is no slouch. Voice acting is of a consistently high quality throughout, and while most environments are of the quiet, ambient variety that aim to give you space to think rather than propel you forward, that ambience is well-tuned and immersive. And while I wouldn't consider the soundtrack to be especially memorable, it does a fine enough job of backing the game's events with a little bit of gusto when it needs to.

Ultimately, Call of the Elder Gods is an extremely successful sequel that doesn't revolutionize the original, but didn't need to - it instead makes tweaks in all the right ways to transform a pretty good experience into a confidently great one. Fans of Call of the Sea are going to be thrilled with this sequel, and frankly, the drastic boost in overall quality combined with an excellent recap of the predecessor's plot makes me want to recommend it even to newcomers. It is likely to take you roughly 7-10 hours to get through depending on your puzzling prowess, feeling both slightly longer and more varied than the original game while maintaining a firm grip on the story it’s trying to tell. While the slow pace is likely to turn some off, I recommend this to any fans of narrative-focused puzzle games without hesitation. Call of the Elder Gods gets the silver genie lamp of approval.

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