Hi everyone,

Spring Sale are now live on Steam - get 66% off Call of Cthulhu on Steam and plunge into a world of creeping madness and cosmic horror!

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Greetings!

We’d like to extend a huge thanks to those who continue to support Call of Cthulhu and give us feedback since the release.

We’ve just rolled out a new patch that includes some new features and bug fixes. Please find the full change log below.




Improvement

• Added the possibility to validate dialogue options with the interaction key
  
• Added the possibility to interact with puzzles with the arrow keys
  
• Removed the mention of "Character Points" when hovering over Medicine and Occult skills after chapter 1

Bug fixes

• All options are correctly shown in the Options menu
  
• Fixed some issues with 21:9 resolutions
  
• Adjusted some SFX throughout the game
  
• Chapter 8: Fixed an issue where Algernon doesn't aim at the player correctly
  
• Chapter 9: Fixed an issue where Sarah would be standing instead of lying down in a key dialogue
  
• Chapter 9: Fixed an issue where players could get stuck while interacting with the bust in Sarah's office
  
• Chapter 12: Fixed an issue where Mitchell's state would be changed after giving the medkit to Cat

Localization

• Added Japanese and Korean support

The Call of Cthulhu Team

Hello Investigators!

Today, we’re very happy to release an update for Call of Cthulhu, addressing feedback that we have received since the release of the game on October 30th.

This update is now live. Please find the changelog below:

• Added options to modify FOV and Motion Blur
  
• Added a scroll bar in the graphics menu to include these new options
  
• Fixed an issue where players were unable to progress in Chapter 12, due to dying immediately upon respawn
  
• Fixed a number of cases where players would be unable to leave scene reconstructions
  
• Fixed an issue where mouse input was not registered during dialogue
  
• Fixed an issue where cutscenes wouldn’t trigger, preventing players from progressing
  
• Fixed display issues with 4:3 and 16:10 resolutions in the diary and during dialogue
  
• Various minor bug fixes

In the future, we plan to produce another PC update which addresses performance drops, the frame rate limit and an issue with fullscreen implementation.

As always, please let us know if you have any issues with this latest update, and we hope you continue to enjoy the game!

The Call of Cthulhu Team

In celebration of Call of Cthulhu's launch last week, we invite you to walk further along the path of madness in today’s Accolade Trailer, which highlights the game’s strong reception from press.

Call of Cthulhu celebrates its launch with maddening Accolade Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFvVy2Po-Ac
In Call of Cthulhu, feel the influence of Lovecraftian Old Gods and other cosmic horrors, playing investigator Edward Pierce as he delves into the circumstances behind the tragic deaths of the Hawkins family. Helped and hindered by the mysterious locals of Darkwater Island, your journey cuts the line between sanity and madness as the hunt for truth brings Pierce ever closer to the Great Dreamer.



Pierce is but a mortal man, with few allies in a remote, unfriendly environment. Whether outnumbered by mortal adversaries or facing foes whose mere existence is beyond human comprehension, offering physical resistance is usually not an option. Making the most of Pierce’s extensive set of skills, along with subterfuge and stealth, is paramount… though escaping the gaze of the Great Dreamer may ultimately prove futile.

Call of Cthulhu is out now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/399810/Call_of_Cthulhu/

Call of Cthulhu is now out!

What lies beyond the veil, scratching at our eyeballs but just out of vision, a terrifying nightmare we simply cannot see? Peer into clear dreams and the murky past in the Call of Cthulhu Launch Trailer. With music by Black Mirror, Utopia, and The Girl With All The Gifts composer Cristobal Tapia De Veer, the trailer is your last look into the void before release.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjarh35CEYM
An official adaptation of Chaosium’s pen & paper RPG, Call of Cthulhu combines investigation gameplay with the unparalleled narratives of Lovecraft’s renowned Cthulhu mythos. What mysteries will you, as private investigator Edward Pierce, uncover on the too-quiet island of Darkwater off the coast of Boston?



Call of Cthulhu casts you in that role - a struggling alcoholic, tortured by the past, haunted by PTSD and strange visions, Pierce is a dogged investigator with a desire to find the truth. Contracted by the father of the late Sarah Hawkins to look into the mysterious fire that engulfed her mansion and killed her family, Pierce is immediately surrounded by distrustful locals and dead ends on Darkwater. Pressing on, his world begins to unravel as reality breaks down, and dreams become reality... All the while, the Great Dreamer prepares its awakening.

Call of Cthulhu is now available.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/399810/Call_of_Cthulhu/

As we near the October 30th release of Call of Cthulhu, we’re taking a closer look at the game’s development through a series of Devblogs, each presented by a different member of Cyanide Studio’s team. Today, we’re joining Lead Level Designer Romain Wiart as he tells us more about Call of Cthulhu’s environments and investigation mechanics.

Hi everyone! My name is Romain Wiart, and I'm Lead Level Designer on Call of Cthulhu. Level design is about using the rules and scenarios written by the Game Designer and the Narrative Designer to create the user experience.

We work on the pace and challenge of the game to make you experience various flavors and tempos through the game. With the investigation mechanics in Call of Cthulhu, we tried to offer various options for players to explore, depending on the way you develop your character and the choices you make throughout the story.



When developing the story, we laid out a series of scenes usable for the Narrative Designers and easy to read and navigate for the players.

Our main focus was on player perception. What you will see and hear, how we can subtly drive your attention to the things we want you to notice, and how we help mental awareness by building the levels in ways that facilitate navigation, thanks to landmarks and signals for example. And finally, we built the environments to offer challenges, as players shouldn't die countless times but still feel on edge, even when there is only an illusion of challenge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hx75ZGiGZk
Call of Cthulhu's investigation mechanics feature three major aspects: exploration, dialogue and skills - we tried to link them together as much as possible.

Player will gather clues and tools through exploration. These will help to resolve the mysteries that fill the story, and open new topics and lines in dialogue. By speaking with the Darkwater locals, you will collect information about the island and its inhabitants. You'll also develop relationships with some of them, opening new paths and closing others depending on your decisions. The team really wanted each player to create their own experience, be it for impactful choices or not.



Our biggest challenge in the development of the game has been to stay as true as possible to the key ideas of Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft has to be gloomy and oppressive, but not outwardly horrific in an on the nose manner. It has to be fantastic but not fantasy. It has to instill fear through unease, expectation and the feeling of helplessness, not through jump scares, direct confrontation and violence. The biggest challenge was to translate this vision of cosmic horror specific to Lovecraft into a game experience.

Call of Cthulhu releases for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on October 30. Digital and retail preorders are available on PC and consoles.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/399810/Call_of_Cthulhu/

I’m Yoann Drulhe, cinematic artist at Cyanide. I previously worked on the cinematics of Styx: Shards of Darkness, Blood Bowl 2 and I’m currently working on Call of Cthulhu and Space Hulk Tactics.

On Call of Cthulhu, I worked on every aspect of the cinematic creation process, from the first draft to the final cinematic. Therefore, my job included storyboarding, layout, actor direction (we used motion capture to animate our characters), integrating the animations into the Unreal Engine and finally, lighting.

The main challenge during development came from the variety and number of cinematics shown throughout the game. There’s a lot of different sequences, from the creepy ones to story-driven drama scenes developing the characters’ backstories, more action-filled scenes with multiple characters, as well as many variations in between.
Every cinematic had its own mood and challenges to face, and this was one of the things that made this production so interesting for me.



One of our key missions in creating the game’s cinematics was to be able to express distinctly Lovecraftian, unspeakable elements, and convey the idea of madness. The ambiguity in Lovecraft’s novels is that he never precisely describes what his characters see, leaving his readers free to imagine the most disturbing horrors! It’s not really the same in a video game, because at some point you simply have to see these things - but we tried to make every appearance of a creature from the mythos a special moment.

We had to show these creatures, but we wanted to keep it both scary and mysterious in some way. There are many ways to do that in a cinematic. We can choose to not show it completely until the end, play with the editing and lighting to not see it in its entirety, or keep it out of frame so they don’t see it when they want to see it most! To achieve that, it made sense to take horror movies as references - which was easy for me as horror is one of my favorite genres for cinematography! To take a specific example, it seemed obvious to me to watch Alien again before thinking about a sequence showing the Dimensional Shambler.



It was a very different challenge to show the inner madness of the main character, Edward Pierce, as it escalates gradually throughout. At the beginning of the game, Pierce’s strange mental state is revealed during visions he has, which are dreamlike and ask more questions than they bring answers. In fact, the issue is the same as in fantastical literature: the player must always wonder about what they have seen, and if what they have seen is real or not. To succeed in doing this, we used a variety of specific techniques: very tight editing, intentional editing glitches, camera focal length variations, expressionist lighting, and more. Once again: I was strongly inspired by many movies to get these ideas. I don’t want to list them all, but I can’t avoid talking about the dream sequences in Shutter Island, and the movie Jacob’s Ladder by Adrian Lyne. The sound is also really important during these sequences, and they would not work anywhere near as well without the work of our sound designer.


The dream sequence from Shutter Island


The Hospital scene from Jacob's Ladder

We used these same things to show the moments when Pierce goes really crazy, but we were also helped by the work of the actors who made the motion capture, who really understood the intentions of the scenes while shooting and helped to make the sequences what they are now.

I also want to point out something about how we show madness in the game. Apart from Pierce, many of the characters are mad in their own way, and different parts of the game represent madness in many ways. One character evokes the archetype of the mad scientist, while another is an interesting variation of the Frankenstein story - a disgusting but tragic monster, betrayed by those around them and still in love with one that hates them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqTI6TDNsrc
One of the important points of the game is that you’re not playing any random character: you’re playing Edward Pierce, a man with his own distinct personality, past and fears. During the gameplay, you’re in a first-person view to maximize the immersion of the player, but during cinematics we’re showing you the character you’re playing and the way he evolves during the events of the scenario.

Many interesting things happened during the motion capture shooting! For example, there is a cinematic in the game that involves a child character. Because this character appears only for a really short amount of time, we chose not to hire a child actor and they were instead hand animated by our team.

The problem was, while shooting, the actors had to interact briefly with this character. Because of that, one of us had to stand in and play as the child. It was not that funny in the moment because we were all focused on the scene, but when we looked at the rushes afterward, it was a very strange sight!

Stay tuned for more Devblogs soon! Call of Cthulhu releases for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on October 30. Digital and retail preorders are available on PC and consoles.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/399810/Call_of_Cthulhu/

Call of Cthulhu, the official videogame adaptation of Chaosium’s tabletop RPG, has gone gold in preparation for its release on October 30 for PlayStation 4, XBOX One and PC.

Dive into the Preview to Madness Trailer for a taste of the press’ first impressions, joined by a dose of Lovecraftian madness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKxgwIiPK64
With Call of Cthulhu releasing in under two weeks, members of the press have already gotten their hands on the early hours of Detective Pierce’s haunting investigation across Darkwater Island. Today’s Preview to Madness Trailer explores praise for the game’s distinctly Lovecraftian atmosphere, mesmerizing audio and visual design, as well as the RPG-investigation mechanics that allow players to discover clues, draw conclusions, question locals and survive the island’s cosmic horrors.



In Call of Cthulhu, nothing is as it seems. Terrible creatures, conspiracies and cults await on Darkwater Island, lining the path to the horrifying truth behind the island. Pierce’s mind will suffer – solving the case will bring him to brink of insanity, to a place where death may appear the most favorable outcome.

Your senses will be challenged to the point of questioning whether everything and everyone is real or illusory. Creeping shadows hide lurking figures… and all the while, the Great Dreamer prepares for his awakening.

Call of Cthulhu releases for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on October 30. Digital and retail preorders are available on PC and consoles.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/399810/Call_of_Cthulhu/

As we near the October 30 release of Call of Cthulhu, we’re taking a closer look at the game’s development through a series of Devblogs, each presented by a different member of Cyanide Studio’s team. Today, we’re joining Lead Sound Designer Swann Ménage as he tells us more about Call of Cthulhu’s sounds.

Hello! I'm Swann, Lead Sound Designer on Call of Cthulhu. I work for a company called G4F, which is specialized in sound design for video games. I'm in charge of the audio identity of the game: sounds, music and voices.

What we wanted to do with Call of Cthulhu is to creep you out with sound. One of the key ways to achieve that is to primarily keep things realistic, so you feel safe - until we add an unnerving sound that frightens you!

However, we’ve tried to avoid ‘horror movie scary spooky’ sound design and jumpscares. We aimed at an oppressive atmosphere.

Some parts of the game are really diegetic-based, meaning that everything you hear comes from what you see. We also tried to mess a bit with how music and diegetic sounds blend together. Sometimes, you won't really be able to tell if what you're hearing is something from the environment, a music, or a hallucination. We hope that players will sometimes ask themselves "did I really just hear that?"

Here is an extract of what we created for the Hawkins mansion with regards to sound design. Some of what you hear is really happening - thunder, wood creaking, rain, etc. - while others are there to freak you out a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1xVaA5IJvU
This entire soundscape is randomly generated: wood creaks from within the manor, weird unknown sounds spinning around you, lightning strikes with the sounds of thunder following on a random delay, and more.

We tried a lot fun stuff, especially when Pierce is dreaming or gets hallucinations. During one sequence, you'll hear something I named the "Dream Generator". A lot of dream-like sounds spawn randomly all around the player, creating a weird threnody.

During the first dream of Pierce, in the introduction, we tried to play with the boundaries between his dream and reality. If you listen closely, you'll be able to hear a distorted, dreamy, stretched version of what's playing on his radio when he wakes up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni0x9ySUEAM
Of course, this has all involved teamwork! Markus Schmidt did the music, G4F helped me, and Renaud was our Foley artist. SIDE, a London-based recording studio, was in charge of recording all voices.

Call of Cthulhu is narrative-driven, meaning pretty big recording sessions as you can imagine. Everything occurs near Boston, and recreating the 1920's Boston accent wasn't easy.

We focused on the acting of our characters and how the fall into madness affects their tones (panic, anger, confusion, etc...) We also recorded a SoundBank (that we call the "ScreamBank") just for this game: mad wails, sick people, weird women, running madmen, locked prisoners... we recorded all of them.

On my side, I had to integrate all these voices and occasionally modify them. As an example, here is how I did the voice that follows your journey into madness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzYKWaEn2d4&feature=youtu.be
We hope you'll enjoy Call of Cthulhu as much as we did developing (and sound designing!) it. 🐙

Stay tuned for more Devblogs soon! Call of Cthulhu releases for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on October 30. Digital and retail preorders are available on PC and consoles.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/399810/Call_of_Cthulhu/

As we near the October 30 release of Call of Cthulhu, we’re taking a closer look at the game’s development through a series of Devblogs, each presented by a different member of Cyanide Studio’s team. Today, we’re joining Lead Artist Rémi Mennerat as he explores Call of Cthulhu’s artistic direction.

My name is Rémi Mennerat. I have classical art, architecture and interior design training and have been working in the video game industry for 25 years. I'm Lead Artist and Environment Art Director on Call of Cthulhu. This means I'm responsible for the overall visual aspect of the environments, in cooperation with the designers and story tellers, and in charge of a team of talented environment artists to create in-game sceneries, props, vehicles, buildings, and other architecture.

Call of Cthulhu is set in the 1920s on an isolated Island that has been cut off from the rest of the world for quite some time. We did a lot of research in order to be as accurate as we could and provide an exciting game experience. The player is immersed in a rich environment with a lot of new interesting things to discover.



Above all Lovecraft stories revolve around worlds that are beyond our own, worlds that cannot be understood by a human being, and are therefore beyond description. In his own words: "When we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown (...) we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold"

Fortunately for the artists who have to show Lovecraft's universe the glimpses of info are revealed in diluted form in his stories. The narrator's descriptions are always very evocative but often amorphous. The things witnessed are so horrible that the description is outrageous, making us doubt the reliability of the description itself.

The challenge was to make 3D and 2D graphics showing these "almost impossible to describe" perceptions.

In Call of Cthulhu, you play as Edward Pierce. He’s a hard-boiled detective, alcoholic, and a loner. Do not expect a bright and shiny world. As the story unfurls don't expect things to improve either - get ready for some creepy discoveries!

As soon as Edward Pierce sets foot on the docks he is dwarfed by the peaks of Darkwater Island. The sharp rocks surrounding the bay make the place look like a trap. The buildings are falling apart - it is obvious that a lot of strange things are going on here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-dQdQkT3Vs
Much more questions arise than what brought our private detective here in the first place. Just taking a look at the environment opens up new mysteries: the buildings look like it used to be a place teeming with life. What happened here? Why do people live in such an obviously unfriendly place? What is this dead orca lying on the docks? What are these green lights?

If you are making an immersive investigation game, you should not use props just because they "look great". Every good artist can make a cool prop. What you want to avoid is a mishmash of "cool looking" things that don’t end up saying anything.



Each time we created or used a prop in an environment we asked ourselves a lot of questions: What is it doing here? Who brought it here? How long has it been here? Does its state of decay tell something about it?

For example, the trees in the mansion garden are gnarled and twisted, they seem to have been there forever. They are leafless, but still seem to be firmly holding on. The creaking, menacing old mansion itself is crying out to be explored. It is uninhabited but really looks like it is hiding some dangerous secrets. In real life you would certainly would not want to visit such a place - in a game it's exciting to do so!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POU3H8JC0GQ
Lovecraft’s works are all about hidden details. As reality is always veiled in some places, what you see is not always what you think it is. When you build a Lovecraftian environment, you are always juggling between showing or hiding things.

Film Noir movies have a method that does this in order to convey mystery. It is a lighting technique called chiaroscuro: the use of strong contrasts between light and dark. It makes volumes stand out and creates dramatic moods. To add even more mystery, there is a lot of smoke and fog in Film Noirs - we use them a lot as well. It also served the gameplay because light and dark are a very important of the game design.

We used specific colours for each environment and the colour palettes are not random - they also tell stories. In an almost monochromatic picture a brightly-coloured object will stand out and be very dramatic.

When Edward Pierce arrives at the docks, the mood is very heavy. The sun is muffled, colours make everything look sick and it makes you feel uneasy. It is a harsh contrast with his warm daylight Boston office he just left.



If you want to make artists happy just ask them to produce crazy stuff! Creating crazy environments is the fun part and we sometimes had to remove some of them because they did not serve the story. A lot of crazy 3D work didn't find its way into the final game.

You can see glimpses of the turned down mad environments in some of the paintings you will come across. As a matter of fact, you will find several Easter eggs hidden in the paintings.

Depicting madness is also a challenge because it often requires coordination with all the different fields of work of the team: animation, post production, animatics, sound, special effects, programming etc...and all this for things that sometimes appear for just a few seconds on the screen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxPAm7sHbZQ
Lovecraft's books are our base but his descriptions are literary and he did not have movies or video games in mind when he wrote them. For the lighting and the moods, a lot of movies with good photography and paintings have fed our work.

Orson Well's "Citizen Kane" and Riddley Scott's "Blade Runner" make good use of the chiaroscuro technique. Painters like George de La Tour, Rembrant are also good references for this technique.

The overall dramatic aspects of the island and landscapes are strongly inspired by 19th century romantic landscape painters, especially Caspar David Friedrich.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" was referenced for the idea of a menacing Victorian mansion on top of a hill. This setting was pure genius and it has since been used countless times in horror movies. Victorian mansions have almost become synonymous to haunted houses in movies (he was inspired by the Addams family House from the television series and an Edward Hopper painting for that setting).

Apart from the mansion, we have tried to avoid as much as possible any gothic inspiration. Partly because they are at risk of seeming corny, as we have seen them countless times in horror games and movies. Another artist that comes to my mind for his crazy stuff is Zdzisław Beksiński.


Zdzisław Beksiński

And last but not least: nature. The real world is of boundless inspiration for all artists and no human will ever match such creativity!

The most important thing about Call of Cthulhu is that we have managed to create our own stuff. The artists from the team often brought lot of inspiration to each other. It was very pleasant to always have fresh visions each week and we used each other's ideas for our own work.

What we have created has an identity of its own, it is something new and, who knows, it might inspire other people in the future!

Stay tuned for more Devblogs soon! Call of Cthulhu releases for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on October 30. Digital and retail preorders are available on PC and consoles.