Sights & Sounds
- The visuals (both graphically and aesthetically) are outstanding. I started playing it on my monitor, but wound up switching to the TV and maxing out the FOV to really take it in
- The sound design is excellent in terms of effects and voice acting, but I found it necessary to bump down the environmental sounds a bit. Distant objects were often too noisy, making things a bit disorienting initially. The menu sounds were also unnecessarily loud. I was wearing headphones, so YMMV
- The background music worked well to complement the mysterious, surreal scenery. The original vocal tracks were also well-written and well-performed
- All in all, after a little tweaking, the presentation of this game is very impressive for an indie studio. Just wish the menu noises didn't hurt my eardrums

Story & Vibes
- The story is a carefully crafted Lovecraftian mystery. Usually, games involving Lovecraftian lore wind up leaning strongly into the horror aspects of the mythos. This game doesn't, sometimes to a fault
- It's not that I wanted this to be a horror game per se; rather, I wish it could have hit some of those notes without changing its tune completely. The game does try to inject those vibes from time to time, but the game expertly kneecaps itself with Norah remarking how unafraid she is on multiple occasions. Plot-wise, it makes sense, but it kinda ruins the emotional impact of some scenes
- I guess I just think that I wanted it to be a thriller instead of just a mystery. The plot is excellent, but a few more frightening moments would have really taken the experience up another notch

Playability & Replayability
- It's a 1st-person point & click puzzle-focused adventure game with light investigation mechanics. In a nutshell, that means you'll be walking around, reading stuff, putting together clues, and feeling stupid about not seeing solutions sooner
- If you've played What Remains of Edith Finch, this plays a lot like that
- While I'm not seeing a replay on the horizon, I did enjoy my experience enough to go back and get the achievements I missed. I wouldn't have been motivated to do this were it not for the extremely convenient chapter select menu

Overall Impressions & Performance
- If you're into adventure games and enjoy Lovecraftian themes, this is definitely worth your money. It's just a matter of how much you think a 6-8 hour playthrough is worth
- There was a little stuttering at times (had to turn vsync on), but not enough to be bothersome. It's a really minor gripe

Final Verdict
- 8.5/10. This game does everything right. Hell, it does everything well. If it leaned just a tiny bit harder on the horror to add a couple thrills, this would be a classic. That said, it's still extremely good

Reject husband. Embrace fish. Call of the Sea is a puzzle game with the backdrop of a Lovecraft novel, as protagonist Norah searches for her husband, lost on a remote island after searching for a cure for her own mysterious illness. On the surface, Call of the Sea offers nothing that other Lovecraftian games don't. Mysterious disappearances. Weird black goo. Ancient intricate stone carvings. Fish people. However, while it is a bit by the book, Call of the Sea isn't without merit. For one, it's surprisingly vibrant. It's a very colorful game with a nice art style. Compare this to the similar (and similarly named) Call of Cthulhu, which I played a few years back, which was an incredibly drab and dark affair. Even when things are reaching their climax, the game embraces it's color scheme, which I think goes a long way. The puzzles also actually require some thought, although they're a bit seldom for a game of this length. I do wish that games with a Lovecraftian spin didn't just rip off the same Cthulhu tropes, as there's only so much variation you can spin on them. I liked the main character, although I never felt any danger to her at all. If anything, it's a bit amusing that she's on her own on a remote island having no troubles at all, while reading her husband's journal entries depicting his misfortune and descent into madness. It's a fun game, and interesting enough to keep my attention, if a bit on the short side.

Call of the Sea looks the part with some excellent vistas but it squanders its fantastic premise on an extenuatingly slow walking speed, irritating puzzles and, worst of all, a cartoony and edulcorated version of the Cthulhu mythos that, despite stated intention, has ultimately nothing to do with Lovecraft's vision.

///Spoilers follow///

The Cthulhu mythos has never been particularly conducive or compatible with gaming: a medium that's usually all about player agency and empowering power fantasy is fundamentally at odds with a mythology in which mankind is powerless before beings beyond its means or even comprehension, the very exposure to which is enough to send one spiraling into madness. Previous games had to bend over backwards in order to implement action combat in ways that made sense, with varying results, as combat with mythos beings is not only inadvisable: it is pretty much impossible. With that in mind, this is where a non-violent walking simulator/puzzle game can do things that an action game can't, as rendering the player powerless is what these game are often about.

Call of the Sea follows Norah, a young woman suffering from an unknown ailment, which has undermined her health for several years, and whose archaeologist husband Harry has departed in search of a cure for her illness. When she loses contact with him and she receives a mysterious parcel containing strange items, Norah decides to set out in search of Harry. From this premise and the title alone, for anyone who knows the first thing about the Chthulhu mythos, it is immediately clear that Norah is a human hybrid in a semi-advanced stage of her mutation into a Deep One, a race of humanoid sea creatures who sometimes mate with human females, and whose offpring in turn eventually mutate into feral Deep Ones and leave humanity to rejoin the ocean.

If you like H.P. Lovecraft's horror fiction, the idea of playing as a Deep One hybrid is a tantalizing one, as seeing the mythos from those eyes is a novel experience. Unfortunately, Call of the Sea decided to excise the entire horror element out of H.P. Lovecraft. To paraphrase the words of the game director: "You do not live a horror story, but you experience the discovery of facts from those who have lived a horror story." That is the members of the husband's expedition, who have one after the other come to a sticky end, either falling prey to mundane accidents or killing one another in a fit of madness. I don't need to point out that the horror in Lovecraft is not found in the events that transpire in the stories, rather in the discovering of the overarching nature of the cosmos, and how human beliefs and theologies are insignificant falsehoods before the horrifying reality of what's really out there. It is therefore impossible to separate Lovecraft from horror, even if, as this game does, you premise that the protagonist doesn't feel horrified because she has mythos blood in her veins.

Another problem are the symptoms of Norah's mutation: Deep One hybrids start showing signs very early on in life, assuming features that more and more resemble those of a fish. It is what Lovraft describes as the "Innsmouth look", an unsighly appearance, coupled with violent antisocial tendencies. For a quality portrayal of this in the gaming medium, refer to Dark Corners of the Earth, in which a husband had to lock his wife in the attic, so by the time her mutation was complete she wouldn't be able to harm her family (which she does anyway). A harrowing sequence, complemented by the other encounter with other Innsmouth dwellers in various horrid stages of mutation.

Norah shows no sign of that whatsoever: she is suffering from some nondescript illness and has strange spots on her forearms and hands, which could be easily mistaken for vitiligo or liver spots. She covers them up with gloves, and that's the extent of the inconvenience brought about by her ongoing mutation. Outside of that she is conventionally attractive, chipper and no less social than your average bookish lady. In other words, her mutation barely shows any outer marks at all.

At the end of the game it is revealed that the husband had long ago discovered what she was and, knowing she would rather die of her illness than to leave him, had decided to trick her into going to the island and complete her mutation (now requiring some sort of bizarre ritual) so that she could be with her people and live. It's an odd plan that only makes sense upon superficial inspection, to say the least.

The multiple endings are the usual matter of choosing one of two buttons to see one video play instead of another: in one, Norah decides to go back home and spend a few more years with her husband before succumbing to her "illness", in the other she chooses to definitively give up her humanity and join the fish collective, or a romanticized, idealized, bizarrely aspirational vision of it, in which a generic "elder god" telepathically speaks to her in very paternal terms, disconcertingly calling her by her human name as she swims towards a bright light. Imagine Dagon referring to someone by their human name: "Come, Bob, come be a fish with us..." It's an irritatingly sanitized and edulcorated version of the mythos, made "safe for consumption" for an audience usually incompatible with it.

This is another baffling aspect of this game: you come away from it feeling like maybe it actually wasn't meant as a part of the Cthulhu mythos. After all it never mentions any mythos deity by name and, barring an easter egg nodding to the Marsh fish cannery in Innsmouth, there seems to be no direct connection to Lovecraft at all, which makes you wonder if we are looking at some sort of copyright-safe Lovecraft-adjacent piece of fiction, like Eternal Darkness on the Nintendo Gamecube was. A quick glance at the game's website dispels those doubts, however, as they are extremely unambiguous in positioning it as part of the Lovecraft lore, eveng going as far as analyzing the meaning of "lovecraftian" and how it applies to their vision with the horror element removed.

That removal is the only explanation for why they decided to omit any reference to specific elder gods, or any faithful representation of their form and behavior. It's not for copyright reasons, as lesser productions have used the Lovecraft brands very liberally before. One can throw the writers a bone and try to assume Norah is an unreliable narrator due to the gradual loss of her humanity, as such her perception of cosmic horrors is not the same as ours, but this is quite the stretch to make, especially given the stated intent of the designers. Taking the horror out of Lovecraft is an extremely bizarre choice, and a fool's errand at that, and the game's world suffers because of it.

///Spoilers end///

So if the story and implementation within Lovecraft lore don't work, what about gameplay and presentation? Sadly, things don't get much better. While the art direction of the island looks very nice, in a "made with Unity" sort of way, especially when exploring its cavernours depths, performance is fairly poor, with frame rate drops and a few glitches: multiple times I emerged from a cutscene to find a row of floating arms where my character used to be, evidently leftover of the loading process. Voice acting is middling, with a lot of actors usually performing in minor roles in larger productions delivering performances that range from acceptable to inadequate. The protagonist, for instance, maintains the same tone regardless of what happens on screen. The game seems to try to justify that with the fact she doesn't feel threatened by the things she sees, but that hardly excuses her lack of expression.

It's the gameplay, however, that really brings this game low. It's mostly a blend of puzzle solving and walking simulator, with emphasis on walking: simply put, the movement speed in this is suffocatingly slow. There is a run botton, and the speed boost it provides is comparable to the walk speed in your average first person game, if not slightly lower, while your normal pace will make you feel like your controller is broken. I was checking my phone while jogging around the island, the mere act of going from A to B being a veritable chore.

Your mileage may vary on the puzzles, and for the most part they are decent, but I found many of them to be very irritating: it usually boils down to coming to a gate that requires a code to enter, which will require slowly walking back through the area looking for clues, then slowly making your way back to the gate, and if you got it wrong, do it again. It's tedious, and Norah's commentary is hardly compelling. There is one area where you begin at the top of a deep cistern-like area with a spiraling staircase. You need to go all the way down to acquire a code, then all the way up to activate a series of switches according to it, then all the way down again to progress. Absolute timewaster, and it's but one of them.

Call of the Sea had a lot of potenttial due to its excellent premise. Unfortunately the execution is lacking and especially its wanton disregard for the Cthulhu mythos (made even worse by the statements by the developers, who seem to have done it on purpose) makes this very hard to recommend to Lovecraft fans. You might get more out of it if you go in knowing very little about the source material.

7/10

Puzzles may be somehow repetitive in their structure (explore, find notes and letters, activate the mechanism) and narratively dissonant, but what a great plot.

What a great reinterpretation of clsssic adventure novels and imageries, how original as a take on Lovecraftian mithologies, what a brilliant reflection on womanhood and monstrosity, on masculinity and discovery. How effective as a subversion of its references. And what a great love story, with a moving and thought-provoking ending.

I want to start with the story because that's what motivates us. The story is obviously surreal and strange but beautiful and dramatic. I was moved by this passionate love story of Harry and Norah, but the only problem is that it was a bit too long. Other than that, the way the story is told is very atmospheric and touching. We slowly grasp the story in those letters on the island while traveling around and they are not boring. The voices are also good.

Apart from the story, the puzzles and what we see on the island: Honestly, I hated some of the puzzles, you have to focus to understand them, and they're not the kind you can just think simple and solve, you have to think a little bit and be calm. I was satisfied with what we saw on the island because it's an experience that goes back and forth between different ambiances. I also found it logical that they didn't put music at every point because they wanted to make you feel the stunning silence or the noise of the atmosphere, and I was definitely scared of the thunder in that air.

Even though it has frustrating puzzles and a story that goes on a bit too long, it's definitely a game you should play. I don't recommend it if you lack patience and have a short temper, but it's a game with competitive puzzles that will test both of these qualities.