Awakening of Cthulhu

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Note: This game is included in the All In! Bundle, along with Alchemist’s Castle, Color.Motif Deluxe, Drift Racing Madness, Minefield, Soccer Pinball, and World of Riders.

Awakening of Cthulhu is an Action-Platformer released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game puts players in the role of a man in a city (London, perhaps? I’m not sure) fighting monsters as Cthulhu rises in power.

This game’s 2D visuals could be potentially pretty decent, except this game in plagued by some sort of loading problem that means that everything in the game looks extremely pixelated for at least a few seconds after you see it for the first time, with some elements such as some backgrounds never fully resolving into anything more than a big blocky, ugly mess. However, it’s when you’re attacked by a creature whose graphic hasn’t fully loaded that’s potentially the most distracting here – this game could be called “Attack of the Pixel Monsters!” and it would potentially be a more accurate title.

The rest of this game’s presentation is fairly decent, with somber piano music being the most prominent element, though you do get some silly grunting noises from enemies when you fight them.

Unfortunately, you’ll be doing a lot of that. Move right, engage enemies in dull, repetitive combat, move right, engage enemies in dull, repetitive combat… For a game that really only has you fighting enemy after enemy, one would think that they would at least make this combat engaging, but instead it’s slow, clunky, and against enemies with extremely stupid AI.

Awakening of Cthulhu was originally released at a price point of $12, which is an outright insult of a price for such a buggy, broken, and poorly-designed game. It has since been reduced to $2, which still seems way overpriced. Even fans of the Cthulhu mythos will find nothing to enjoy here. I suppose I should make a comment like “you’d have to be driven to insanity to buy a game this terrible”, but I really don’t see any reason to bring levity into this miserable experience. Better to just avoid it entirely.

tl;dr – Awakening of Cthulhu is an Action-Platformer with broken visuals and boring, repetitive, brainless combat. Do not buy this game.

Grade: D-

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