3. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Developed by: Headfirst Productions
Published by: Bethesda Softworks
Release Date: Q4 2003

	What's Ahead: Call of Cthulhu has been in development for several years, but the development was slowed by the financial woes of its former publisher. Despite the age of the game's core graphics, the designers are being quite creative in using special effects and are working to update the art and add more visual polish to the game before its scheduled release next year. The biggest challenge is obviously to deliver a single-player experience as convincing and atmospheric as what we witnessed in the several levels shown at E3.

As popular as survival horror games have been on consoles, there really haven't been that many horror games for the PC, let alone a game that promises to be as scary as Call of Cthulhu. To create its tense atmosphere, this first-person game uses a range of special effects, horrifying scripted sequences, and a dynamic system for measuring the effect of events on your sanity. Your character, Jack Walters, starts out as an ordinary policeman investigating a cultist's house that harbors some terrible secrets. What was surprising about the E3 demo was that this introductory sequence was actually creepy and startling enough to make Walters' subsequent stay in a sanitarium completely understandable.

Call of Cthulhu is based on a classic short story by H.P. Lovecraft that involves time-traveling aliens and terrifying creatures that live in the deep waters that the locals depend on for commercial fishing. Walters returns to the New England town of Innsmouth after recovering from his bout of insanity, but his quest to uncover more about the strange happenings around the town won't leave him unaffected. There's plenty of occasion to explore odd locales, but you'll also run into creatures you'll have to fight and others that it's best to simply run away from. As terrible as things are to look at, they'll cut into your sanity level and cause a variety of side effects, like hallucinations, paranoia, and vertigo. The effects of progressive insanity are creatively represented in the game's graphics and sound, and they make the scripted events and combat encounters much more suspenseful.

Headfirst has been working on Call of Cthulhu for several years now and has just recently signed a publishing deal with Bethesda that should put it on the right track. The game has always had plenty of originality, but the demo at E3 2003 illustrated just how far the designers have come in bringing Lovecraft's horror setting to life.