Professor Harry Everhart may have survived the cosmic horror that plagued him while he was trapped on that accursed Pacific island in Call of the Sea, but he still suffers from ominous visions decades later. Elsewhere, university student Evangeline Drayton has similarly bizarre dreams of a life and civilization beyond her understanding. When fate brings these two together, it leads to an intriguing and fun mystery centered on solving puzzles that bend the mind and reality itself.
Like its 2020 predecessor, Call of the Elder Gods challenges players to solve elaborate environmental puzzles using observational and deductive skills, with no small amount of out-of-the-box thinking. As a whole, the first-person adventure has much in common with Call of the Sea, but I like how the globetrotting premise allows for more varied visuals. Players solve riddles in a storm-battered mansion, an abandoned snow-covered facility, a sweltering Australian desert, plus surreal locations not of this world.
Puzzles sometimes require switching between controlling Evangeline, an engineer, and Harry, an archaeologist, though neither possesses distinct gameplay abilities. Instead, exercises require two heads to tackle, such as using Harry to carefully open a series of rooms for Evangeline to explore while evading and containing a supernatural threat. These exercises are fine subversions of the generally good and often challenging solo-character-designed puzzles, but I would have liked more tandem puzzles, given that they’re the biggest difference from the first game.
Still, I was both impressed and perplexed by multi-layered riddles, such as deciphering otherworldly musical notes to open doors using ancient instruments or uncovering information on members of a mysterious cult to access their inner chambers. Finding every clue strewn about an area and recording key information in a journal is key, as missing one piece of evidence can be the difference between a breakthrough and an hour spent staring at your notes. While I find the puzzles logical, journal notes are sometimes too vague. On a few occasions, I questioned the exact meaning of a phrase or instruction because a note stopped short of fully clarifying or contextualizing something, turning some problems into frustrating guessing games (a cable-to-socket-matching exercise being the most egregious). Thankfully, a penalty-free hint system offers gentle nudges that build to outright solutions, depending on how deeply you choose to delve into it.
Some puzzles lay out a buffet of notes, photographs, and other clues before you even have a grasp of the problem at hand. I would have liked some of these clues to be a bit more funneled, as sifting through so much out-of-context information at once is sometimes overwhelming. Furthermore, I was annoyed that certain clues I found useful would not be recorded in the journal for easy reference; revisiting these clues wherever they lay to cross-reference any hunches is a pain. Ultimately, these are small complaints, but they reared their heads often enough to be irksome.
Call of the Elder Gods’ roughly seven-hour story, narrated by Call of the Sea protagonist Norah Everhart, is a decently entertaining mystery that takes some unexpected but neat twists. Despite having a good emotional core, particularly in how each character’s motivation is rooted in the loss of a loved one, Evangeline and Harry still aren’t the most memorable leads. The game’s villains fall even further below that benchmark; you won’t see them often, and one major foe’s fate unfolds anticlimactically. While the modest character models and illustrated cinematics won’t wow anyone, strong voice performances give the adventure some gravitas.
Although it may not reach the heights of other narrative-puzzle contemporaries released since Call of the Sea, Call of the Elder Gods is still an entertaining test for your noggin, wrapped in an adequately engaging Lovecraft-inspired story. Harry and Evangeline would say otherwise, but it’s okay to embrace this game’s insanity-inducing madness with open arms.