As much as I like all things Lovecraftian, it’s hard to muster much enjoyment from Desolatium.
Whilst I recognise that it isn’t always easy to create a Lovecraft-themed game due to the complexity of developing cosmic horror, there are a surprisingly large number of decent games in this little subgenre. World of Horror works as a fascinating and challenging leap into the realm of eldritch gods as an RPG, whilst No One Lives Under the Lighthouse functions as a slower first-person descent into madness. Desolatium is a confusing point and click game that makes progress as difficult as possible thanks to sprawling, empty map filled with clutter to distract you.
Desolatium makes a pretty reasonable first impression at least. You, as a man named Carter, are kidnapped by a group of, admittedly less than stellar-looking, people and knocked unconscious, only to wake up in a hospital room. When I mention the good first impression, that comes from the very nice looking environment and reasonable early puzzle to escape your room. More on that later though. Once out, Carter proceeds to escape the hospital with no one attempting to stop him, which seems odd.
Anyway, at this point you’ll switch to another character, Sophie, who has been investigating local cults. Solving puzzles in her chapter will have you switch to another character. You’ll control four different characters, jumping between them from chapter-to-chapter over the course of the game, leading to a very broken and confusing narrative. You may make some revelation as Sophie, only to have control of her taken away from you for another three chapters meaning you lose sight of what she was working on. It’s quite irritating and meant that by the end of the rather short game, I had no interest in the characters or their motives. Most egregious of all was the twist, if you could call it that, which felt completely unearned and added nothing to the story. Half of the threads along the way even seemed to be dropped. For a genre that should really focus on story, this felt like a bit of a mess.
Puzzles were equally frustrating as well, but not due to them being difficult as such. It’s often fairly obvious that combining something acidic with a padlock will allow you to open a door. The annoyance comes from how difficult it is to find items in the cluttered, but impressive to look at, environments. If you remember the days of pixel hunting in old point and click games, Desolatium has that in spades. Add to that the fact that there are multiple areas in each chapter, many of which have nothing of interest in them, and that they’re 3D, and you’ll find yourself scouring each room, painstakingly slowly to find the next object. In some of the chapters you won’t even know what it is you’re looking for, which just adds to the problems.
I realise I’m complaining a lot, but there are some things I did quite like. The makers of Desolatium clearly have an admiration for the Lovecraft mythos, as there are so many Easter-eggs hiding in each chapter. From more overt ones like posters for holidays to Carcosa, to the more subtle of a musical themed achievement being named after Erich Zann. I liked finding these, and it made some of that fine-toothed comb searching more palatable, at least to a point.
The areas you explore also look really nice a lot of the time. Some of them are a pain to navigate thanks to it being unclear which door leads in which direction, but at least they look good. The forests, offices, and shops seem to be put together from photos, or through some very impressive modelling. The characters that occasionally appear are incredibly jarring by comparison though, looking as though they stepped out of games from two generations ago. I’m glad that the developers went with a more stylistic approach for cutscenes and conversations rather than have those 3D models be given more screen time than necessary.
Sound design is worthy of praise too, at least to a point. The music is well done, although it doesn’t always quite match the mood of the scene you’re observing. There were some nice gutteral sound effects as you trawl through caves beneath Innsmouth, and some good use of approaching footsteps as you explore whilst being followed by someone unseen. Voice acting is present throughout, but it’s something of a mixed bag. Characters who are meant to be afraid come across as being a bit campy rather than fearing for their very soul, and they’ll pronounce the same word in different ways during a single scene. Idh-Yaa has some solid voice work though, and she stands out as a solid performance.
Desolatium is hard to recommend. There’s little here that I really enjoyed, and found myself not really wanting to have to spend half an hour rooting around screen after screen to try and find something to progress the story. There’s a free prologue on Steam that lasts around thirty minutes if you want to try it out for yourself, but I’d encourage players to avoid this particular descent into insanity.
Desolatium is available now on Xbox, PC, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
