The Inns-MEH Case

This game really wasn't for me at all... very much more a book than a game. I can see how some people would enjoy it, but it was definitely not for me. This was a one and doner for the achievements.

Even if I did enjoy this game, what a grind it would've been to get the achievements! Sooooooooooo repetitive. Thank god for someone's video guide I found! Owe that guy a beer!

To my achievement hunters, this is a quick and easy 100% IF you use a video guide / walkthrough.

I’m a sucker for all things Lovecraft and thus I had to try this “choose your own adventure”. The premise is simple enough: you’re a detective looking for a lost girl in the town of Innsmouth. The game’s writing is often funny and translates the Lovecraftian atmosphere well. However it couldn’t hold my interest for long. There seem to be more than 20 possible endings but I completed only 2 of them, each one taking me about one hour. The branches in the storyline are multiple but I rapidly grew tired of replaying/reading passages.

The Innsmouth Case

cjfelty3396
cjfelty3396


The Innsmouth Case
It’s hard to really say when this game was beaten, as there are nearly 20 different endings, but I’ve gotten the lay of the land enough to see what the game is going for. Admittedly, the pitch for this game hooked me into buying it on sale, and I regret to inform you that even the sales price was too much to pay.

As a text adventure, my one ask for this game would be that it has no spelling errors, and it fails there, sometimes to the effect of confusing the player. As for the story, this game is trying to be a more comedic take on the dark Lovecraftian mythos, but it relies heavily on players already knowing that mythos for any kind of lasting effect. Finally, the routes to different endings are not long, so the first ending I reached felt abrupt and unearned.

The only positive thing I would say about this game is that it creates a very real sense of geography, for a text adventure. The map was awesome, and the images of locations were moody, but this wasn’t enough to raise this game’s status for me.

You've probably skipped The Innsmouth Case a couple of times on sale, just like me. But, if not convinced already, maybe you should check it out, not only if you're interested in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, because it is also a hilarious not so hard boiled detective story.

It's been a while since I've read his stories as a foundation for a series of essays on lovecraftian movies for a handful of print and online publications, amongst them Dagon and Cthulhu, both inspired by The Shadows Over Innsmouth, a story you should at least know, if you want to understand the interconnection with the lovecraftian world.

The Innsmouth Case however is neither retelling nor precisely recapturing the literature, so if you wanted to get into the game just for fun, you can. It's just that as always with referential storytelling you might not understand the humorous facets as much. I also don't think an adventure like this is going to prepare you for the books, though it does one thing better than many Lovecraft adaptions.

Those usually struggle to capture the unspeakable horror between the lines of what was told by the author rediscovered in pop culture during recent years. A guy like Cthulhu, for instance, isn't the tentacle faced baby Yoda of demonology depictions like Funko Pops make you want to believe.

In the eighties, a short story by H.P. Lovecraft usually was good for delivering a basic idea for a picture to be garnished with practical effects extravaganza. Which is awesome, by the way, in cases like From Beyond even more thought through than it appears at first sight. But as much gore galore can be entertaining, it's not the feeling of desperation like I get from the originals.

There's a reason Lovecraft works better as audio plays or maybe even audiobooks told by a single narrator. Even though in cosmic scale the stories create a rather intimate atmosphere depending on your individual interpretation. Using a format to be described more as interactive than a visual novel, using spare but beautifully sombre illustrations, appears to be comprehensible.

I'd call The Innsmouth Case a text adventure if it wasn't too easy to be confused with games relying heavily on keyboard input, which isn't the case. You've got your 27 endings reached via interconnecting plot fragments and plenty decisions to make, so you can discover completely new areas or meet the same people in the same situation, but heavily influenced by if you made friends with them earlier or not.

From my first hardly five minutes, where I've managed to drop the case and go home to watch TV, I was hooked until I finally saw the last possibility about 20 hours later. It might have helped the atmospheric score was not so essential I couldn't listen to the newest Mostrich Mixtape instead, but once I found out anything can happen in this story, I was highly motivated to explore what's called achievements on Nintendo Switch.

It doesn't matter if you seek help at an early stage or look for a walkthrough to puzzle last pieces that you basically have seen, but not in the correct order to log in the last two endings - like me - but confusingly as often platforms like Steam or Xbox seem to have their own additional achievement system to keep track on how often you've been talking about veganism in a playthrough for example.

Whilst that's ok to check what you could have missed along the way, I couldn't care less about this type of scoring, even though I could not hold back counting myself how many occasions of sexual intercourse can be put into a single playthrough, because there's a diverse variety of creatures at your service in The Innsmouth Case. My focus though is what made it to the Switch, keeping track what's left to explore.

If there's one thing to criticize in this game it's that due to interactivity (and maybe confusion with previous decisions in cache) you will find mismatching text pages once you dig deep enough. That can be an ending speaking of a reward you did not collect for instance, but at that point you will have skipped plenty of pages anyway and will make enough sense of it. It's just not as perfect as it could be.

Additionally, I would have preferred a more direct connection to the decision tree, so it's possible to instantly go back and see what would happen if chosen differently. There are chapters you can address to go back and take it again from there, but you will skip quite some text and action sometimes to get to a specific moment again.

The Innsmouth Case however makes that up with the weird tale of a private detective at the bottom of existence. Once you're on a case of a missing girl in Innsmouth, you will have to save expenses and decide to go by bus or hitchhike, to give you a hint of the situation (a bit like the original protagonist waiting for the bus, because he can't afford a train ticket, if I remember correctly).
It's up to the player now if you can bring the girl back home and the level of molestation it takes, well, if it doesn't end in death anyway. Chances are significantly high.

Could be it's because The Innsmouth Case speaks to my bitter generation grown old on not growing up, but I like the incorporated dark humor referencing b-movies and games from the eighties, first person shooters from the nineties, experience of the second Star Wars trilogy but also confrontation with mobile app addiction and gender diversity along the rituals of Dagon with the possibility to travel dimensions.

It falls into place more naturally than a movie like Cthulhu, which made an interesting take on homosexuality within the cult but felt a bit constructed. It's more like "What the heck, sleep with me creature of unknown ancestry, I'm on vacation here!"
And The Innsmouth Case sure is more refreshing than the latest survival horror.

I know there are plenty of lovecraftian games, from very outdated point'n'click adventures like Call Of Cthulhu: Shadow Of The Comet to a more recent Gibbous - A Cthulhu Adventure that despite the lovely artstyle I still have in backlog. And there's even another text based game called Omen Exitio: Plague, that on first sight appeared as a more serious take on old game books and also more complicated, keeping track with a stat sheet, map and everything.

I will dive deeper into that sometime, but let me tell you this: Even looking to expand my adventure addiction from point'n'click to visual novels, I'm not sure I knew I was looking for something like The Innsmouth Case, but it turns out I was!

It's perfect for me, as I too often skip my reading for a game and I like to listen to music when reading and I can do this here as well. It's an entertaining take on lovecraftian horror by using noir tropes in a sarcastic if not cynical way, so two things I love matching with the dark humour of mine. I don't regret a second spent on The Innsmouth Case, I'm just sad it's over.

I really want more like this, but meanwhile, check it out yourself. You get it on sale often and who knows, maybe you too didn't know it's exactly what you wanted?
Even if it's just for the reason it permits you to finally decide for the things other games won't, because the format allows to paraphrase the effect, rather than having to manifest it in pixels - which makes connecting it to H.P. Lovecraft an utterly brilliant move, if you ask me.

Fun game with good writing and characters that even let me do some stuff that you usually don't get to do.

Like - have sex with an eldritch abomination. I did not expect that.

This is not for people who want a "serious" game. Though the game does hit the note when you make the "right" choices, it is a humouristic approach and can't be arsed to take it's main character very seriously. I loved that. Others might not.

With its 27 ending, there is a lot of replay value. I have unlocked five endings right now and still a lot to replay and see where it might lead me.