Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss Review

To Play It Is To Go Mad

HIGH That’s a very impressive Shoggoth you’ve got there.

LOW Attempting to play the game on PS5.

WTF What’s with all the headless corpses?

Everything about Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss seems like it’s aimed directly at me.

A Mythos game? I’m down for that. Developed by the people behind stellar narrative adventure The Council? Tell me more. Gameplay that cribs from Frogwares‘ amazing Sherlock Holmes games, complete with mysteries to be solved using a mind palace? Every part of this is setting it up to be at least a contender for my game of the year, yet I’m going to recommend that people stay the hell away from it because it’s the most broken thing I’ve ever played on the PS5.

To be fair, I will start with works about The Cosmic Abyss.

It’s an interesting story, well told. Set in 2053, after decades of severe climate change have flooded the world, the adventure follows government investigators looking into spooky, extradimensional threats. One of their compatriots has gone dark, forcing main character Noah and partner Elsa to search her home for clues. One quick jaunt into a bizarre alternate dimension later, Noah is missing three fingers and one partner, leaving him haunted and desperate to mount a rescue operation.

He gets the opportunity when he’s tasked with exploring an abandoned deep-sea facility that a a billionaire constructed to discover the ocean’s secrets, yet he wound up disappearing without a trace. Well, that’s not entirely accurate since the action in Cosmic Abyss is largely about following the traces the missing folks have left behind using Key, an AI attached to Noah’s deep-sea survival suit.

In addition to the aforementioned mind palace, Key is the source of Cosmic Abyss‘ defining investigative mechanic – the pulse scanner. And what a mechanic it is! Every time the player picks up an item they can examine it to determine what type of item it is, and what it’s made of. Once they’ve successfully identified it, they unlock the ability to ping any similar items in the area, allowing them to quickly locate anything from paper documents to metal alloys that went out of use millions of years ago.

It’s one of the best investigative mechanics I’ve ever seen in a title like this because it allows the player to find strange and unconventional solutions that absolutely fit the setting. For example, a document revealed that a creature was capable of becoming invisible, but I’d already scanned its tissue elsewhere in the area, allowing my suit’s sonar to find otherwise undetectable lumps of flesh. It’s weird and unconventional in the best way, and I absolutely adored working through the various puzzle areas with its help.

Structurally, Cosmic Abyss is broken down into a handful of settings, each one packed with items to interact with, lore to take in, and environmental storytelling to puzzle out. This is the rare kind of experience that asks players to figure out unusual things like the ages of different parts of an ancient city, so that they can determine which one of the warring alien factions was responsible for a particular piece of technology. It’s dense, occasionally baffling, and incredibly rewarding when a solution finally becomes clear.

There’s even a mutation mechanic that allows the player to upgrade their mind in order to make connections between clues easier, and a corruption mechanic that degrades those abilities if the player takes the easy way out and uses the simple solution to puzzles. While there are a couple of dangerous creatures to be avoided and one very bad ending, Cosmic Abyss isn’t a horror game in the traditional sense. It’s short on scares and long on slow, methodical investigation in a way that feels fresh and innovative all the way through.

If only it ran on the hardware!

This is the part of my review I wasn’t looking forward to writing, but it can’t be avoided. Cosmic Abyss is not a long game, and it based on my experience as a reviewer, I’d estimate it should be completed in about five or six hours, and faster for the very clever.

It took me twenty because the game broke constantly.

My first issue was in the tutorial for the mind palace mechanic. I accidentally pressed the circle button during it and exited the screen, and afterwards I was unable to bring the mind palace back up, locking all progress. Reloading a checkpoint and deleting my save file accomplished nothing – from then on, re-doing that tutorial simply bricked the game. I was able to turn off the tutorials (which should not be necessary!) in order to proceed, but the problems didn’t stop there.

Quests failed to acknowledge being completed, objectives wouldn’t update, and buttons on my controller would cease functioning until I closed the game and restarted it. Sometimes, those restarts would delete my save file, which is basically the worst thing a game can do to a player, and it happened over and over again.

I was truly impressed by the parts I had successfully played through, though, so I kept coming back by speedrunning the areas I’d already completed and keeping my fingers crossed that I’d make more progress on the next try. I can’t even guess how many times I trudged through the sunken tutorial house before finally getting the credits to roll. This entire experience is a technical disaster on the PS5.

I’ve checked other people’s videos online and apparently it works fine on the PC? I guess I was just unlucky to be reviewing it on PlayStation, and I suppose if one was planning to buy on PC instead, this could be even read as a positive review of Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss! Unfortunately, it is a review of the PS5 version, and this is something — at the time of review, at least — that I can’t recommend anyone play.

Rating: 2 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Big Bad Wolf and published by NACON. It currently available on PC, PS5 and XBS/X. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 20 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode, but it should have taken 6. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was rated M by the ESRB, and includes Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Violence. There’s just a ton of gore in the game, and a lot of swearing. There’s also some implied sexual violence that is in no way depicted in the game, thankfully. It’s bleak from beginning to end, please take the M rating seriously.

Colorblind Modes: The game does contain colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which cannot be resized. Actually, at certain points the audio failed to play, and the subtitles were the only evidence that someone was speaking. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are not remappable.

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