Call of the Sea

Call of the Sea is a lovecraftian FPP puzzle game. It’s 1934 and you play as Norah, she’s looking for her husband. Her husband went missing while trying to find a cure for her unknown sickness, this sickness has run through her family. No one has survived it, but by all that’s holy her husband decided that wasn’t acceptable and went looking for that cure. Norah receives a random package one day with information on her husband which leads to her going after her now that she finally has a lead. It takes her to a beautiful and lush island paradise that doesn’t have a name or visitors really due to it being called cursed by natives in the local islands, also it’s rather perilous to get there due to a mix of sudden gusts of bad weather and lots of very strong, sharp, big, fuck you type rocks ready to eat through the ships’ hulls

The game focuses on Norah’s interactions on the island. She follows her husband’s footsteps and tries to figure out what to do and where to go. She starts to see things and having out of body experiences blacking out and showing up in new locations. Oh, and her sickness starts to come back, aaaaaaaand gets worse much to her chagrin. She has to put together the notes from her husband’s expedition to figure out not only how to solve puzzles but also that there are even puzzles in some cases. Most of this game is just walking around and reading notes, there’s a few puzzles around each level, but only a few are hard, almost all of the puzzles are pretty easy to figure out and solve.

It takes a short while to beat the game, even if you know exactly how to solve everything and where all the notes were it’d still take six to eight hours at least. There is a lot of stuff to see and do in the game, most of the game though is just walking around but the island is really pretty, it’s not all that realistic, it’s very bright and colorful, albeit very cartoony in color palette. There are all sorts of different types of puzzles in the game, most of them are logic based, you can usually see what’s happening so even when you don’t do something right you can see what you did wrong and then go about fixing it.

The game takes anywhere from eight to twelve hours to beat, depending on how much you just wanna look around. I spent closer to like fifteen or twenty hours but I kept just looking around cause everything was what I like to call prettyful, I know that’s not a real word, I don’t give a fuck, it’s my word, I likes it like that dun dun dun duuun. *coughs* I’m not old, you’re old. So very pretty game, good puzzles, FANTASTIC voice acting, this is a generally pretty good game. You might notice Norah’s voice actress, Crissy Jones, if you played Firewatch or Darksiders III anyways, honestly you should recognize her from Firewatch immediately as Delilah since the roles sound similar, unlike when she voiced Fury from Darksiders III.

Overall I really liked the game, I really like Crissy Jones’ voice and the husband’s voice was done by Yuri Lowenthal, another person I love the voice of. The only drawback I can see with the game is that it’s a LOT of a walking sim. This isn’t a problem for me personally as I love walking sims, I’ve reviewed a few and to my knowledge I’ve only really disliked one. However, I also realize that walking sim is not a particularly popular game genre. Then again I don’t think puzzle is either, but that is at least more popular. The thing I can tell people not into walking sims, due to walking and monologuing, is that the game isn’t particularly slow so the walking isn’t too bad, and Crissy has a wonderful voice so listening to her talk to herself isn’t bad. This isn’t like, what was it, Dear Esther which made, well, most people want to blow their brains out. That is the one almost everyone hates because it’s super slow and the monologues are boring as sin. Everyone who dislikes them almost always points to that game, this is NOT that, most walking sims aren’t that bad, I promise, just give’em a chance. So I hope this game does well as I really liked it, and I love Cthulhu based games.