Call of the Sea

Call of the Sea is a first-person point-and-click adventure that tries to put a new spin on the Cthulhu mythos. With a colorful and vibrant art style, the game is unfortunately marred by exposition-heavy writing and questionable puzzle design.

It’s the 1930s, and a woman called Nora Everharti is traveling to a remote island in the Pacific in search of her husband, Harry. You see, Harry was frustrated with his wife’s strange skin disease, which marked her with black spots, and went off in search of a cure. One day, then, Nora receives a package detailing where her husband went – an island southwest of Tahiti –, and she decides she too ought to travel there and discover what happened to him.

Call of the Sea doesn’t make a great first impression. The game starts with a dream sequence – always a red flag, the narrative crutches that they tend to be – and as soon as Nora wakes up, the first words we hear coming out of her mouth are blatant exposition: “Those horrible dreams again!” she cries, “I’ve had them repeatedly ever since my mother died and left me that music box in her will,” she says to herself, alone in the room. Maybe she didn’t say that, and we are only hearing her thoughts, sure, but that doesn’t help the situation in the slightest: it would have been much less awkward to just break the fourth wall and address us directly. Narrative honesty goes a long way.

But Nora doesn’t stop there, as there are many more details we should know about: “Harry always said that old family heirloom had something to do with my family’s strange disease. That’s why you took it with you when you left, isn’t it? Almost a year ago,” she says and then begins to imitate him, “If the doctors won’t give us an answer about your illness, I’ll search for one myself.” It’s a clunky opening that makes Nora sound totally insane: the right answer to the question “why is she thinking/saying all those things,” after all, is simply “so the player can know about them.” She doesn’t seem to be a real, tangible (interesting) person at this moment; she’s a character – and a poorly written one at that.

What makes this narrative decision even more mindboggling is the fact that Nora has a diary, which can be accessed with the press of a button. So, all these details could have been stored there, leaving Nora room to think and act like a normal person. Unfortunately, I don’t know if they believed we were not going to bother with the diary, but the thing is that the writers make Nora frequently repeat out loud everything that is written there, which, in turn, renders the diary completely moot.

In the prologue, for example, we can access it to discover some details about Harry’s expedition. It says that he traveled far and wide in his search; that one day his letters suddenly stopped arriving; that he sailed from San Francisco to Tahiti, and finally proceeded to a mysterious island feared by the locals. Then, as soon as Chapter 1 begins and Nora is on a boat en route to the very same island, this is said out loud by her:

“You left a year ago to search for a cure for my affliction. The letters kept me close to you, but suddenly they stopped coming. What happened, old pal? What did you find? Whatever it was, it led you to hire a crew and set sail in San Francisco to Tahiti, and from there to this place. An island in the middle of the Pacific that the locals refuse to even name.”

In other words, the game teaches us right from the outset that one of its main features is pretty useless, despite framing it as important: Norma keeps writing in her diary, and her logs are even considered a kind of collectible. (A side note: Nora will say “old pal” more times than Gatsby says “old sport”, which is saying something.)

However, the main problem is not even that she’s just repeating what is already written in the diary – although that is a problem – but that what she’s saying is, by itself, also exposition in a pure, crystallized state, untouched by narrative sense: it doesn’t make for her to be saying/thinking those things in that way. And it’s useless exposition, too: if we didn’t know Harry set sail from San Francisco to Tahiti, for example, we – smart as we are – would still understand the story perfectly.

Especially since Call of the Sea’s story is very simple, even though it still fails at what it attempts to do. Early on, Nora spots what appears to be, well, Dagon, towering over the island in the distance. Add the statues of fish heads and murals depicting fish people scattered around the place, and the game makes it clear that we’re dealing with the Cthulhu Mythos. But the narrative tries to subvert it: instead of being horrified by the monsters and the island, Nora… feels at home, sensing that she belongs there.

True to form, when it comes to Call of the Sea, this is repeated often. Every chance she gets, Nora will wonder about how odd it is that the island feels safe to her despite its strange monuments; how she feels great there, free for the first time in her life. She tells us all those things all the time – and writes them in her diary, of course –, but we still have to take her word for it because, at the same time, the murals on the island have pictures of human beings becoming slaves of the fish people. Nora feels free, but the lore is telling us that sea monsters will put shackles on her: it’s a contradiction that the narrative doesn’t even try to touch upon. Coupled with some other issues – such as never making Nora’s disease appear painful, as she feels cured as soon as she sets foot on the island – this robs the final choice in the game of any dramatic force: one of the two options available for Nora still feels absurd to us despite all the “I feel great here” lines.

The dissonance between the player and Nora can be a constant thing if we choose to explore the environment out of the intended order. In Chapter 3, for example, we come across a tent with some pictures and a recording. Some words written behind one of the photos mention an “attack” on Harry’s crew, which prompts Nora to exclaim, worried: “An attack? What attack?!” The voice recording right next to it, then, explains in detail what happened in said attack, but Nora never reacts to it. The dissonance, then, comes if we hear the recording before checking the picture, as Nora will keep ignoring the recording and being surprised by the note behind the photo. The opposite also happens: Nora may come across a piece of a puzzle and comment on how it’s just like the others, even though that is the first one we’ve encountered.

Call of the Sea is a point-and-click adventure in which we control Nora in the first-person and explore some environments in search of clues to solve a specific puzzle. There’s usually one big puzzle in a level, with a lot of clues scattered around for us to find and Nora to write in her journal. Then, with all the clues found, we go to the puzzle and try to figure out its logic; if the clues indicate the order we have to rotate certain objects, for example, or if they show the shape of the thing we must build.

This puzzle design leads to some problems. The first one is the need to gather all the clues without the game telling us when we’ve done it: we’re always left wondering whether we are not cracking the puzzle because we are failing to figure things out, or if it’s because we simply haven’t acquired all the information yet. This can lead us to sweep the whole area again for missing clues, which can be a real chore, as Nora moves with the speed of a lazy paraplegic snail suffering from severe anemia.

Another issue with exploration is that if we just look at an important object and press the action button… nothing will happen. For Nora to react to the object in question, we must look at it from the right angle so an “eye” icon can appear over it. In other words, instead of the infamous “pixel hunting” that plagued many point-and-click adventures of old, Call of the Sea has a new “angle hunting” that is just as frustrating.

But let’s say that we have successfully gathered all the clues. What do you do with them? Well, sometimes they just straight up give us the answer, showing the exact order in which we must do things, which means that the puzzle amounted to nothing more than busywork; that it was just about exploring the island to collect the clues. But sometimes these clues are as they should be: just the beginning. They’re cryptic, so we still must figure out what they actually mean, while the fantastic nature of the puzzle itself produces a haunting sense of wonder. The last puzzle in Chapter 3, for example, about a huge “organ” built into a rock, is excellent, but puzzles like these are a rare find in Call of the Sea.

Finally, we also have the case in which the clues can misdirect us. I won’t be surprised to discover that most people found the last puzzle of Chapter 4 the most difficult in the game by a good margin. After all, it’s not our fault: the clues clearly direct us to the importance of joining symbols to form words, and then moving a dial to form sentences, but that’s of no help at all. It’s as if the puzzle were about counting how many times the word “heart” appears in a single cutscene in Kingdom Hearts and the clues were explaining to us the seven possible metaphorical uses of the term in the game…quite missing the point.

What Call of the Sea has going for it is its art style. Few people would associate Lovecraft’s work with cell-shaded graphics, bright colors, and a vibrant aesthetic, but since the narrative never leans into the horror aspect of some of its elements – Nora feels great there, if you recall –, it fits the overall mood of the game and makes the more impressive environments stand out a bit more.

Call of the Sea may have some good ideas and impressive visuals, but its foundations are too shaky: the writing is clunky at best, and the puzzle design is often quite frustrating.

February 09, 2025.