Indie Game of the Week 481: Call of the Sea

An odd fact about my tastes in adventure gaming is that I've liked almost every first-person adventure game I've played except Myst, even though it (along with The 7th Guest) is pretty much the reason any of these others exist. Out of the Blue's Call of the Sea is perhaps closer than most Indie games of this format to approach what Myst did back in the day, dropping you on a mysterious island full of epistolary storytelling and copious amounts of notes required to decipher its handful of mechanism puzzles to reach the perplexing and esoteric truth at the core of it all. It also has a hell of a lot of walking around, for which a gingerly trot toggle can only do so much. Even so, there's something about Call of the Sea's tight, chapter-like approach and in-game hint recording system that makes it the superior supernatural sleuthing experience. That a whole bunch of Cthulhus, of course. Shout outs to the big guy, you made it into another one of these first-person puzzle games (after Magrunner and probably a few others I'm forgetting).

Ominous structures made of otherworldly geometry aside, this seems like a nice place to put up a deckchair and enjoy a few daiquiris.

Moving back a few steps, Call of the Sea concerns the young socialite Norah Everhart who for years has been plagued with a mysterious skin disease and nightmares of a strange island and its underwater depths. Her husband Harry, a renowned scientist and explorer from a powerful family, traveled across the world seeking a cure for his wife's ailment until he vanished during an expedition to an island just off Tahiti. A letter arrives for Norah attached to a key, giving her a more definite location where he disappeared and she takes a voyage there to hunt for any traces of him and his companions, only discovering upon landing there that it was the same island from her visions. What follows is a story told through journal entries and notes about what happened to the expedition, the Lost Shannon vessel that brought them there, and what any of it has to do with Norah's condition and lucid dreams. Like many of these modern first-person adventure games the puzzles and storytelling are intertwined, with the former often serving as a carrot on the stick for the latter rather than the typical inverse.

Each chapter of the game has an informal structure that comprises an exploration phase and a puzzle phase. While exploring you learn more about the expedition and the island but also start finding puzzle hints that, once all these hints are assembled, give you everything you need to solve the one big puzzle for that chapter that opens the way forward to the next. These puzzles starts fairly easy, with the first having you piecing together the correct arrangement of a five-part stack of ideograms gleaned from wooden posts to drop a bridge that takes you to the expedition's main campsite. They get progressively more involved from there, often requiring you search high and low to get the hints you need while also ensuring you've picked up as much about the ongoing story (or, rather, what happened in the past to these explorers) in the meanwhile. It's a pretty elegant format for a game and storytelling approach like this, not necessarily holding your hand for its puzzles but at least giving you some indication that you have all the tools needed to solve it: if the hints page has a gap in it, that's a gap you'll probably need to fill before you start pushing buttons all willy-nilly.

The Notes section of your journal dedicates a couple of pages to the puzzle for that chapter. This was a little easier than most. Man, she must've spent quite a while doodling that gate. The idle rich, huh?

Call of the Sea has an attractive presentation, taking the colorful visuals of its South Pacific tropical setting and juxtaposing them against the ominous black basalt found across the coastline where the Lady Shannon ran ashore and then even more alien environments as you head further inland and discover more of this unnamed island's ancient secrets. Environments are fun to explore for all the notes and other clues you can pick up and examine, spinning documents and photos around to see if any additional notes are written on the back, and filling Norah's journal with revelation after revelation once you've unearthed them. The environments can be a little awkwardly big to roam around in if you need to double back for anything you missed, though many of them have shortcuts to open up to mitigate the backtracking to some extent. Each chapter takes place in a new location, never mixing with the older ones (at least so far; I'm about five chapters in), so there's never that much geography to hoof it across but it does incentivize you soon after starting to make doubly sure you've checked everything in one area before moving onto the next.

I've really been enjoying Call of the Sea so far; my playthrough was inspired to some degree by its recently released sequel Call of the Elder Gods but really because I wanted another one of these cerebral puzzle games to sink my teeth into though am still a little intimidated by Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (COTS is something of a training arc). The quality voice acting means the thoughts and emotions of Norah and the expedition are well conveyed, the environments find that balance between realistic clutter and gameplay-conducive lucidity when looking for clues, the visuals are charming until they aren't (in a deliberately eerie fashion), and its linear approach still allows for exploration of its spaces and various asides like bonuses and in-jokes to discover, for as immersion breaking as they might be. I'll have almost certainly seen the game through between writing this article and when it gets published this weekend, so I'll leave the usual coda of my final thoughts in the comments below. It's not always the quickest on its feet, but occasionally you'll want that extra downtime to ponder the next puzzle. Ol' Cthulhu and Dagon have been asleep for aeons; they can always wait a little longer for you to figure out which mystical rune buttons to press.

Joining Lovecraftian mythos with puzzle games always felt like a match made in R'lyeh, because the whole idea of both is to fry your brain.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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