Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

The first entry in a planned-but-never-realized trilogy of games based on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a 2005 first-person survival horror game heavily based around Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and also has plot elements borrowed from the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG adventure modules published by Chaosium, Inc. 
The game puts the player in the role of a former detective named Jack Walters, known for this preternatural hunches. In 1916, while still a police detective, Jack is summoned to deal with an armed standoff between the authorities and an armed cult in Boston, Massachusetts, he discovers alien technology within the cult's manor house and quickly blacks out after activating a gate-like device. Deemed insane and sent to Arkham Asylum, he is shortly released and spends the next six years in a fugue state before regaining his former memories and personality. Trying to restore a sense of normality to his interrupted life, Jack resumes his former career, opening a private detective agency. In 1922, he takes on a missing persons case in the isolationist port town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. What he discovers there will severely test his physical and mental limits, and bring into question his own true nature. 
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=Overview= 
The game was notable for being among the first FPS games to feature no in-game HUD by default, and an in-game sanity meter (the first video game to use the latter element being Eternal Darkness). The sanity meter tracks Jack's mental resistance to distressing imagery and/or alien mental influence. If it drops too low, Jack's vision will start to blur and waver, he may start to hear hallucinatory audio, and the player's controls may be scrambled. Taking too much sanity damage will result in "Massive Sanity Failure," whereupon Jack will commit suicide with whatever weapon he has at hand or go irrevocably insane (notably the threshold for suicide is lower than going insane with the in-game tips even advising the player to holster a loaded firearm if something is inflicting sanity damage as well as a unique animation where it fails if Jack's weapon is empty). 
The lack of an in-game HUD necessitates the use of iron sights on firearms for accurate shots, and the player will need to mentally track ammunition expenditure to avoid being caught with an empty firearm at an inopportune moment (reloading with a partially-loaded firearm will simply return the unused rounds to the common ammunition pool, however). The game is also somewhat unique in that the trajectory of a bullet is directly tied to the angle of the firearm's barrel when it is fired; for example, if the player reloads the M1911 and fires before the reload animation brings the barrel back to the direction he's looking, the fired bullet will travel in the direction it was pointing when it was fired. 
The game also has Jack's movement speed be tied to his currently equipped weapon (moving fastest with a melee weapon or pistol equipped and slowest with the Tommy Gun) but oddly this penalty still applies if the currently selected weapon is holstered (So Jack moves faster with a holstered Colt rather than a holstered Tommy Gun despite still carrying both weapons) and Jack's arms will tire if he aims a weapon for too long, causing weapon sway which ties into the health system as Jack can take damage to various limbs, from light/heavy bleeding, broken bones, or poison with broken arms making weapons have increased and constant sway, with infinite use morphine available to temporarily negate the effects of injuries.
To increase the survival horror factor, firearms and/or ammunition cannot be looted from killed enemies and must instead be found throughout the game's various levels. Ammunition in this game is also capped to a maximum value Jack can carry with him at any given time, specified below for each weapon. Jack can, however, use a firearm in melee when it is empty. 
An unrealistic visual element used for this game's firearms is the extreme amount of muzzle smoke each gun puts out whenever one is fired. This is opaque enough to immediately but briefly obscures the target being fired at if the firearm in question was being aimed at the time. This design choice is ostensibly to discourage "spray-and-pray" shooting, but would only be realistic with older black powder firearms, and then only after a few shots in the same direction.
=Handguns=
== Colt M1911 ==
The original Colt M1911 is the most common handgun available in the game, is chambered for .45 ACP, and has a magazine capacity of 8+1 rounds, with the extra round available if Jack performs a tactical reload (even though his only reload animation involves him racking the slide every time, which in reality would eject a still-chambered round). Unfortunately for fans of this handgun in real life, its stopping power in this game is among the lowest of the in-game weapons- two or three headshots are necessary to take down a deformed Innsmouth citizen, the most common in-game enemy (who are in fact hybrids created from humans interbreeding with the ichthyoid Deep One monsters). Eight-round magazines for the M1911 would only become common in later decades, with an M1911 in 1922 most likely using seven-round magazines.
The M1911 can be first found in the "Jailbreak" chapter of the game in a police weapons locker, when Jack sneaks into the Innsmouth police station while evading a mob of deformed Innsmouth citizens out for his blood, after his investigation delves too deep into the town's secrets. 
Many NPCs use this gun, but it is less common than the M1917 revolver among hostile Innsmouth citizens. It is treated as the standard-issue handgun among the various NPCs who are part of the FBI ingame, even though the FBI would not issue a semiautomatic pistol until the 1980s (and the FBI was still known as the "Bureau of Investigation" in the 1920s). Two notable named NPCs using this weapon include the game's depiction of J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Bureau of Investigation at that time in its history, who hands Jack two Colt M1911s at different times during the Marsh Gold Refinery raid, and Lucas Mackey, an undercover FBI agent sent to investigate Innsmouth's possible criminal activities before Jack arrived. 
thumb|none|300px|Original Colt M1911 (dated 1913) - .45 ACP
== Smith & Wesson M1917 ==
The Smith & Wesson M1917 is the less common of the two handguns available in-game. The in-game version is chambered in the fictional ".45 LR" caliber (in reality, the M1917 uses .45 ACP rounds held in moon clips) in a six-round cylinder. This is likely a mistake on the developers end to refer to ".45 Long Colt". It is commonly used by deformed Innsmouth citizens, and is the most powerful handgun in the game, with increased damage and recoil over the in-game M1911, despite the fact both handguns use the same caliber in real life.
The words on the barrel read "Colt 45 D.A." which is only present on the Colt M1917 variant of the revolver, and it lacks the release-latch seen on the Smith & Wesson variant, instead using the latch built into the blast guard like the Colt variant. However, due to the overall frame and grip design, it is primarily based on the Smith & Wesson M1917.
The M1917 is first available to the player in the Innsmouth Cannery section of the "Escape from Innsmouth" chapter of the game, and is commonly found in various places thereafter. A few notable named NPCs who use this weapon include USMC Sergeant Sam Carter, Captain Stephen Hearst (of the US Coast Guard Cutter Urania), and Sebastian Marsh (an influential figure in Innsmouth society who is behind one of the plot's major conspiracies). It is interesting to note that the M1917 is also featured in the introductory chapter of the game which takes place in 1916, one year before the revolver's historical release.
Earlier builds of the game included wooden grips and a chrome finish for this weapon, but it was eventually modified to have a grittier finish and ivory grips. The M1917 was also originally much more common and issued to the player at the start of the game, and used much more heavily than the 1911. 
=Shotguns=
== 12 Gauge Double Barreled Shotgun ==
A 12 Gauge Double Barreled Shotgun is found in the police station and various other areas of the game. It was originally intended to be a 4 bore elephant gun, as there are two shotguns that currently still exist in the game, an Iver Johnson Hercules 12 gauge double barrel shotgun which is only wielded by enemies, and the generic double barreled shotgun which is wielded by only the player and is known as a simply "double barrel 12 gauge shotgun". It has fancy engravings, a very large barrel, and a cheek-rest on the stock that remain to show its previous history in the game as an elephant gun.
== Iver Johnson Hercules 12 Gauge Shotgun ==
The Iver Johnson Hercules 12 gauge shotgun is a double barreled shotgun, smaller than the standard game shotgun and is only wielded by enemies. It was previously wielded by both the player and enemies in early versions of the game.
=Submachine Guns=
== M1921AC Thompson ==
An M1921AC Thompson can be found multiple times in the game. It has the standard 50-round drum magazine and the anachronistic Cutts compressor (a late feature introduced in 1926, after about 4 years after the events of the game). Earlier variants of the gun in the game could be used with a stick magazine that held 20 or 30 rounds (the amounts were switched as developers playtested it) before finally settling on the classic drum magazine. 
Notably, having a broken arm will heavily increase the recoil of the Thompson, making it much harder to control.
=Rifles=
== Springfield M1903 ==
The game features a Springfield M1903. The rifle in the game holds five rounds loaded into the internal magazine via stripper clip. Early variants of the rifle in game had working adjustable sights and a bayonet for melee-charges, as well as a scoped version for longer range sniping. The usable variant of the rifle only features a circular hood sight rather than the standard sights for an M1903. These are generally only fitted to protect the blade during transport.
It can first be found hidden near the start of the Refinery section of the game (notably counting toward an A rank if found) and later found aboard the Warship.
=Machine Guns=
== Browning M2HB ==
An anachronistic Browning M2HB is seen twice in the game, one in the Marsh Refinery where it is used by one of Marsh's men open fire on the player at the start of the refinery level and is called a "floor-mounted automatic rifle" by Jack, and again on the Cutter Urania where it was originally meant to be used by the player. The guns in release versions are no longer usable and the Urania version is described as "something else that's broken" by Jack upon inspection.
=Other=
== Flamethrower ==
The game features a flamethrower, mostly based on the anachronistic (as noted by the developers themselves) M2 Flamethrower, which is used by the player to melt ice away from a door and kill Josiah Bentley, a Star Spawn of Cthulhu. In earlier versions of the game, flamethrower could be wielded by players and carried around, however the decision to remove it was made as there were too many weapons in the game at that point in development. It currently is only carried by a US Marine and is then left in the snow. It is also worth noting that initially the flamethrower was a complete analogue of the M2 with three cylinders (as it can be seen in the old weapons render in this article), but was later changed to one large cylinder, in the style of the Kleinflammenwerfer M.16.
= Cut Weapons =
Multiple weapons were removed from the game and only exist in the beta. The weapons of beta version can be seen in the photo below and consist of the following:
== Mauser C96 ==
The game initially featured a Mauser C96 which was removed close to release as it was determined there were too many guns in the game. It was chambered for the 7.63x25mm Mauser round and the internal magazine held 10 rounds. It was reloaded via a stripper clip similar to the Springfield M1903 seen in the game.
==Mk 2 Hand Grenade==
The Mk 2 hand grenade was also planned to be usable, before it and other explosive weapons were cut.
== Winchester 1897 ==
Police in the game initially carried a pump-action Winchester M1897. It held five shells and was the lowest power shotgun in the game in order to balance out the gameplay with the double barreled shotguns.
Other gameplay weapons that have been omitted (as they are not firearms):
Stag knife, crowbar, baton, Yithian energy cannon, Deep One poison spear, fishing harpoon, dynamite, hatchet, metal bar, and a 2x4 with a nail through it. These can be seen in the old weapons render in this article.
== Early Weapons ==
Some other weapons existed only in early builds of the game, later replaced by others.
=== Colt Python ===
Early versions of the game included a rather crudely modeled Colt Python with wooden grips and a 4" barrel. The Python was a temporary weapon and removed once research began on authentic 1920s era weaponry where it was replaced with a Smith & Wesson M1917.
=== Luger P 08 ===
Early pre-2002 versions of the game include a Luger P 08 in 9mm. It was removed as it was determined there were too many handguns in the game.
=== Single Barreled Shotgun ===
Early pre-2002 versions of the game include a Single Barreled Shotgun. It was subsequently replaced with the more effective double-barreled shotgun.
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Category:First-Person Shooter
Category:Horror
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