Review originally published at https://www.thecerebralbore.com/


Cthulhu Saves the World is a Lovecraftian comic RPG from indie developer, Zeboyd Games, and a followup to their similar Breath of Death VII ...which I haven’t played yet because I thought Cthulhu was the first one ...it isn’t.

Pretentiously named ‘Cthulhu Saves the World: Super Hyper Enhanced Championship Edition Alpha Diamond DX Plus Alpha FES HD - Premium Enhanced Game of the Year Collector's Edition (without Avatars!)’ on the PC, the game was originally developed for XBLA before Kickstarting its way to Steam, where it’s regularly hocked for a pittance, along with Breath of Death VII.

So finally, a brand new PC, able to play the latest and greatest and what's the first thing we play? ...A 16-bit RPG, because BioShock Infinite is still downloading! Remember old Commodore games that used to have a little mini-game while the proper one loaded in the background? If you do, you’re getting old!

So, Cthulhu Saves the World is a self-knowing, comedy, 16-bit RPG ‘starring’ old squid-headed Cthulhu, a one time badass who gets all his powers nicked at the outset, and so he has to get them back.

The game has a narrator (in text form) who talks to the player, and the self-aware Cthulhu is constantly chipping in with fourth-wall breaking banter. The characters you meet along the way and their interaction is probably one of the highlights here, with a well written and often amusing script, but your enthusiasm may begin to wane as the game drags on.

The PC version also Includes a directors commentary, with additional text logs activated through numerous ‘question marks’ you find along the way.

Cthulhu features a tile-based overworld (like any 16-bit RPG), with combat shifting to a static, first person view, where you get a good look at the enemy sprites, similar to what you find in games like Dragon Quest.

Random encounters are frequent, and as ever, grind on you more and more as the hours start to rack up.

Interestingly, the game does have a very welcome feature, whereby if you defeat so many enemies within each area, the encounters stop until you reach the next room, giving you a chance to explore, unmolested. What a good idea this is! The only trouble is, the number of encounters you need to reach in order for them to cease is usually so high, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference unless you’re looking to spend ages in each one... I found myself just wanting to get through them!

‘Dungeons’, you see, are a series of large, maze-like rooms with LOTS of interconnecting paths which get more and more complex as you progress. There are a number of chests containing stuff worth having in each room, but the sheer size of these areas makes navigating increasingly frustrating (and the constant random encounters certainly don’t help). You can find yourself, quite by accident, stumbling upon the correct path and locating a room's exit, knowing there are chests you missed still in the room, and knowing they probably have something decent in, but it feels like too much of a pain to go back.

The game got hard later on, possibly because I couldn’t be bothered to hunt down all those chests in previous Dungeons ...which in turn meant I’d keep dying, which made the game even less fun.

Combat is menu driven, in a ‘classic’ style, which also means it isn’t particularly deep but the simplicity gives it a fast pace at least.

Most of the time, you’re just bashing away on the Return key to perform the default attack for each character, no time-consuming menu navigation or long animated attack sequences to sit through... but it also means the combat is not very engaging.

One pretty unique aspect is a combo system, whereby enemy attacks get increasingly stronger with every turn, so it is in your best interest to beat them ASAP before they beef up enough to crush you in a single turn.

Rather than make things more interesting though, this just means you can die very easily and quickly depending on which group of enemies you randomly come up against, which is very annoying if you’ve not saved for a while...

The difficulty is just all over the place, with you running into a mix of easy fights or impossible ones, within the same area during those last few hours. It’s just pot luck at this point, and I was having to save every few seconds as I inched forward, frequently having to reload after hitting another impossible (or at least unnecessarily difficult) set of enemies.

One thing I did like was the level up mechanic. Here, every time you occur the necessary XP, you get a choice of one of two perks to buff the stats of each character or grant new abilities. You get a full description of each, and have to make a choice which is more beneficial to you. It’s simple but really helps to keep you going, knowing you’re never far from the next level and perk choice.

This still isn’t enough to overcome the fact that playing just feels like too much of a slog however. You spend most of the battles just jabbing away at that return key, just keeping an eye on everyones health and occasionally healing. Admittedly, this is a very lazy tactic but it does help speed things up, thus relieving some tedium ...you do still die a lot, since you’re trying to rush through, so maybe it’s not such a good idea ...the combat is just so boring though!

All turn-based games just seem to bore the ♥♥♥♥ out of me these days in fact, and Cthulhu Saves the World was no exception. It’s the type of game you have to play whilst doing something else, like listening to the radio, because there isn’t enough substance there to distract you on its own.

The game is what it is. You certainly can’t complain at the price but it’s hard to get enthusiastic about either.

4/10

I have never really liked these types of games to begin with, if you like RPGs then you will probably llike this. Though im not really a fan of thm since every 000000.000000001 nanoseconds you get an ncounter. It has good humour in my opinion but the main thing is just the fact I stated in my last sentence.

Didn't care for it personally, I don't find it funny.

.

"Cthulhu Saves the World" is a 2D retro pixel "party RPG" dungeon crawler... and while it looks like yet another of thousands of RPG Maker asset flips, it's not! It's made with XNA game studio... and the product is probably a notch or two better than RPG Maker garbage, it's resulted in a playable game. However, I just previously played through and reviewed Breath of Death VII, by the same developer, and I'm disappointed to see it's pretty much the exact same game with different levels. Sigh. Asset flipping begins at home, I guess?

Since the game is identical to Breath of Death VII, my review will be also. If developers are going to copy + paste entire games, there's no grounds for complaining about copy + pasted reviews, especially when all the defects and shortcomings are the same across both games.

Even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the video game library/engine, Microsoft XNA Game Studio. It's rarely used, because it's arguably no better than construction kits like GameMaker Studio, RPGMaker and Clickteam Fusion, but it's also much harder to work with. Despite this, Microsoft XNA Game Studio has very limited capabilities, which go some way to explaining the poor quality of the game. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

"Cthulhu Saves the World" is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

After having fun with Breath of Death VII, I was expecting a similar experience with this game. Unfortunately, despite the familiar gameplay and humour and a number of things this game does better than it's predecessor, several serious bugs resulted in me giving up on this title before I could finish it.

For the most part, this game is quite similar to Breath of Death VII, with it's silly, self-aware story and simple JRPG gameplay. It does make numerous good improvements though, including improved animations, visuals, and the option to save anywhere and teleport to town, which was greatly appreciated. It does still end up feeling very repetitive and easy for most of the game though, the level design still isn't always the greatest, and the music still got very old very quickly.

Unfortunately, the stability of this game was not good. I played this game on the Steam Deck, and although I had no issues when playing through Breath of Death VII on the Steam Deck, this game kept freezing randomly when transitioning into or out of a fight. Originally this was quite rare, so I mostly just ignored it and made sure to save frequently so I didn't lose much when it did happen, but it seemed to become more frequent the farther into the game I got, and eventually I gave up. "No worries," I though, "I'll just play the rest of the game on PC." Unfortunately, I encountered other issues when playing on PC, including certain button presses sometimes not registering on my controller and the speed of the game being far faster than it was supposed to be (it seems to be tied to the framerate, which was much higher on my PC). Although there might have been ways to fix these problems, I was no longer willing to spend time trying to get this game to work, so I gave up and moved on.

TL;DR This short, simple JRPG is similar to it's predecessor, with a funny story, entertaining gameplay, and a cheap price. However, it has many of the same flaws, including feeling repetitive and tedious, and several serious bugs I encountered on both the Steam Deck and PC made it almost unplayable. As a result, I wasn't able to finish this game and I can't recommend it as a result.

Game crashes during the intro...
Unplayable.

Cthulhu Saves the World is cute, but... uhhh...

it’s bad.

like

BAD.

On the overworld there’s a weird sensitivity thing that makes you move 1-3 spaces on every button push so going through doors or opening chests is hell.

Combat is simultaneously overly complicated and sooooo boooooorrrrriiiiinnnnggggg.

and the map design...

each dungeon is an overly complicated maze full of constant random encounters.

Like... all off the things I complained about in Final Fantasy Legend / Final Fantasy Legend II, but in those games the maps felt DESIGNED. In this game the maps felt thrown together thoughtlessly.

That said the art was cute, the characters were cute, the dialogue was funny.

IDK I kinda feel like it would have been a very good visual novel, but as a turn based RPG it was too painful for us to play more than an hour and a half.

Do not recommend.

(visual novel version please?)

Read the FULL review here: https://gemsimov.com/game-reviews/f/cthulhu-saves-the-world---a-review

Hello everyone, I am the eldritch monstrosity of inexplicable proportions and dimensions, G.E.M.Simov, a being wielding forbidden knowledge… Come to share it with you in the form of a review pertaining to Cthulhu Saves the World.

Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point.

Gameplay

This is a JRPG. It is almost a joke JRPG, but in reality the amount of effort put into it is quite impressive, thus rendering it a not-joke JRPG, though due to the fact it is a JRPG it is a joke. More on that later.

Much like every JRPG, the game of Cthulhu Saves the World (henceforth CSW) is separated into 3 modes of play: Zone exploring mode, Combat mode, Map exploring mode (listed in order of appearance).

In any case, this game is a JRPG through and through, and by picking the INSANE difficulty, what one subjects themselves to is a grind that goes beyond insane. I mentioned 200 fights before the first boss was even remotely killable, well, the second boss - who is somewhat optional - will require at least 2x that… On top of it. That’s owed up to the fact that the amount of damage it does is around 50% higher than that of the first boss, as well as to the fact that enemies in the area have 100% more Health Points than the enemies so far faced by the Player, whilst also dealing about two times as much damage.

The grind is obtuse, especially considering the fact that every time the Player Characters level up they need more experience to reach the next level, leading into an unbelievable amount of killing the same thing over and over again. Carpal Tunnel, as I said. Spam the A button and wait for your bones to turn to dust.

I must admit that the monstrous difficulty really makes the combat intense, but the fact that one needs to engage in combat hundreds, even thousands of times to even be able to squeak out a win feels wrong.

Thus, this game is best played on the lowest difficulty and completed as quickly as possible. 1/3

Presentation

This game’s presentation is both intriguing and unfortunate. It is unfortunate due to the fact that the developers have chosen a 16-bit style to emulate, which is not something that provides an opportunity for high fidelity. As such, the appearance of the game is exclusively pixel-art of varying quality and degrees of complexity.

There are a few things that I’d point at and say: “this looks unreasonably uncanny!” such as any human character, but then I would like to turn around and look at most of the inhuman characters and say that they look really interesting - an example would be Sharpe. The same applies for many things in the game.

The Zones that the Player explores are very same-y and visually boring, but then when the Player enters combat the background of the fight is reflective of where the Player Character is in the Zone, which is an impressive feature, and, not only that, but the backgrounds all look impressively good!

Then, however, there’s the sprites of the enemies, which tend to be very generic, in a sense, very tried and true, and there’s a LARGE amount of recolors - using the same sprite but it’s blue instead of red, this time. Simultaneously, though, some of the sprites are really funky - an example would be Snailey, who is your friend until he no longer is, or the Shogoth, or the Whale. But that’s anomalous. What’s really impressive and actually supremely cool is the fact that every single enemy has an alternative sprite for when they are affected by the Insane ailment, and those tend to be VERY cool - again, the Whale comes to mind.

This game does that very adequately - contradicting itself. There are musical scores that are very good, then there are those that are annoying, at best, made far more annoying by the fact that whenever one enters a battle the music cuts out and swaps to the SAME music track that plays over EVERY battle, which track cuts out as soon as the battle is over and the old music starts playing again. Experiencing songs in snippets of 10 seconds is not a good way of doing it, and the constant cutting becomes grating and annoying.

There’s the issue of everything being monstrously loud, which potentially only exasperates the issue of the battle/zone tracks swapping constantly, but then it is very appropriate for the quieter, moodier and more atmospheric tracks that really make this game sound good. ALSO, the ambient music in R’lyeh is definitely NOT a good pick.

The sound effects aren’t anything spectacular, but then there’s the fact that combat animations take an incredibly short time, which is such a god-send in a JRPG, for when I compare this to most other JRPGs it’s one of the most rapidly going combat systems out there, and that’s because the animations are all very brief and tiny.

The game features some really good art in the cutscenes, and I really like it, but then it features some very bland and almost bad sprites for ordinary townspeople…

In response to the Developer commentaries, I quite liked the bridges. The layered levels were the one engaging thing about the zones, frankly, with the exception of the Ghost Forest, which actually looked really cool.

I suppose one could say it’s a game of opposites. We’ve got well delivered jokes that are somewhat amusing and then some that are just overwhelmingly cringeworthy, there are some interesting implementations of stuff and then there are ones that make me want to bawl my eyes out. It is a joke game, but, still, the presentation is so wibbly-wobbly that I can’t put my finger on it. 2/3

Story

As previously mentioned, this is a joke game. As such, almost (if not everything) in the game exists with the goal of being utilized as a funny, or as the foundation for a funny. The funny can be an actual joke, or something amusing, or something that induces vast amounts of cringe. That leads into the story being nothing special (or worthwhile) and thus results in a lackluster experience. At one point I was asking myself why I was playing the game, considering the fact that there was no fun in the playing of the game and there was no fun in the unveiling of the story.

In short, “I want die”. For what it was, it was okay. There is an alternative story, there are some shenanigans here and there, but there’s not that much to be spoken of. I did not truly enjoy it, even if it was amusing enough to not be bad.

Also, there is no fourth wall. Is that a bonus or a negative? 1/3

Legendary Point

Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? The concept for this game is very interesting, and I feel that, if it were presented through a medium that was not an obtusely grind-focused JRPG, it would have been a lot more entertaining.

In addition to that, I can not say that I am not a fan of Lovecraft’s work, or rather the concepts he explored in his writings, as well as the humongous amount of extended literature that has been spawned by him. I really enjoy eldritch horror, or cosmic horror, if you will. Unfortunately, this one did not tickle my pickle, so NO, I am not going to give it the point, even if I really liked some of the visuals. 0/1

Conclusion

4/10. Perhaps it was treated a bit too harshly by yours truly, but it is a JRPG. A grind focused JRPG that does not do anything to fix the issues of JRPGs - boring combat that you repeat a billion times. In fact, it doubled down on those, so… I suppose if one were a fan of JRPGs, this is the game for them. In the meantime, watch a playthrough on youtube.

In the Bag of Mediocrity it goes. It’s not a truly bad experience, but it’s closer to being a bad game than a good one. The dust will cushion its fall.

Read the FULL (Steam has a character limit) review here: https://gemsimov.com/game-reviews/f/cthulhu-saves-the-world---a-review

erm... at first i was like Cthulhu Saves The World but now im like uhh Kaiden Saves His Money when I refund this piece of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.... NEXT! 😒