Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure looks amazing and will make you laugh, but its inability to tell a coherent story prevents this comedy cosmic horror adventure from fulfilling its abundant potential.
Readers rate this game as Underwhelming.
Created by a handful of folks from Transylvania calling themselves Stuck in Attic, Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure has been hotly anticipated ever since it was successfully funded on Kickstarter back in 2016. Inspired by the works of weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft and the LucasArts genre classics, Gibbous promised beautiful artwork, an otherworldly storyline, ample dialogue and laughter aplenty. Fast forward just over three years and the game is hitting digital shelves having met all of those objectives, though to various degrees of success. There’s no doubt that this admirable point-and-click debut effort has been made with love: it’s visually superb, begins intriguingly, provides some humorous moments and has a number of clever puzzles. Unfortunately, it’s undermined by dodgy writing and seems more interested in fantastical ideas than a comprehensible plot, creating an uneven experience overall.
The game begins with players in the shoes of the amusingly named Don R. Ketype. He’s a trench coat-wearing, tough-talking detective who has been tasked with hunting down the Necronomicon, an ancient grimoire that mysteriously seems to be in hot demand. His search has led him to the local library in a creepy “hellhole” called Darkham. Sitting behind the desk is a young man named Buzz Kerwan, who claims to know nothing about the magical book. That soon changes when the building explodes, Don is kidnapped, and Buzz discovers that the Necronomicon has been hidden a meter away from him this whole time.
In disbelief, Buzz takes the book back to his cramped home and reads it out loud – unexpectedly gifting his cat the power of speech. Well, “gifting” is debatable, since Kitteh (a bad name reminiscent of internet memes) is entirely unimpressed and wants to focus on eating and sleeping rather than talking. And thus it becomes Buzz’s mission to restore Kitteh’s meows and rescue Don. It’s an enticing opening that immediately pulled me in, posing lots of questions (like who took Don and the true purpose of this book) that made me keen to play on.
Sadly, it’s all downhill from here story-wise. The major issue is that it’s decidedly unfocussed. Buzz goes to visit a local voodoo expert for advice, who blabs on about a “terrible god of the murky abysses” called Bob Olmstein who lives in nearby Fishmouth and might be able to help reverse the magic. From this point onwards, I lost grip on what was happening. You eventually meet the person who employed Don to find the Necronomicon; he dumps meaningless exposition on you, talking in elusive riddles and mentioning things like “the Esoteric Order of Dagon” and some supposedly sinister guy called “the Butcher” before telling Buzz to find his daughter Peace.
I don’t know if I was just being an idiot, or if my lack of Lovecraft exposure was a hinderance, but I had no idea what was going on and my confusion continued to spiral. Buzz and Don finally meet up again; the former decides to head to Romania to find Peace, the latter to immortal alchemist Nicolas Flamel’s abode… for some convoluted reason. The narrative incoherence is incredibly frustrating and it comes across like the writers had all these exciting ideas and didn’t know how to blend them together into a meaningful plot. At times it seemed like I’d missed entire chunks of the game that were meant to contextualise things. I found it impossible to properly engage with the wider story – something about monsters and cults – as a result. The last third of the game is particularly problematic, introducing unexplained new characters and concepts on a whim.
It doesn’t help that parts of the dialogue are poorly written and sometimes don’t entirely make sense, though you can figure out the gist. “I put some weight on my man in rare and forbiddens – the kinda pressure makes a Joe’s stomach jackflip,” says Don in the opening. Most of the time it’s passably fine, but some conversations can be clunky and verbose. Certain lines sound as if they’ve been mistranslated – shoes being called “walk-dogs” at one point totally threw me.
That’s not to say the script is all bad. Far from it. There are a lot of wonderful, funny moments: a cultist’s refusal to complete a sacrifice without filling out the necessary paperwork; the Fishmouth tourist information employee saying the best thing a visitor can do is leave; pop culture references like Darkham Asylum described as being run by a real joker; and ironic RPG-style stats appearing above Buzz when he does something particularly silly or clever. “Man, this is just like in the movies,” Don quips as he patiently stands around waiting for Buzz to look something up on a laptop. Gibbous succeeds in bringing the humour out in bizarre moments, so it’s a shame that such unusual events aren’t tied together better.
Despite being inspired by Lovecraft, Gibbous is not intended to be scary. The overarching story is played straight, and the often sombre art and music reflect that, but ultimately the game is more interested in making you laugh. Characters behave appropriately emotional during occasions that require it, such as when Don encounters some gruesome creations, but there’s always a light-hearted line or moment waiting around the corner. And though there are certain elements that would be unsettling out of context, like the owner of an inn having a hunger for his guests, such things are meant to be silly here.
Really the game works best on a micro level. Don and Buzz are rarely together (which is too bad because they have a good dynamic), so you control each character in turn with no agency in choosing between them. Usually you’ll need to convince people to let you through or solve their problems in order to progress, and it’s enjoyable tackling these quandaries through a mix of dialogue puzzles, inventory usage, and environmental manipulation. One scenario sees Don piecing together clues to convincingly pretend he knows someone, while another has Buzz posing as an entertainment act to stroll past a pair of festival guards. The highlight tasks are those most out of the ordinary, like cracking a password linked to a pentagram or decoding an unintelligible alphabet. The puzzles are never overly challenging but the difficulty does fluctuate, which makes for an uneven experience. The penultimate chapter is one of the easiest, which feels unnatural. Buzz can talk to Kitteh for a general objective reminder, but if you get stuck at any point you can handily consult Don’s notebook, which will update with hints.
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