Call of Cthulhu launch trailer lets you glimpse the horrors that lurk within

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It's out October 30.

Cyanide has released the launch trailer for its Lovecraftian horror RPG Call of Cthulhu ahead of the game's arrival next week.

The trailer, above, gives you a taste of some of the beasts, cultists and inter-dimensional ambiguity you'll face in the game, which James described as a "walking sim RPG with Ace-Attorney-lite detective sections" after watching a live demonstration last year. 

It begins by showing Sarah Hawkins running through a spooky forest, slipping between dimensions, running from something terrible. As it will be in the game, you're not quite sure what's real and what isn't. Later we meet detective Edward Pierce—that's you—who is asked to investigate the deaths of Sarah and her family on an island off the coast of Boston.

It's the official adaptation of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu pen & paper RPG, which means the emphasis is on problem solving, dialogue and stealth, rather than combat. You'll have special abilities to discover that will boost your detective skills, and you'll also have to manage your sanity, which will dip when you see or read anything particularly gruesome. 

Some things that aren't good for your mental state, like reading occult books, will help you in other ways, offering new insights or opening up dialogue options, which sounds like an interesting balancing act.

While the trailer doesn't give much away in terms of gameplay—you can watch gameplay trailers here and here, as well as the first hour of the game here—it gives you a good idea of the dark, brooding atmosphere that you can expect.

It's out on Tuesday, October 30.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.