Call of Cthulhu - Shadow of the Comet - [ 1993 - PC-DOS - Full Game ]
5Developer - Infogrames Europe SA.
Description by - www.mobygames.com -
In 1834, in the small New England fishing village of Illsmouth, the distinguished British scientist Lord Boleskine lost his mind. After studying ancient manuscripts of evil repute, he had travelled to this place to observe the passing of Halley's comet. What he observed that night, however, turned him into a raving lunatic. Now, 76 years later, Halley's comet is coming back, and young reporter John T. Parker has travelled to Illsmouth to try to uncover the truth in Boleskine's wild claims, and see the comet for himself.
Shadow of the Comet is a horror adventure game, inspired by the terrifying writings of H. P. Lovecraft. Contrary to many adventure games from the early 90s, the game has a keyboard driven interface with a system of actions activated either by pressing the corresponding key (L for look, G for get, T for talk, U for use) or selecting them from the menu activated by the TAB key. The CD release was enhanced with a mouse-driven interface. Typical for Infogrames titles (e.g. Eternam), the game contains vector-based cut scenes with enlarged graphics of the faces of the speakers during dialogues.
The GOG.com release of this game includes both Floppy and CD versions of the game. The main differences are new graphics, mouse-driven interface and full voice-acting whereas the Floppy version doesn't feature any voice-acting. The CD version's launcher screen additionally includes a Museum mini-game where character can walk through a museum and look at various mystical objects and paintings inspired by H. P. Lovecraft.
Trivia
Development
The development team stated that the game is based on two of Lovecraft's short stories; The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Dunwitch Horror. However, there aren't really any similarities between the events in the game and the events in either of the stories. Also, 'Illsmouth', the town in the game, is nothing like Lovecraft's town, Innsmouth.
While in development, many of the game's characters and places had different names. For instance, Parker was called Carter, Jugg was called Rugs and Illsmouth was called Isthmuth.
Here is an interesting note on how the storyline of Shadow of the Comet changed before the makers decided on the final version. The text and dialogue used in the game - just like all its data - is packed and hence "invisible" if you just try to view the game files, but by dumping memory contents while (or after) playing the game, you can read the parts that are used at certain points in the game (You can also extract the game's sounds, but that's another story). Doing this with the demo reveals some interesting information about the history of the game. First of all, we can find out that our protagonist was originally named John T. Carter instead of Parker (the company forgot to change this in the text that made its way to the box cover). Also, he was an astronomer, not a journalist. Tobias Jugg's (the librarian) original name was Rugs, and the town was named neither Illsmouth, nor Innsmouth, but... Isthmuth (a real tongue twister). But the most amazing discovery is that the demo - and perhaps even the game itself - was originally supposed to have a cameo by Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself! From what I found, it seems that HPL would be hiding behind the curtain-covered door in Jugg's house. He was supposed to have a few lines of dialogue - here it is, extracted from the memory dump: "You're there, are you? No... Don't go away. It has been so long since I had a chance to talk. My name is HOWARD PHILLIPS. We're going to follow the unusual story of a young and brilliant astronomer, JOHN T. CARTER. The adventure takes place in the most peaceful fishing port you can imagine, a place called ISTHMUTH...". Unfortunately, HPL's cameo (or at least the means of activating it) seems to have been removed from the demo. The writer, however, "lends" his face to Dr Underwood in the full game (which, for that matter, makes use of quite a few faces known well to horror fans - Vincent Price as Dr Cobble is probably the easiest one to notice!). Also, all the locations, screens and music from the demo appear in the full version of the game.
???
On your first day at Illsmouth, try to examine (using the 'L' key) Curtis Hambelton (who lives near the harbour) or Wilbur Hambelton (you can find him at the general store) to see something... "Very odd, indeed!". The rather ghastly meaning of what you'll see will become clear to you at a later part of the game.
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