Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss Review: Messing With Your Sanity in Unexpected Ways

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” If you’re a fan of Lovecraftian horror, you’ve likely seen this quote framed in every corner of the internet.

It is basically the cornerstone of the subgenre, following the idea that what we don't see and understand is far more terrifying than what we do. As a devotee of cosmic horror myself, to the point where a Cthulhu figure keeps a permanent, watchful eye over my living room, I walked into Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss expecting to be left completely in the dark, while also not knowing what was staring at me from it.

However, paradoxically, Big Bad Wolf’s latest title does the exact opposite: it actually forces you to turn the unknown into the known. It is a bold subversion of Lovecraft’s pillars that surprisingly works, even if the journey is marred by some frustrations that can mess with your sanity.

A Case for the Skeptical

Imagine you are a detective in the vein of Scully from the iconic X-Files, and you suddenly find yourself stuck on the case of a missing partner who vanished after months of self-imposed isolation. After searching her home, all you find are strange minerals, sketches of symbols in an unknown ancient language, and, naturally, a concerning lack of hygiene all around.

Upon looking into it further, you discover the situation is far more grave than you imagined. You are thrust literally into the middle of interdimensional portals, alien worlds, humans descending into madness, and bizarre creatures you thought only existed in books – even the legendary hidden sunken city itself!

That is basically what you will face in Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss through the eyes of the protagonist, Noah. As you might have noticed, the game makes a point of bringing every staple element of the subgenre to the table, and it does so with unapologetic intensity.

No Action, All Intellect

With this context in mind, we have a game that leans heavily into the investigative side, meaning you shouldn’t expect moments of direct action or combat. This is a puzzle game for those who enjoy (or don't mind) an experience with a deep focus on narrative, slow pacing, and a significant amount of reading, as you have to dig through mountains of information to progress.

Essentially, your goal is to be extremely curious, poking into every corner of the environment for items and details that will help you advance. So it functions almost as a pure detective simulator! And the gameplay remains relatively simple: you can move, jump, and crouch, in addition to interacting with the environment and managing systems tied to puzzle-solving, the most important of which is the Sonar.

It simply acts as a “detective mode” where you use waves to scan for clues. What makes it unique is that you must configure it to seek specific elements. For example, you can analyze an ancient tablet to add the signature of its gold symbols to your Sonar, allowing you to find other similar tablets with the same gold paint. This means that it doesn't hand you answers on a silver platter, and it requires genuine thought. As the story progresses, the system grows more and more complex, allowing you to combine up to three different characteristics to track increasingly elusive objects.

The game also features a clean interface that displays only basic actions and offers great quality-of-life features. You can pin documents or maps to the screen, for instance, which is a feature I found incredibly useful as a player with a short memory. And the investigation feels smooth thanks to how the game handles multiple clues: you can minimize audio logs to keep exploring while listening or even tag specific objects in the scenarios to revisit later. Add to that a literal AI companion called Key, who acts as your loyal partner, and you have the perfect scenario to play Sherlock Holmes, only in a setting filled with tentacles.

What I truly loved about the puzzles is how they require you to inhabit the madness of the setting. Solving them often demands that you think like an ancient cultist. And I know it sounds strange, but you soon find yourself encountering the most bizarre sights and treating them as perfectly normal, analyzing every detail just to find more clues. It reaches a point where you can find a pregnant woman in the middle of a pool of blood, and your first thought is simply: “Ah, of course, it's for the ritual,” before walking away as if nothing happened!

The Ritual of Deduction

Beyond the Sonar, there are four other systems you must manage, as they directly affect how you explore and prevent you from simply scanning everything without a second thought. The first is Noah’s Energy Bar. To put it simply: examining objects consumes energy, which can only be recharged by finding a specific orange fungus on the walls and injecting it into yourself – just a regular Wednesday for a cosmic horror title, right?

The second is that you can also equip “evolutions” to Noah’s mind, which act as perks, such as increasing the Sonar range, reducing the energy consumption, and more. They are quite straightforward, but their effectiveness can be undercut by the most punishing system of all: the Corruption. It is basically a sanity meter that fluctuates based on how you solve major puzzles. Most investigations offer two paths: one is easier but increases Corruption, while the other is more complex but decreases it. Since this affects the outcome of Noah’s story, it adds a significant layer of pressure to every major decision you make.

To keep track of everything, the game provides the Vault, the final system we need to discuss. Much like the Mind Place in Alan Wake 2, it serves as a central hub for organizing clues and connecting dots through various deductions. While it works quite well initially, the system becomes somewhat overwhelmed by the final chapter due to the sheer quantity of information and clues available. This is because the Vault displays both minor and major clues in the same space, which can quickly lead to a visual experience that feels cluttered and disorganized.

Adding to this is the fact that the game doesn’t “clean up” the clues that have already been used and are no longer necessary, resulting in a pile of information that makes you feel like you’re sitting at a desk with stacks of paper everywhere.

While I understand that this might be exactly how a real detective feels, it somewhat undermines the game's earlier efforts to keep the overall management smooth. This led to moments of frustration where I found myself wishing the game would automatically archive at least the minor clues once solved, simply to prevent that inevitable sense of “information overload.”

The Eldritch Horror of Technical Performance

While Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss brings some clever ideas to the table and does justice to cosmic horror, it is a bit rough around the edges – and I’m not just talking about the Vault.

As a reviewer, I’m used to playing pre-patch versions where a few bugs are expected. However, when performance issues actively hinder the experience, I feel that they need to be addressed. Just as the mechanics grow more complex toward the end, the technical issues seem to pile up as well.

In the early game, for instance, I encountered minor visual bugs and an occasional failure in the autosave system, which cost me some progress. By the midpoint, however, I faced frequent stuttering and crashes that resulted in a more significant loss of progress. At one point, I couldn't even complete a deduction because the UI area required to drop a correct answer simply failed to appear. So, it was frustrating to fight not just Cthulhu’s forces, but the lack of polish as well.

I couldn’t help but feel that this lack of polish is directly tied to the game's ambition. That’s because The Cosmic Abyss aims for realistic graphics, but I find myself divided on the results. While the creature designs are appropriately gross, a more unique art style might have prevented the game from being too heavy to run – and, at the same time, distanced it from other titles in the genre. For instance, some environments, like certain pools of blood and fog-heavy areas, become almost impossible to navigate visually, forcing you to stay in Sonar mode and missing out on the actual art direction. The feeling in the end is that I wish the game had shown the same ambition in its visual art as it did in its investigative mechanics.

Accessibility and Immersion

As every Nintendo Direct loves to say, one more thing: we also need to talk about how the difficulty options drastically change the experience in Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss. You can opt for a freer experience (the default and the one I consider more true to the game's intent) or a more guided one, in which you can ask Key for extra tips via pop-ups, make the Corruption system more merciful, or even disable energy consumption entirely.

My recommendation is to try playing without these aids first and only activate what you truly need help with, as the game allows you to customize the difficulty to assist with specific systems. I say this because the base experience is extremely immersive and truly pushes you to become a real investigator, while having the facilitators active makes the journey much more guided – which, while helpful, can take away the weight of the game’s core premise.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss successfully nails the elements I love most about cosmic horror: the crushing weight of thalassophobia, a dense atmosphere, the chilling descent of humans into madness, and Cthulhu himself. I mean, we usually watch civilians become his victims in most stories, but in this one, we have scientists losing their grip and believing his mad cult, on top of some investigative systems that are genuinely clever. So it is very interesting!

However, there were some stumbles along the way that were hard to ignore and ultimately took some of the shine off the overall experience. Ultimately, the game did make me lose my sanity, but not always for the reasons I expected. While the atmosphere is great, the lack of technical polish in the latter half of the game is a significant hurdle. If Big Bad Wolf can iron out the performance following launch, this will be an indispensable title for fans of the genre. For now, it's a brilliant but bruised descent into the abyss.