Introduction

When the first Alone in the Dark came out, many players were delighted to find some references to the Cthulhu Mythos, but unfortunately, Infogrames didn't have the Call of Cthulhu RPG licence at the time to create an "official" adaptation. Less than one year later, the licence was bought from Chaosium and a new game was set up:

So what is Shadow of the Comet ?

It's an adventure game released by Infogrames in 1993. It's an official adaptation of the RPG Call of Cthulhu, which means that it surely contains: tentacles, insane cultists and of course you usual bed time reading, the Necronomicon. It got awful controls and an insane difficulty but it's still one of my favourite adventure games.

You may not know the game itself but you probably have heard of the sequel: Prisoner of Ice. The two are loosely linked but it is interesting to play SotC first to catch some plot twists in the sequel.

The project is mainly due to one man: Hubert Chardot, the scenarist of the Alone in the Dark original series, creator of The Devil Inside and of the awful video game adaptation of From Dusk Till Dawn. As a great fan of Lovecraft, he managed to create a (very) loose adaptation of the novella "Shadow over Innsmouth" with this game. One other person from the original AITD staff is present: Philippe Vachey, the composer. He later created the music for Little Big Adventure and makes a very good work here for Shadow of the comet.

What is it about ?

The story takes places in 1910. You play the role of a young English photographer called John Parker who decided to cover the passage of Halley's Comet in a small village called Illsmouth in America.
But there is another reason which has caught the interest of Parker. During the last passage of the Comet in 1834, Lord Boleskine, a English painter, also went to Illsmouth to depict the comet and became totally insane, ending his life in an Asylum.
Things will go from bad to worse as you uncover some horrible truths about the quite village. Will you be able to protect Parker from fates worse than Death ?

Why is it worth watching ?

Apart from Dark Corners of the Earth, it is probably the best adaptation of the Cthulhu Mythos as a video game. The plot is good, the cast of characters is interesting and a real paranoid ambiance emerges from the game.
Besides, there are a lot of

events and sometimes the voice actors seem possessed by the ghost of Vincent Price under drugs.

Videos

Introduction - Where the madness begins	Viddler
Update 1 - In which we discover that Vincent Price has a doppelganger	Viddler
Update 2 - In which we become good friends with local law enforcement	Viddler
Update 3 - In which we go into the forest and meet some interesting people	Viddler
Update 4 - In which we are overwhelmed by sadness and spontaneous combustion	Viddler
Update 5 - In which we struggle with the local administration and eventually understand what the hell we need to do	Viddler
Update 6 - In which we do some stupid things and are rewarded for it with a cool sepia flashback	Viddler
Update 7 - In which our death rate rises exponentially	Viddler
Update 8 - In which we kick some cultists' ass	Viddler
Update 9 - In which we learn to fly and where Narackamous gets	Viddler
Update 10 - In which we put an end to all this nonsense, Parker Style. :ssj:	Viddler
Bonus - Let's take a tour to the Lovecraft Museum	Viddler