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Although I’ve watched countless pieces of media or played dozens of video games and board games that draw on the Cthulhu mythos and the works of HP Lovecraft, I was suddenly struck by one question I don’t think I’ve ever properly considered while writing this review of Big Bad Wolf’s solid investigation puzzler, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss. What does Cthulhu want?
Review info
Platform reviewed: PS5
Available on: PS5, Xbox PC
Release date: April 16, 2026
As I’m trawling through audio logs, video diaries, and messages left by a research crew and its billionaire funder in an abandoned underwater facility and an otherworldly city, I witness how they all succumb to the call of the Great Old One and become fixated on bringing about his/its/their return.
And while by the end I’d solved some mysteries and smugly puzzled out how to keep Cthulhu slumbering, I still didn’t know what the big tentacle-faced beast got out of it all apart from a few mindless, raving fans.
Can I be your number one fan?
I guess you could argue that’s the whole point. Cthulhu is supposed to be a being beyond our comprehension, from a place with impossible geography, so I should just take the win and be happy I was able to stop him from awakening before being subsumed into the fandom.
But while some things may never be understood, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is all about solving what you can. As an occult investigator, Noah, you use tech and your wits to explore the grotesque and fascinating environments of a flooded bayou to the sunken city of R’lyeh. It’s a game of scanning for clues, absorbing the relevant information, making connections and figuring out how it will help you stop Cthulhu.
What that ultimately means is that this is a game with a lot of reading, a lot of listening, and a lot of work outside the game, shuffling the facts around inside your brain as you piece it all together. Fortunately, it’s never interrupted by the threat of a monster attack or an enemy stalking you throughout the area like a Soma or Amnesia. Some wrong moves or wayward exploration will result in death, but it’s easy to avoid this if you’re paying attention.
To help visualise all of your clues, you do get given a mind map of sorts that allows you to move clues around and draw connections where you think they are relevant, but most of the time, the game will prompt you on the important questions that need answering to progress.
Added to that is an energy system that allows you to analyze clues and items, to better understand what they are and how they can be useful to your investigation. And while this is supposedly a limited resource, each area is full of the fungus that you can use to recharge it (yep, Noah basically powers up like Mario), so I just ended up scanning everything when I had the chance. Because of that, the whole system feels superfluous.
The same goes for the upgrades and augments you can find or earn from special tablets or shrines dotted around each area. You can only equip a limited number based on your maximum capacity, but when all they offer are small bonuses, such as an increase in your scanner range or a chance to restore energy when analyzing clues, the decision of what to equip doesn’t matter all that much.
Fortunately, you can still investigate and puzzle solve fully while both the energy and augment systems just exist in the background without requiring you to engage with them. I can only assume they must have been added to make Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss feel more gamey, but I don’t think they add anything of value.
Jarvis, activate see everything mode
One aspect you will be engaging with a lot is the sonar built into your AI companion, Key. Using the frequencies you gain from analyzing clues, you can set and search for nearby items that match the frequency. This becomes a loop for part of the game’s puzzle-solving.
For example, a component made of a specific alloy might be missing from a piece of equipment, so you can scan the surrounding area for alloys that match that frequency to find it. Relatively straightforward, then, but the game does expand on this idea a handful of times by making certain key frequencies harder to find or requiring you to combine frequencies to find more specific items and secrets.
Best bit
There’s little else quite so satisfying as connecting the dots between various pieces of seemingly unrelated information and working out exactly what you need to do to progress. Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss has several moments like this, and when you get deep into a puzzle that comes together in one intricate and elegant solution, you feel like a genius.
I liked it enough as an idea, but as with all of these special vision types in games (looking at you, Arkham detective mode), I ended up simply cycling through what I thought was a relevant frequency and spamming it in each new location to be sure I wasn’t missing any clues.
That’s not to say the game’s puzzles are bad. I did enjoy investigating a lot, with many solutions requiring you to take in all of the information given to you. There are moments where you feel like you are uncovering the secrets of an ancient civilization, learning how to use their bizarre technology, or piecing together the lives and relationships of the original research team as they descended into madness.
What’s also interesting is that chapters give you two possible solutions to the main puzzle: one that pushes you more towards the corrupting influence of Cthulhu, and another (often slightly more elaborate) that lessens the Great Old One’s control over you and the world. It’s a neat idea that rewards you for following a different path than the obvious one and encourages you to fully consider all the clues presented to you.
A sacrifice I am willing to make
The choices you make can affect the state of the world, characters, and your final ending, so I really appreciate a usually very linear puzzle game offering up some more freeform elements that give you more influence over the story — and a chance to try alternate paths if you feel stuck on one route or are keen for a second playthrough.
I doubt I’ll be diving in again, though, as I feel happy with everything I got out of Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss on the first go. It has some rough edges, namely an inconsistent autosave, which meant I had to repeat some steps when loading my game on a few occasions. There are also fussy item manipulation mechanics and some ideas that aren’t fully realised.
However, its core investigation gameplay is strong, and the atmosphere is suitably sinister, so I’m sure anyone who enjoys a puzzle game with a dash of cosmic horror will come away satisfied enough — especially for a budget release.
Should you play Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
Accessibility
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss has two difficulty modes: Investigation and Exploration. The first is the standard experience, while the second allows you to ask your AI companion for hints and shows the clues available in each location. You can also set a custom option to tweak how much corruption affects you and how energy is used.
Elsewhere, there are three color blind modes for green, red, and blue color blindness, the option to make subtitles clearer, disable head movement to ease motion sickness, and fully rebind all controls.
How I reviewed Cronos: The New Dawn
I played Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss for around 8 hours on a PlayStation 5 Pro on a Samsung S90C OLED TV and Samsung HW-Q930C soundbar while using a DualSense Wireless Controller.
I played the whole game in Performance mode and still experienced a few technical hitches and moments of slowdown, so I wouldn’t risk Quality mode without a major patch.
In my time playing, I completed the game once and saw one of the possible endings, although I did have to replay an early chapter three times due to an autosave issue, which should now be fixed in the full release. However, I did still find the autosave unreliable, and that probably bumped up my total playtime by at least an hour.
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james.pickard@futurenet.com (James Pickard)
