Cthulhu games are a dime a dozen these days, with everything from JRPG parodies to well-meaning but flawed efforts that bear the official Call of Cthulhu license. But there aren’t many point and click adventures showcasing H.P. Lovecraft’s sanity-twisting mythos. Two very dated Infogrames efforts in the early 90s come to mind, but if you haven’t played 1993’s Shadow of the Comet and 1995’s Prisoner of Ice, you’re not missing much.
The Dark Rites of Arkham, by indie developer Postmodern Adventures, rectifies this with a well-rounded effort filled with odes to all of Lovecraft’s best stories. It has the quality of a Call of Cthulhu tabletop campaign assembled by a well-read fan.
As a successful perception check will tell you, this game takes place in the city of Arkham, which is described by the lead – detective Jack Foster – as a supreme hellhole. It’s 1933, Prohibition is about to end, FDR is president, and Jack starts out investigating mayoral corruption only to find himself witness to a murder with arcane symbology and a dismembered arm scattered across the ground.
To solve this murder, Jack must abide by ’90s adventure game mechanics, completing puzzles by collecting inventory items and using them on things until something happens. The puzzles are all decent, though a few border on filler territory. (At one point, Jack gets a serum and is about to use it. Like a bozo, he then drops said serum into a grate and has to use a turkey baster to suck it up. I suppose this does mimic the act of getting a critical fail in the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game.)
Thankfully, unlike most Lovecraftian protagonists (whose brains tend to liquify after witnessing sights beyond comprehension) Jack can never die, and his mind will also never be shattered by the infamous point and click “dead man walking” scenario, where you might progress hours into the story only to realise that you missed a critical item way back in the beginning. So this is a very forgiving game by design, and while such an ethos might be slightly at odds with the Cthulhu Mythos, The Dark Rites of Arkham is a very relaxing game that you can sit and play in bed on a Steam Deck for the entirely of its seven hour runtime, letting yourself be swept away by the narrative.
And that plot is a good one. Foster isn’t the most original protagonist, though he does have a whole “I haven’t drunk nearly enough coffee to deal with this shit” schtick that is endearing. He teams up with a straight-laced fellow detective named Harvey Whitman, and the duo have a fun buddy cop vibe as they gallivant around Arkham. Their meanderings lead to the trail of three witches who have somehow stuck around since the Salem Witch Trials of the 1600s, and they’ll eventually encounter monsters in the woods, cultists, a dash of Yog-Sothoth, and world-ending damnation.
Jack and Harvey venture from the streets and sights of Arkham to the surrounding woods…and some very far-flung alien locales indeed.
It all feels like H.P. Lovecraft’s greatest hits, with add-ons from August Derleth and other Mythos writers tossed into the mix. As a fan, I was right at home, amused to find references to everything from the Great Race of Yith (from The Shadow out of Time) to a descended-from-Dagon fishman who runs an antiques shop and rants about how the feds busted his people (from The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a story some may have only experienced via the incredibly janky 2005 game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth). There’s even a great eleventh hour twist starring a well-known Lovecraftian character that I won’t spoil – I’ll just say that even when I thought the game had exhausted its repertoire of references, it pulled out a truly fun one.
Postmodern Adventures even stuff several of these Easter Eggs into an in-game exhibition (dubbed the Arkham Museum of the Unusual) that Jack and Harvey can peruse at their leisure. This is no surprise if you’ve played previous games by this one-man Spanish developer, whose real name is José María Meléndez. Beginning with 2020’s Urban Witch Story, a brilliant free itch.io game that looks like Sierra’s Police Quest but is a hundred times better, all Postmodern Adventures efforts have featured heavy amounts of well-researched supernatural geekery, from ghosts to haunted video cassettes to The Dark Rites of Arkham’s eldritch lore. And there’s usually some kind of museum with a curator who’ll just talk shop with you about what is clearly the developer’s special interest.
This leads me to my only major critique of The Dark Rites of Arkham – in visual style and tone it feels very similar to Postmodern Adventures’ other games, especially An English Haunting, which made my 2024 selection box. There’s nothing wrong with this in theory, and since this review marks the only instance that RPS has covered Postmodern Adventures’ work outside of a few Alice B posts on An English Haunting, many of you may be unaware that Meléndez has been making a treasure trove of indie adventures for the past several years.
But for those of us who have been enjoying his endeavours for a while, The Dark Rites of Arkham cannot exist in a vacuum. It must be compared to past works, because most of Meléndez’s games bear graphical and thematic similarities. And amongst its peers, it surpasses An English Haunting (which had a mildly flavourless main character and a draggy middle stretch) but doesn’t quite live up to Urban Witch Story or what I consider is the greatest Postmodern Adventures game – 2022’s Nightmare Frames, which is probably one of the best horror adventures I’ve ever played.
Jack Foster and Harvey Whitman’s narrative arcs just can’t compare to the evolution of Alan Goldberg, the asshole screenwriter lead of Nightmare Frames who learns to become a better person after he’s tasked with finding a haunted videotape. Despite being released four years ago, bits of Nightmare Frames also feel like they have more production value, such as detailed character portraits. The Dark Rites of Arkham does feature close-up character interrogation scenes, to be fair, but they’re somewhat inconsistent – a few NPCs have them, while many do not.
Finally, Cthulhu fans like myself are the ones who are going to get the most out of The Dark Rites of Arkham. Those who don’t know a Shoggoth from a hole in the ground are probably going to find this tale much less compelling. And to a certain extent, I wish that Postmodern Adventures had pushed the line harder when tackling the racism that permeates Lovecraft’s work. There are people of colour in the game, and mentions of the awful race relations that permeated 1930s (and let’s be real, modern day) life in the United States, but aside from a puzzle involving a Black woman on a bus, these aspects are background dressing. Considering that Urban Witch Story confronted similar issues head-on by starring a Black cop during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, there’s untapped potential here to dig deeper.
Of course, if the only critique I have about an indie game is “it’s very good, but the developer’s other works might be better,” then we’re in a nice position. The Dark Rites of Arkham is Call of Cthulhu in swell point and click form, and it’s a solid weekend play for any fan of weird fiction. But perhaps for Postmodern Adventures’ next effort, we can push the envelope farther. A tweaked engine, a different graphical style, a non-Eurocentric setting, maybe even a female protagonist? C’mon, let’s make old Howard Phillips roll in his grave!
This review is based on a review build of the game provided by the developer.