I was looking for something light and frothy in the Switch eShop’s list of new games that they thought I might like.
I only glanced briefly at “The Innsmouth Case”, a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style text adventurer set in the Lovecraft mythos, and then went past it to look at more graphically intensive games.
But I kept thinking about it. The writing in the screenshots given was pretty funny. The trailer advertised twenty seven different endings. The characters looked to be a huge and wacky departure from the grim madness of unimproved Lovecraft. It was cheap. I took a chance.
You play a hardboiled, down-on-his-luck, alcoholic private investigator just trying to end the workday conscious when a femme fatale who has seen better days comes into your office, asking you to look for her dear, missing daughter. A daughter who doesn’t look very human.
“Puberty, what can I tell ya,” says the woman who claims to be her mother.
You soon find yourself on the bus to Innsmouth (or hitchhiking, if that’s something you feel like daring), a charming, out-of-the-way port village just stuffed with the oddest collection of cultists, mutants, zoned out stoners and vacuous tourists you’ll see in a text adventure.
What happens then, is up to you. Sometimes you manage to miss all the danger signs all around you and just take everything at face value. Sometimes you escape but are scarred for life. But usually… it doesn’t go that way.
The Innsmouth Case is a game that rewards trying odd things and going out of the way. It’s pretty easy to skip back in the narrative to try something new. Once I even became the head of the cult… by accident.
Praise Dagon and pass the crab cakes.
