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On April 16, 2026, Big Bad Wolf Studio released its puzzle horror game Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss to the world. This game promises players a true cosmic horror experience as they struggle to solve puzzles that will lead them to discover the true nature of the universe. With unique mechanics like a sonar to search for materials and a Corruption system that will determine your ending, this title looks at a glance to be one of the most unique games based on the Lovecraftian Mythos. So, is this game worth playing, or should gamers simply pray unseen to the incomprehensible squid? Let’s dissect the game piece by piece and make that decision for ourselves!
Unique Item-Finding Mechanics
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss‘s main gameplay loop takes the form of solving puzzles to progress through each chapter. These aren’t small puzzles either, as each one takes up an entire building’s worth of rooms and will have the player running back and forth to accomplish multiple steps.
The player’s main method of engaging with the world and puzzles of this game is to look around each area for items to examine and pick up, and then bring these items to specific locations. That might not seem like a lot, but this is a game with hundreds of items to examine.
So how does one find the specific items they want? By using their sonar that highlights items of course. This mechanic is easily the coolest feature of the game, as instead of highlighting every object in range, the sonar will only look for specific materials that the player assigns it to search for.
For example, in the game’s second chapter, you find a crown with traces of Ancient Blood and Orichalcum. Knowing that you need to find two more of these crowns, you can search specifically for those two materials and have your sonar guide you to them.
The game is filled with moments like these, with some items not even telling you what they’re made of, as the game instead trusts you to read documents to find the type of materials you need to search for on your own.
If the game simply highlighted every object the player could examine with a single click of their sonar, it would result in information overload due to the number of objects in the world and would invalidate most of the game’s puzzles.
The brilliance of the sonar is how much it encourages the player to think through what they’re examining instead of just letting them turn their brain off like similar mechanics in other games. I find this mechanic to be the best showing of Big Bad Wolf Studio’s strength as game designers, and I hope that others agree with me on this.
Hard to Solve Puzzles
As for the puzzle-solving experience itself, this will easily be the part of the game that will divide players the most. This is not a game with easily covered puzzle solutions; the player is expected to walk around in circles for long periods of time, trying to figure out what to do.
Despite that fact and how I myself grew quite frustrated with how long it took me to solve certain parts of the game, I find myself being unable to say that the puzzles in Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss were truly unfair.
Even when some of them took me literal hours to complete, it always felt like I was the one missing something and not that the game was withholding information. Every time I found the true solution to a puzzle, it felt like I had just noticed a vital clue I had overlooked, and not like I was throwing everything at the wall until it worked.
The clues do exist, they might be tucked away in a note you found or require a bit of thinking outside the box to truly understand, but they exist. I would be lying if I said that there weren’t several annoying puzzles in this game, with chapter 5 being a stand-out example due to that chapter’s particular gimmick, but nothing felt like it was badly designed.
This is a type of puzzle design I can enjoy, as the moment the player goes “Ah-ha!” and finally progresses is invigorating, but it can easily turn many off the game due to the hands-off nature of the game, even when you enable tips. The best advice I can give is that if you are the type of person who can tolerate spending hours on a single puzzle, then Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss will scratch that itch for you.
The Corruption System
Most chapters in the game feature two different ways to solve the puzzle presented to you and complete your investigation. One that will increase the Deep One’s Corruption of your mind and one that won’t.
The amount of Corruption the player accumulates will determine their ending during the game’s final chapter, with there being six different endings to obtain.
While that might sound simple enough, avoiding being corrupted is much harder than you may think. Because you are following the steps of a group of people who have fallen to the Deep Ones, any hints you find as to how to progress will be for how to solve each puzzle in a way that corrupts you as it did them.
A first playthrough of Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is almost guaranteed to end with the player being mostly corrupted, as the less madness-inducing methods of progressing are significantly harder to figure out.
I believe this was an intentional design decision, as being sucked into a madness beyond their comprehension is what most would want from a single playthrough of a Cthulhu game, with the extra endings where the player can avoid this Corruption being more of a bonus for those dedicated enough to find them.
However, even though I greatly enjoyed the concept of the Corruption mechanic and overall liked its implementation into the game, I do have some problems with it. Several parts of the game seem to force Corruption on the player for either no reason or because they made one wrong step, and because Corruption is generally treated as a negative status by the UI, it feels like I’m being punished for no reason a lot of the time.
An Ocean of Technical Issues
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, unfortunately, has a myriad of technical issues that lessen the experience. Players will immediately be able to notice this game’s inconsistent framerate, which appears to drop at random and is particularly noticeable during cutscenes.
Another performance issue the game has comes from the way it loads in areas. More often than not, the game’s U.I. will load before anything else (sometimes forty seconds before) and leave me in fear that the game has softlocked when I can see nothing loading in.
Those fears are justified in my opinion, as the game crashed several times for me on PlayStation 5. While I have gotten used to this with modern games, crashes in this game felt particularly bad as autosaves were infrequent enough that I needed to repeat a good chunk of an investigation whenever it happened.
Perhaps those crashes were actually a blessing in disguise, as playing the game for extended periods of time in areas with water would cause the audio to eventually begin glitching out and begin playing the sound of static whenever any action was taken.
The only way to fix these audio issues was to restart the game, which (again due to the infrequent autosaves) tended to be just as painful as listening to the static play in my ears.
All Too Compressible Horrors
I would like to spend the last part of this review commenting on how Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss functions as a Lovecraftian horror title. Lovecraft horror is by design different from the type of horror one encounters in most games, as it is centered around paranoia and building tension that may not necessarily pay off.
Unfortunately, I would consider this aspect to be Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss’s biggest failing. Nothing about this game feels particularly Lovecraftian. If the horrors the characters are encountering are entirely comprehensible, then something has gone horribly wrong in your cosmic horror script writing.
Cthulhu and the other various supernatural ongoings in this title all feel like they could have been substituted for any kind of threat, as they may as well have been an original creation of Big Bad Wolf Studio’s. While I do not find the writing of the game to be necessarily bad, it’s much more surface-level horror than what one would expect from something called Cthulhu.
What’s sad is that there are moments of this game which do an excellent job at building dread within the player. Swimming through a dark pool that you cannot see through, only to use your sonar and discover that there is hundreds of bodies at the bottom is an excellent horror moment that the game doesn’t ruin by lingering on. I wish the game had more moments like this throughout its runtime.
In addition to this, the game is filled to the brim with small references and easter eggs that reference Lovecraft’s large catalog of stories, such as analyzing a bone fragment and being told that something similar was found in the town of Innsmouth.
While I do get a sense of mild joy from seeing names I recognize, these references typically add very little to the game and come across as more desperate to appeal to Lovecraft fans than anything else.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is a puzzle game that is designed to force players to spend hours on a single puzzle, has technical issues that make playing it extremely hard at times, and doesn’t understand the type of horror game it wants to be. By no means can I earnestly recommend this game to others.
Despite all of that, I found myself having a fun time with this game. Seeing the creativity on display with the game’s sonar system and the joy of finally solving some of these puzzles never faded throughout my entire playthrough. So in the end, I would have to classify Cthulhu: Cosmic Abyss as a game for a very specific demographic of people, of which I find myself in.
Cthulu: The Cosmic Abyss
Bottom Line
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is a game that will appeal to only a small group of people. With puzzles that take hours to solve, many technical issues, and a misunderstanding of what makes the Lovecraftian Mythos interesting many gamers will be turned away from this title. However, those who love the type of long-form puzzles the game offers may fall in love with its unique design and mechanics.
