Worth a play despite the bugs? Are the bugs avoidable/fixed?

Hey all, for some reason or another, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has caught my attentions recently and everything I see of it is quite interesting to me, and it is readily available on Steam for $10. However, I have heard many things about the bugs that render the game unplayable/unbeatable on the PC version, and I just want to know how possible it is to avoid these, or if there are fixes out on the 'net, and how reliable those are. Thanks in advance.

Its been maybe a year since I've played, but I don't recall any major bugs during my playtime. In fact I only found out later that the game was once notoriously buggy. You should be fine.

Greg Kasavin called from 2006 and said yes.

@adequatelyprepared: I played through the game not too long ago. There were two bugs that made it quite frustrating though. There's a section where you have to shoot at lights in the distance. On modern systems they're invisible. With enough persistance and luck you can get through that one. The second bug messed up the very last moments of the game. It's a time sensitive sequence that was impossible to finish on my PC. I had to look up the ending on Youtube.

There's a patchtool with fixes for both. Didn't do anything for me. Apparently you need a cracked main executable for it to work.

I enjoyed the game despite of those problems.

I play this from time to time, but I have never finished it so take what I say with a grain of salt. I've never experienced a bug in this game- it has always played (surprisingly) fine.

Other replies here suggest any bugs have patches that may or may not work and it's possible the bugs are later in the game then I ever got.

I should mention I never stopped playing because I didn't enjoy the game. It's actually (still) really good. A little annoying sometimes, but good none the less.

This is one of those games I just stop playing to play something else and then forget to go back to it. It's happened to me several times since it's release. That happened to me with EQ2 also, strangely enough. Although I guess with MMOs that makes more sense.

From what I remember this one doesn't make a great first impression. But if you're into the Lovecraft lore you'll probably be able to look past its flaws and have a decent time with it.

Otherwise I'd suggest just watching a walkthrough on youtube and then checking out DAGON.

They both seem to be based partly on The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Absolutely...but just keep the glitches in mind. Don't be afraid to download someone else's save file (I ended up having to do that), you'll obviously lose your personal progress, but ultimately, it doesn't matter.

I played the initial PC retail release. I definitely encountered the ending bug @coinmatze talked about and resorted to hex-editing the movement speed that made a sequence either insanely hard or impossible (the fix linked here probably spares you that shit); I never managed to finish fairly during an arduous 60-90 minute attempt. Other than that the game presents an interesting hybrid of gameplay styles and all of them are pretty clunky but serviceable depending on your tolerance level.

The plot fluctuates between faithful Lovecraft and B-movie, splatter movie-Lovecraft but is entertaining throughout. The Innsmouth beginning "act" is straight out of the stories and a favorite gaming segment of mine. The prologue will immediately give you an idea of the whacky SciFi elements and expanded universe nonsense at play as well. The game has that oldschool,'almost zero hand holding' policy at times which works relatively well but drove me insane to the point of consulting a walkthrough once (Marsh refinery).

If the Lovecraft theme interests you I'd say it's absolutely worth it, bugs and all. It's a solid horror game otherwise but I'm not sure it'll hold up that well. Unique and interesting Lovecraft adaptation though!

I never got further than 2 hours in because it would blue screen my pc at the exact same point every time. It was actually game breaking. All the fixes i tried only managed to make it merely crash and not fuck my pc up.

This game is 100% worth playing. Coincidentally, I just wrote something about it this weekend when I made a list of games that were nearly unplayable on release, but are still worth taking a look at, especially when unofficial paches are available. I won't attach the full list here becuse it's pretty long, but I'll link it here:

Flawed Masterpieces

The majority of the major bugs have been fixed on the Steam version. I've played all the way through a number of times and the only game-breaking bug I get anymore is one at the end when you're on the ship and you can't see the targets on the island. I ended up downloading someone else's save to get me past this, but 99% of the rest is fine.

Steam version fixes a ton of the issues. Game starts slow but after a couple hours you'll need to see it through to the end. Great game :)