Game Review: ‘The Innsmouth Case’

Choose your own adventure books, remember those? Those fun times where you either choose paths to make the story last a while and remain interesting, or end suddenly with embarrassing choices that say a lot about you. Well, RobotPumpkin Games and Assemble Entertainment have brought back the joys and pains of this reading style digitally in The Innsmouth Case, an interactive story set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft.
 
 

 
 
The Innsmouth Case puts players in the show of a private detective from Boston being hired by a mother in search of her daughter, where the client is from…Innsmouth, the infamous seaside town from Lovecraft’s short story The Shadow Over Innsmouth. While there, players will meet and interview interesting locals, check out the sights Innsmouth has to offer, all the while trying to conduct their investigation.
 
 

 
 
Now onto the game itself. This is new for me as there’s not a lot to really talk about, as mentioned before, it’s a text-based choose your own adventure kind of game, not much skill is needed, just the patience to read.
The artwork is fun to look at and fits the game’s darkly comedic tone, yes, this is a comedy, so some of the choices you have are pretty funny, like when you’re given the option to throw up after looking at the picture of the missing girl (who has the Innsmouth look), that sort of thing.
 
 

 
 
The game’s audio is pretty good, it’s mostly soft music is fitting for each scene. Honestly, I would not mind having some spoken dialogue for some of the characters as I feel this would have helped make The Innsmouth Case more unique than it already is.
 
 

 
 
The Innsmouth Case overall is pretty fun to play, something low impact and could be enjoyed on a slow evening or a rainy afternoon in fall especially if you’re a fan of Lovecraft as the game is full of Easter eggs (mainly character names) that a Lovecraft fan would enjoy as well as a fan of choosing your own adventure stories. With it just being a text-based game, I’m not going to be super critical of it and hold it too high on scoring so out of five stars, The Innsmouth Case earns all five.
The Innsmouth Case is out now on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox X/S, IOS, and Android.