Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is a first-person horror investigation and adventure game inspired by Lovecraft’s stories, mainly, The Call of Cthulhu. The game was developed by Big Bad Wolf, known for Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, and published by Nacon, released in 2026. In it, we play as Noah Williams, an Ancile agent who must descend to a submerged station to uncover what happened to its missing crew. And I know you can already have a fair guess at what’s waiting for him down there.
The Story of "Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss"
1 – The Awakening
The game starts in 2053 with Noah and Elsa crossing the Miskatonic River by boat. It seems the river has flooded part of the city, causing a major disaster, and the whole east coast has been dealing with similar floods. After Elsa gives Noah a telling-off for treating an AI (KEY) too personally, the two arrive at the house of someone called Mei.
When nobody answers the door, they make their way inside, only to find the place empty and in a mess. As they look around, it becomes clear that Mei had been researching some strange stones. But down in the basement, they find an enormous organic mass filling the entire room, alive and pulsing; something they reckon might be a portal.
The portal is activated using two specific stones, and once it opens, Noah is pulled into a strange dreamlike dimension with a massive black hole hanging in the sky.
There, they find Mei, completely unhinged, and she attacks them, injuring Noah. The fight ends with Elsa killing Mei, while Noah gets pulled back out. The portal closes before Elsa can escape.
Eight months later, Noah wakes from a nightmare. This time, he’s on a mission to reach the Ocean-I mining station and investigate an underwater complex that was abandoned under mysterious circumstances.
On the descent, things obviously go wrong, and Noah gets thrown out of the submarine. He has to swim the rest of the way, guided by KEY. Thankfully, his diving suit is strong enough to let him walk along the ocean floor.
2 – The Excavation
Noah arrives at PIT Station, a massive mining facility at the bottom of the ocean. The place has been wrecked, and more of that organic material is spread throughout the station.
The signs suggest that something powerful tore through the place, smashing everything in its path and leaving trails of slime behind. Noah starts experiencing hallucinations, and KEY detects something odd in his brain, some kind of influence that’s corrupting him.
In the control room, Noah watches a recording from Andrew Marsh, explaining the purpose of the expedition. They had discovered ruins belonging to what might have been an ancient pre-flood civilisation. It’s possible the crew went down even further, to the drowned city itself.
Noah follows Marsh’s trail into the Maze, an area full of bizarre structures that look nothing like anything on Earth. It’s called the Maze because it’s a labyrinth of caves, and this is where Noah finds the first body from the previous team.
The Maze seems to trap him in loops, forcing him to walk in circles, at least until Noah notices a slime trail guiding him forward.
3 – The Temple
Noah reaches an entire city at the bottom of the sea, built from stone, with insane and awe-inspiring architecture. The place is enormous beyond belief.
Naturally, it does nothing good for Noah’s sanity, and there’s already a statue of Cthulhu waiting at the entrance just to make sure his presence is felt. Massive, intimidating, and stealing the scene as always.
A trail of bodies makes it pretty obvious that whatever happened down there was savage. After passing an abandoned camp, Noah comes across a kind of altar with a man hanging from it, surrounded by candles. His flesh has fused with the stone.
The man says the creature is still nearby. According to him, they were carrying out a ritual, but a woman named Anastasia fled halfway through. Marsh, meanwhile, heard the call and opened the gates along with the rest of the crew.
Before dying, the man says he is trapped in R’lyeh forever.
Yes — this is R’lyeh.
After attaching an artefact to open the way ahead, a creature bursts from the water to attack Noah; a quite humanoid thing with fish-like features. The artefact’s power dissolves it, and Noah is able to continue towards the portal.
4 – The Other World
Noah returns to the other dimension, still beneath that black hole floating in the sky; the same place where Elsa was trapped. He finds signs that someone had been living there, along with Elsa’s phone, where she left a message for him.
Now Noah follows Elsa’s trail, venturing further into this bizarre world. At another abandoned camp, he finds another message from Marsh. Marsh is completely broken, searching for the Star of Shamash. He’s fallen for the classic Cthulhu trap — set the monster free so it can “save” the world.
Along the way, Noah finds human bones mixed with the bones of Deep Ones, while whispers echo through the air, growing louder as he moves on. These voices belong to the Dreamers, who condemn the Yith and want Cthulhu freed.
That’s when it becomes clear that this place is still R’lyeh, the prison where the Yith sealed the god away.
Noah reaches one of the Yith’s technological platforms, but the Dreamers surround him, triggering hallucinations about the Star of Shamash.
When he comes to, he’s somewhere else, and finds Elsa. Now Noah is racing against time to reach the key before Marsh does. He’s standing in the ruins of the Yith structures, where he can finally see the Star of Shamash.
5 – The Citadel
Right in the middle of the Yith citadel, sitting on top of a grotesque mound of flesh, is the key: the Star of Shamash. Tubes run through the fleshy mass and into the structure itself, and there’s a giant eye watching anyone who comes near. Honestly, the creature looks brilliant. Horrifying, but brilliant.
This thing is the guardian of the key.
The citadel shows that the Yith had been running experiments with tanks designed to preserve organic matter, which explains how the guardian came to be.
As Noah gets closer, the full horror of the creature becomes clear. He uses a Yith artefact against it just as it tries to swallow him, and the guardian enters a trance.
That leaves the path to the key open, only for Noah to find Marsh already dead.
Noah touches the Star of Shamash and is teleported away.
6 – The Last Door
The chamber is magnificent, filled with Yith technology that looks impossibly advanced and ancient at the same time. This place is the gateway to Cthulhu’s prison, and the creature is close to awakening.
Noah has no choice but to solve a series of puzzles left behind by the ancients, while strange voices explain what happened. The Warden is what keeps Cthulhu asleep, but it failed and now Noah has to finish the job.
He opens the passage, and the chamber begins collapsing.
Elsa returns to help him, and together they leap into the opening Noah created, a full leap of faith, landing right in front of Cthulhu’s confinement.
7 – The Heart
Cthulhu’s prison looks more like a sanctuary, surrounded by towering structures and a staircase leading to his confinement, a gigantic statue/sarcophagus-like. Waiting there is the Warden, a person whose mind has been transferred into a machine. Their body is wrapped in organic matter fused to the wall. Suddenly, Noah is attacked by someone who looks exactly like Elsa.
Now there are two Elsas standing in front of him.
But the new Elsa can’t see the Elsa who has been helping Noah this whole time. That Elsa was created by the AI KEY, which has apparently been planning this ever since the incident in Mei’s basement.
KEY refuses to trust the Yith, unlike Elsa. It wants to become the new Warden.
Noah removes the artefact from the old Warden’s head, and at that moment, Cthulhu appears; colossal tentacles, glowing red eyes, the whole lot.
Noah has to choose.
In one ending, Noah destroys the Star of Shamash, going against KEY.
Some time later, he’s being interrogated. No one in the agency believes his story, but the fact they still have the Star of Shamash suggests there’s more going on.
In another ending, Noah throws the artefact to Elsa, and she drives it into her own forehead. After that, the interrogation plays out the same way.
In the third ending, Noah uses the artefact on himself. This time, the world is destroyed by Cthulhu’s awakening, exactly as KEY intended.
Mythos
R’lyeh is the biggest and most important location in the whole game. The sunken city at the bottom of the ocean, with its impossible stone architecture, its overwhelming, sanity-shattering scale, and its role as Cthulhu’s prison, is taken straight from The Call of Cthulhu.
R’lyeh lies in the Pacific Ocean and was originally built on dry land, roughly during the Palaeozoic era. It was later sunk by the K’n-yanians, who were seen as enemies of Cthulhu. Despite being an ancient city, in the present day R’lyeh acts as a prison for the big squid-headed menace.
Cthulhu first appeared in The Call of Cthulhu as a colossal being lying dormant beneath the city. He’s usually described as having a vaguely humanoid body, an octopus-like head, and dragon-like wings. Cthulhu is an alien who arrived on Earth thousands of years ago along with the Star-Spawn, creatures that share some similarities with him.
He represents one of the greatest threats to Earth, mainly because he has a huge number of followers trying to carry out the ritual that will free him from R’lyeh. Even the Deep Ones and the Dagon cult worship the squid-faced horror.
The Great Race of Yith comes from The Shadow Out of Time, where Lovecraft describes them as an ancient alien race capable of projecting their minds through time, building enormous cities, and gathering knowledge across entire ages.
At some point in the distant past, the Yith fought a war against creatures known as the Flying Polyps, a conflict that nearly wiped them out. The Yith survived by transferring their minds into an insectoid species on Earth known as the Coleopterans; essentially giant, maybe humanoid, beetles.
Good visuals, smart puzzles, engaging investigation, sluggish pace
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is basically a horror game centred around exploration and puzzle-solving, with a strong focus on its narrative. I think the first thing worth highlighting is the visuals: it’s a real gorgeous game, with well-crafted character models and incredible settings. The voice acting is brilliant across the board and really helps keep you immersed, paired with animations that are equally on point.
In short, it’s a game that presents the Lovecraftian universe with top-notch graphics and excellent modelling of environments and creatures. The monster guarding the Star of Shamash is absolutely impressive and shows a clear level of care from the team in production, at least on the visual side.
The puzzle system is quite clever. Throughout the campaign, you need to gather bits of information and connect them to unlock new possibilities, meaning you actually have to interact with the clues you collect. Once you make the right connections, you can use your character’s suit scanner, which starts picking up new elements in the environment that were previously hidden. It’s a brilliant mechanic, because the need to swap between pieces of information to detect different things keeps you really involved in what’s going on.
The downside is that the game is absolutely drowning in text and audio recordings. Pretty much every area throws three, five, or even more readable and listenable bits at you. To a point, it gets a bit tedious, to be honest.
There’s also a character progression system, but — hand on heart — it’s neither here nor there. If it weren’t there, you’d never miss it. The game simply doesn’t offer enough danger or challenge to justify the mechanic. You don’t fight creatures, and there’s no backtracking that would make a limited inventory worth upgrading.
The Great Cthulhu
The way the game handles Cthulhu is also worth a mention. The creature comes across as imposing from start to finish, always portrayed as nothing less than a hideous, malevolent being. From the statue at the temple entrance to its final appearance, the game does a proper job of making you seriously wary of encountering the figure, because the mythology it builds around him works a treat when it comes to unsettling you.
Unlike some games that portray Cthulhu in a more fantastical or awe-inspiring light, here you’re left in no doubt that he’s rotten to the core.
The story is decent, though it doesn’t stray too far from the Call of Cthulhu formula we already know: a bunch of fanatics venturing into the realm of the gods to wake them up. And naturally, you’re on their trail, always arriving after the dust has already settled. This kind of storytelling ends up creating some rather anticlimactic moments, like finding Marsh already dead.
Marsh was supposed to be the main human villain, yet you never even get to meet him alive. It isn’t Noah’s actions that bring about Marsh’s downfall; he was always going to snuff it regardless. Because of that, you end up not caring much about any of the characters caught up in the plot.
Another aspect that could have been better used is the underwater station. The ocean floor is already ominous enough on its own, and filling it with monsters could have given the game a real extra punch. We could head to R’lyeh from the halfway point onwards. This would maximize the element of surprise. And while R’lyeh is well put together, it ultimately ends up feeling like yet another cave level — and you lot already know what I think about cave levels. There’s no way to make this stay good for more than 10 minutes.
But, these are all my impressions for now.
