Arkham Horror: Mother’s Embrace is a detective adventure and turn-based strategy game.
You choose one of seven characters as your main protagonist for the whole game. Every character has different stats, traits, backstory, and a unique voice. As soon as you do that, the game starts.
Wilhelmina Tillinghast, a professor of Astronomy at Miskatonic University, invited you over to her house. When you arrive, no one answers the door but the lights are on… so you break the window to get into the house. Soon after that, you’ll hear screaming from another floor. As you search for Prof. Tillinghast, a detective arrives. Together, you find her body and a mysterious man, who you’ll need to fight.
As you may have surmised, Arkham Horror: Mother’s Embrace is set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. It’s safe to assume that the story has a supernatural angle in some kind of way.
Your team of detectives will get bigger throughout the story. More people will join you and help you find out what really happened to Wilhelmina Tillinghast.
Gameplay
The gameplay loop consists of adventure elements and turn-based fights. You’ll walk around the environment and search for clues, people, and objects. You’ll need to talk to people, break things, and so on. Your character’s stats define how successful your actions are just like in a board game.
Many of them also let you choose what you do (e.g. try to break a box, shake it or look at it). Your characters can give you hints to let you know which of those actions will be successful.
As expected of a Lovecraftian tale, some cruel things will happen down the line and your character’s mind will suffer from it. The game will automatically roll a dice and if you miss the test, your character loses one sanity point. If your sanity reaches zero, your character gets a trauma that will negatively affect him in some way. Between scenarios (missions) you can leave your character at the bureau. If you do that, his trauma will disappear.
Besides sanity, your characters have health points. Just like in most games, your character dies if his HP reaches zero. You can revive them in a fight with items. There is no permadeath in the game.
Let’s talk about the turn-based fights. There is a timeline on the upper screen which shows the order of characters making their move. This gets decided through the individual initiative of every character.
You have 5 Action Points (AP). Every action costs one to five AP. Different weapons have different stats and cost different AP to use. There is magic to use as well as some abilities like Overwatch.
The voice acting is good enough in my opinion, even if many reviews on Steam say otherwise. It may have something to do with me not being a native English speaker, but I know of other games with very bad voice acting. The graphics and the sounds are okay-ish.
Some things will get on your nerves early on. For example, almost every time after you inspect an object, the camera will change and a cutscene will start, even if it’s for just one sentence. It feels unnecessary and disturbs the otherwise fluid gameplay.
Well, it would be fluid if your character wasn’t as maneuverable as a tank or get stuck on edges, and these cutscenes often feel cheap because the dialogue and mouth movements don’t match at all. Animations in general are very generic and repetitive.
The camera often feels like it’s in the wrong position or too close to the character which is another they should work on.
The adventure elements are a bit subpar, too. You can just mostly click on everything you can see and find clues and that’s it. There aren’t challenging puzzles. There isn’t even a mode where you can combine clues to find something out (like in The ABC Murders).
To add to that, the turn-based fights are pretty generic, too, and not innovative or difficult. To be honest, there’s not much to like; the game is mostly serviceable with nothing exceptional.
Summary
If the reviews on Steam are anything to go on, there’s much to dislike about this game. However, keep in mind that this is a €20 game and nothing more (you can even get it for €15.99 on a sale). I feel like a lot expected way too much for that money.
The game offers a pretty interesting story and thanks to the fast-paced switch between turn-based fights and story elements, it doesn’t get boring at all.
If you mainly want a tactical turn-based strategy game, this is not it. If you’re into an atmospheric detective adventure with easy turn-based fights and can turn a blind eye to the flaws I mentioned, you should definitely check this out, preferably when it’s on sale.
Credits
| Author | Curtis Pyke |
| YouTuber | The Indie Gaming Guild |
| Program | Freedom! Scholarship |
| Publisher | MGN |
| Game | Arkham Horror: Mother’s Embrace |