15-year-old Cthulhu game Dark Corners of the Earth gets full mod support

A hotel hallway from Dark Corners of the Earth, updated with the Creepy HDR ReShade

(Image credit: MayheM7)

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a horror game developed by Headfirst and published by Bethesda, which sank like a stone on its initial release. But like Lovecraft said, that is not dead which can eternal lie, and Dark Corners has built a reputation as a cult classic in the years since, thanks in part to a memorable hotel chase sequence.

It's a buggy old game with some frustrating difficulty spikes and an even more jarring swing into action game territory than Bloodlines—and like Bloodlines, it has an essential fan patch. DCoTEPatch is the work of sucklead, who has continued tinkering with the game and now created an injection hook that forces it to check a mods directory before running.

What that means is this 15-year-old game is now compatible with the Vortex mod manager. It's got a page on NexusMods too, though so far it's only hosting a couple of existing graphics updates: Creepy HDR ReShade and a 5.5GB texture pack called Sharp Corners of the Earth. Thanks to sucklead's hard work, maybe now this nearly forgotten game can get some of the mod love it deserves.

While you're here, Retro Gamer's making of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is worth a read.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.