If you're going to title your game "Cthulhu Mythos," you're setting up a lot of expectations. Fortunately, they did a good job of meeting them, mostly.
Character creation is decent; you raise or lower attributes (but you don't get extra points for lowering them) and buy skills. Some skills are definitely better than others. Most skills are useful, but some barely so; a lot depends on which route you take. Early in the game, you choose whom to travel with - but then you're stuck with that group for the rest of the game. If you want to play around with different parties, you'll have to play the game through more than once.
The game itself is alright. The perspective is weird: it's always a front view, just pointed in different directions; when the game started, I thought everybody was lying on the floor, looking up. You can interact with almost everything, but there's little worth looking at, and almost nothing to find that isn't out in the open, sparkling. Navigating the manor is confusing at first, since nothing is marked, but you'll eventually figure it out.
At first, it seems like the game is going to miss the point of the mythos. Cthulhu games are rooted in the terror of the unknown; high-schoolers shouldn't easily get used to fighting zombies, although I guess if you fight enough creepy dolls and soul orbs it's old hat. Random encounters and basic puzzles started to bore me, and the story seemed so thin that I forgot where I was going at one point. Didn't matter, though, 'cause I knew I'd eventually stumble on whatever was supposed to happen next. I was bored, and didn't have enough inventory space... and then the REAL monsters started to show up.
And that's when the game got satisfying. I won't spoil anything, other than mentioning that there's a very incongruous and implausible fetch-quest near the end of the game; it's worth playing through to the end. The late game is difficult and rewarding, and the ending is pretty decent.
Unfortunately, it didn't quite grip me enough to start a second playthrough right away. There are multiple endings, and things you unlock after beating the game, but ultimately, the gameplay was just flat enough that I didn't finish the next run. Still glad I bought it, though!
(Ah, one last thing. When opening a safe, it'll let you put in numbers forever; enter the combination, and then push "A".)
