Just did my first run-through of The Occult Chronices; here's a "first impressions"/mini-review.

Occult Chronicles has you playing as an agent of the Occult Defence Directorate (O.D.D.) exploring a creepy old mansion and trying to uncover its secrets and hopefully defeat the evil machinations of its inhabitants. You begin by selecting a scenario (Cthulhu cultists, vampires, aliens, demons, etc) and creating your investigator. I created an accountant named Wilbur (I guess all the field agents were busy that week) and pitted him against the vampire menace.

The game has you wandering around a randomly-generated mansion, running into various encounters, finding clues, solving quests, and hopefully finding enough loot to compensate for all the damage you're taking. Periodically the overarching plot will advance, and you must defeat the evil before it reaches the twelfth plot development, or its plans come to fruition and you lose.

Encounters typically present several options for resolution, with some being more or less difficult depending on your character's stats. For example, if I encounter a ghost, I may have the options of trying to fight it, banish it with a spell, engage it in a 'psychic duel', talk to it, or just run away. Wilbur was an intellectual type, so I ended up taking the diplomatic options a lot, which resulted in a lot of quests. I was pleased to see the extent to which my character build influenced the way I dealt with events, and I suspect a different character type would play very differently.

Skill checks are resolved via a short trick-taking card game with tarot carts, with your stats influencing the number of cards you get and the "target number" of tricks to take. The amount by which you succeed/fail affects the number of reward or punishment cards you must take. This mini-game works well enough and is quick and simple enough not to get annoying, but it does feel a little abstract - it's hard to imagine myself locked in deadly combat with a demon when I'm laying the Page of Wands over the Eight of Wands.

My other complaint, and this is true of all Cryptic Comet games, is that the interface can be hard to figure out even after having read the manual. I'm sure I'll get used to it after a few plays, though. Overall, the game had some decent atmosphere, moved along at a good pace, and had lots of nods to Lovecraft and to horror in general. (At one point I ran into The Tall Man from Phantasm, for example.) I'll have to play through a few more times and see how quickly the events start to get repetitive.

Oh, and if you're wondering about Wilbur, he used his acute reasoning skills to put a number of ghosts in the house to rest (apparently this vampire had a thing for haunted musical instruments). Unfortunately, Wilbur had a harder time reasoning with the zombies (they just don't understand optimal economic decision matrices), and, while fleeing one of them, tripped on a loose floorboard, fell into the basement and was promptly torn to shreds by a nightgaunt.

thanks for the review, sounds like a cool game!

Thanks for the great review Azilut - I've only just found out about the Cryptic Comet games, and must say they look very interesting.

Magrunner: Dark Pulse http://danteveli.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/magrunner-dark-pulse/
is a Lovecraft Portal mix thats pretty good
Starts of like Portal clone with magnetic impulses but as the story progresses it gets more and more Cthulhu elements. Plus Lovercraftian ending and our hero is Dex Ward.

Here are some further thoughts on Occult Chronicles after a few more play-throughs:

-I'm not finding the card game as distracting as I did initially; it's "fading into the background" and the theme is taking over.
-There is a lot of repetition in the events and quests you see, but on the other hand, there are many different ways of resolving them as well that can lead to very different results, so I'm not finding it tiresome so far.
-The game is HARD. I don't think I've made it past the fourth story token so far, and only one of my characters made it far enough that I was starting to consider exploring the basement. The difficulty feels appropriate for a roguelike, especially a horror one, but be advised.
-The game definitely feels quite "boardgame-ey". For me that's a plus, but the randomized nature does mean that the game tends to feel more like a collection of unrelated supernatural events rather than an overarching plotline. Though maybe I just haven't made it far enough into the game to see the over-plot come into its own.
-This is a text-heavy game. Stay away from it if you don't like doing a lot of reading. (You can skip most of it and just look at the stats, but at that point I'm not sure why you'd be playing this game and not a more action-oriented one.)
-The art is rather cartooney compared to Cryptic Comet's other offerings. It works well enough, but if you're expecting the drop-dead gorgeous art from, say, Armageddon Empires, you might be a little disappointed.

Edit: I'll mention one other thing, since it might be a deal-breaker for some people. One of the possible outcomes of a failed combat is that your character is insta-killed. It doesn't happen very often (I'd guess the probability is well below 1%), but it's there. I don't mind personally - the game isn't supposed to feel fair, it's supposed to feel quick, nasty and violent - but if that's the sort of thing that makes you write letters to your elected representative, you might want to skip this one.

Has anyone seen the Colour Out of Space film who would care to comment? HPL film adaptations are so rarely tolerable, let alone good...

not yet. Did you check the their homepage http://www.die-farbe.com/ ?
quite some indie prizes there and they seem to be in close contact with The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, who made Call Of... and Whisperer.
As they where really low budget and 100% Fan love.

Necronomicon - The Dawning of Darkness, according to the developer, the game is inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

Just finished reading The Colour Out of Space, one of my favorite Lovecraft stories so far. Now I'm in a mood for some Lovecraft game

Finally started reading Call of Cthulhu today...

This thread got to page 6, and existed for over a year, with nary a mention of Eternal Darkness?

Granted, it's not on PC. But if you have a Gamecube (or a Wii) Eternal Darkness is a very Lovecraftian game that you might give a shot. I know I enjoyed it a lot.

I NEED Shadow of the Comet, Prisoner of Ice and Dark Corners of the Earth on GOG!!!!! :)

Got the retail versions on my shelf still :D

Ps. If Shadow of the Comet ever pops up on GOG, then I might be able to help with some goodies that is in the retail box. Like A big brown envelope with letters and notes Written by Lord Boleskine, and The Shadow of the comet mouse pad (well i guess it would be a bit diffcult reproducing the mouse pad. Still have it though) ;)

Eldritch the already Lovecraft themed rogue-like game
gets and explicit Mountains of Madness DLC for FREE!

http://www.destructoid.com/eldritch-expanding-to-the-mountains-of-madness-267023.phtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Destructoid+%28Destructoid%29

Recently played through Necronomicon - The Dawning of Darkness. It turned out to be a point-and-click adaptation of Lovecraft's story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", which was a plus for me as I quite like that story. I have mixed feelings about TDoD - I liked it more than I was expecting to, but it feels like a great game that got pushed out the door when it was only half-finished. There are many points where it's obvious that there was meant to be a puzzle that was never completed (or the puzzle that is there was meant be far more elaborate), and the plot is very disjointed and often leaves you in the position of having no idea what to do next, so you just run around talking to everyone again in the hopes that you'll trigger something. On the other hand, it's obvious that someone cared about this project, as there are some very well-crafted and genuinely creepy sequences, most notably the "underground lab" that you'll be familiar with if you've read the story. I was also very impressed with some of the "City of the Ancients"-style architecture that crops up late in the game. It's a shame the game was so obviously rushed - another year in development and it could have been a real gem.

On the whole, if you're a die-hard Lovecraft fan who's used to overlooking a lot of flaws to find a few kernels of inspiration, it might be worth checking out - though it should definitely be lower on your list than, say, Darkness Within. If you're less invested in Lovecraft specifically, and are just looking for a solid horror adventure title, I'd suggest looking elsewhere.