Cthulhu Saves the World is a hilarious indie Role Playing Game done in the style of the 8 bit Dragon Warrior games.  Cthulhu Saves the World can be downloaded from the Xbox Live Arcade at a bargain price of 240 Microsoft points.  This game is a tongue in cheek RPG made by Robert Boyd, William Stiernberg, and Gordon McNeil.  Those three guys also made the hilarious old school RPG Breath of Death VII.  If you played Breath of Death VII then you already know how Cthulhu Saves the World plays because its core game play is almost exactly the same.  If you have not played Breath of Death VII then what the heck is wrong with you?  It was a hoot and only cost a buck.  Seriously, go buy Breath of Death VII.  Where was this going again? Cthulhu Saves the World?  Ah, yes, Cthulhu Saves the World scrubs the boring grind out of the old school RPG genre to deliver a fast, funny game for a price that competes with a meal from the dollar menu.  And Cthulhu is a lot heathier for you than anything you could buy from of a dollar menu.

Cthulhu saves the World is a soothing, lighthearted indie balm for the grim, gritty melodrama that the triple A studios pump out. Unlike Gears of War or Mass Effect this game can’t take itself seriously.  Cthulhu and the Narrator break the fourth wall to talk to the player and argue with each other. The cast of characters include tongue-in-cheek parodies of staple RPG characters and off-the-wall originals.  Nothing about this game is serious in the slightest, and it all adds up to one of the funniest games on the Xbox Live Arcade.  Cthulhu cranks up the funny with some of the wittiest dialogue available in any game.  To compliment the brilliant humor Cthulhu also delivers a deep old school RPG experience that is so good that it would put some Super Nintendo games to shame.  And it might just have the best soundtrack of any indie game on the XBLA.  Except for, maybe, I Made a Game with Zombies in it, which has an epic soundtrack.

Cthulhu Saves the World’s core game play is very solid because it scrubs all of the boring grind out of the old school RPGs genre while delivering a deep RPG experience.  Cthulhu uses a few nifty game mechanics to avoid the grind endemic to the old school RPG genre and to make the combat more complex.  The most important game mechanic that keeps Cthulhu moving quickly is that characters level up quickly and easily.  The ease of leveling is balanced by their being a limited number of random encounters in each area, so the player is discouraged from breaking the game by grinding himself retarded.  The limited amount of random encounters also helps the game move along at a quick pace because if the player gets lost in a dungeon the random encounters will stop so you could find your way to the end.  Cthulhu beats the grind in random encounters by using two game mechanics to encourage the player to end fights as quickly as possible.  The two game mechanics act as a carrot and a stick.  The game breaks out the stick by making all the bad guys 10% stronger every turn.  Cthulhu complements the stick by offering a carrot for ending fights quickly. After each fight Cthulhu and his crew recovers some Magic Points.  The game dangles a carrot in front of the player by decreasing the ammount of magic points that are recovered for every turn that goes by. This encourages the player to nuke the holy hell out of the mooks and, ideally, end each random encounter in one turn.  Figuring out how to end each random mook stomp in one turn is a fun minigame it its own right.  As much fun as it is to giggle stomp random mooks, Cthulhu does not encouraged the player to spend all their time terrorizing them.

Cthulhu Saves the World music video.

Cthulhu Saves the World delivers six solid hours of entertainment for only three bucks.  Even if you do not like old school RPGs the humor in Cthulhu is so good that you should give it a try.  The demo is free and it will give you a solid idea what the rest of the game will be like.  A game like Cthulhu shows that three guys with a good idea for a game can make something that is as much fun as a triple A title and delivers a lot of play time for your buck.  Cthulhu even manages something that the triple A titles rarely try for, comedy.  A wise man once said that comedy was harder to pull off than drama, but Cthulhu shows what a well done comedy game can be.  Cthulhu Saves the World is a great game to download if you have a slow, boring Sunday afternoon with nothing going on.  Just download Cthulhu and let the good times roll.  The power of the Internet compels you.