Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land Quick Help

Basic Gameplay

The game is a turn based strategy. The aim is to finish each mission and this is done by completing all of the objectives in each. To review the objectives, press the portrait image in the top-right of the screen. You also need to keep the key Investigators alive. You have between 3 and 6 Investigators in each mission. Each Investigator can move and act as many times as they like until all of their Action Points (AP) are expended. Once you have run out of Action Points for all your Investigators or have done all you wish to do in a level, press the End Turn button (bottom-right) and this begins the enemy turn.

Gameplay Help

Help information in this game can be displayed at any point by pressing the ‘?‘ button. The game also has a tutorial we strongly recommend completing (‘Basic Training’ in the front-end) and help pages in the front-end (Game Guides > Field Manual).

Controls

• Selecting an Investigator: Tap/click on any unit to select it.
• Movement: Once an Investigator is selected, tapping/clicking on a square gives the Action Point cost of moving there. Tap or click on the same square a second time and the Investigator will move there.
• Attacking: Once an Investigator is selected, touch/click then hold on a unit to attack it. This will bring up the Action Bar. This tells you the Action Point cost, HIT% and Damage of the attack. The attack can be improved by allocating more Action Points to the attack by tapping the Aim button. Press the tick button to confirm the attack, or the cross to cancel it. If the tick is greyed out then your selected unit is either out of range, out of line-of-sight or does not have enough Action Points for the selected attack.
• Supporting Actions (Using First Aid, Psychoanalysis etc.): Friendly units can assist one another when standing next to each other. To perform an action select the unit with the item you wish to use, then hold tap/click on the recipient unit to perform an action. Press the tick button to confirm the action or the cross to cancel it. If the tick is greyed out then the selected unit cannot perform the action because either it does not have enough Action Points or the target unit is already on full Hit Points (HP) or Sanity (SAN).
• Navigating the Screen: Use touch/click-and-drag to scroll the camera around the mission area and rotate camera buttons (see below) to change the view. There is also a pinch-zoom (or using the mouse wheel on PC) to help you select things.
• Skills: To use any object in the game, it is a combination of a skill and item.  For example, to shoot a shotgun your Investigator needs that item equipped (such as a Winchester) – then the skill% for the Shotgun skill combined with that particular weapon (and the range) give a HIT%.  The ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ skill is used for casting spells (which come later in the game) and the Psychoanalysis skill, combined with a Psychology book, allows one Investigator to restore some Sanity (or SAN, also later in the game..) to another.
• Buying and Selling Items (in the Quatermaster): To buy an item,  tap/click the space in your Investigators inventory you want the item to go to, then touch/click and hold the item you want to buy and it will then purchase it.  If there is already an item in your Investigators slot, it will automatically sell that item as it buys the new item.  Note that to buy you need to make sure you have the money ($) to pay for an object.  Also note that you are buy like for like, as in you can only buy a weapon from the Quartermaster to go into the weapon slot of an Investigator.  Same for Equipment and Armor – they can only be purchased to go into a Equipment or Armor slot respectively.  For example you can’t buy a weapon to go into an equipment slot.  Press the help button ‘?‘ to find out more (press same button to remove this help text).  If you only want to sell an item; tap/click the item you are selling and the touch/click and hold the sell icon in the Quartermaster’s side of the screen (bottom-right of the item icons).

HUD Guide

This is a quick guide to the game’s HUD:

A – End Turn button.
B – Swap button – when two or more units are next to each other, they can exchange items using this.
C – Rotate camera buttons – use these to help you navigate the 3D game-space.
D – Unit portrait – Tap/click to open objectives box.
E- Character Sheet – Tap/click to open full stats inc. weapons and equipment for a unit.
F – Unit weapons – Upper weapon is the one equipped. Tap/click to rotate the weapon equipped.
G – Unit equipment – Upper item is the one equipped. Tap/click to rotate the item equipped.
H  - Unit armour – removes this amount of HP damage from each attack.
I – Help toggle – in any screen, this button brings up the help information.
J – Speed toggle – Tap/click to speed up the game movements and animations.
K – Pause menu – Tap/click to exit the game, replay from last turn or replay from last objective. If you quit a game, it is saved from the end of the last turn.