Well of course after playing the prequel Cthulhu Saves Christmas last year on the Nintendo Switch, it wouldn’t be long before I dusted off the original Cthulhu Saves The World, still there on my XBox 360, downloaded shortly after its release in 2010. Attracted to the weird title and finely-crafted gameplay and presentation, I barely played it then but knew it was great, deciding to save it for when the time was right.
Sixteen years later, my XBox 360 still chugs along, its ring redded when Red Dead Redemption booted up, its hard drive upgraded with a magic one-use cable gifted by an old friend, its ethernet port destroyed by a power surge in the early 2010s, its disc drive door requiring a paper clip and some luck to open, and Cthulhu Saves The World still stored on its internal hard drive. Microsoft's store for the XBox 360 has long since closed and the game cannot be obtained anew (it survives and is available on PC), but there it sits among my sloppily-crafted small group of downloaded XBox 360 games that I am hoping to have there forever.
Microsoft scares me though. Cthulhu Saves The World is an XBox 360 Indie Game, with no achievements and not reviewed by their board of standards and practices, yet still in 2026 it has to check in on Microsoft's servers before I can start the game. A few times this actually failed, requiring reboots of the system and repeated attempts to resolve. It's not an online game and it has no achievements yet Microsoft maintains enough of a leash on it several console generations later to make playing it troublesome at times. At some point in the future these old downloaded games will either be free of that leash or unplayable I suspect, and that will be a tragedy.
Enough with the depressing crap, though, as Cthulhu Saves The World was a funny, grindy, old school top-down-traversal and random-combat-with sprites role-playing game that captures the magic of the genre while making a lot of quality-of-life improvements that lets up on the traditional frustrations often experienced with those types of games. A dark, evil entity like Cthulhu would seem an unlikely candidate for being a likeable hero, but the great writing and unfolding adventure take the player there.
One of the frustrations from those old RPGs that these Cthulhu games from Zeboyd Games has reduced is the issue of infinite combat as one explores. Traditionally, dungeon levels and overland areas present the danger of constant attack, hindering exploration as one's party of adventurers tries to explore every level meticulously in hopes of acquiring loot and experience. In the two Cthulhu games, there is a set number of random encounters in each area, and once those are done, the dungeon is open to unhindered exploration ahead of the final boss encounter.
While I played Cthulhu Saves Christmas, at first I just stood at the entrance and started the fights myself to wear down the counter. I would save after every battle and head back to town and recharge magic as needed; but it was a dry, grindy process that felt a little shallow. By the end of that game I was exploring a little while I was grinding down that counter to mix it up a little. I found, however, that the interruptions of battle would sometimes throw off my mental image of the map and I would emerge disoriented, so I generally did not complete the exploration of the dungeon before finishing the required number of fights.
It was always worth it, as a well-designed game balance meant that clearing out the dungeon also levelled my party of quirky characters to where they needed to be before facing the boss at the end. Each dungeons' monsters were also a joy to behold, with all sorts of cute variations of other themes, and occasional weird one-off monsters like "Horror Writer". Fighting them with various physical and magical attacks was also great fun, seeing what spells were effective. There are lots of combat options that also reduce the old school frustration, like 1-Ups to restart the battle after a defeat, and an Escape spell.
The player can save anywhere, and victory in battle usually revives and heals the party completely. The only diminishing resource the player has to deal with is magic points; those can only be recharged in towns at the Inn or by sparse pools found in dungeons. There was usually one of those pools ahead of boss fights, so even dealing with monitoring one's magic points is more that fair when balanced out against all the other things making the game easy.
Levelling is fast and frequent, with each character getting a choice between two upgrade options each time, from stat increases to new spells to new passive abilities. It's a simple but engaging levelling system that gets the player back into the game quick. Each player also upgrades armor and weapons, with items found in chests or at shops in town, not as loot from monsters. Each item is unique to a specific player and can only be used by that character.
I was once again in the mood for an old-school roleplaying game and Cthulhu Saves The World fit the bill. Between its offbeat premise, wacky enemies, and perfectly-sized campaign length there was a lot to love here. I also love that an indie game released in 2010 and stored on a nearly-broken old console of mine for sixteen years still works most of the time. Gameplay like that is forever; let's hope the downloads we made back then are as long-lived.
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