I came to this one as a former CCG player, which I think matters, because if you’ve never built a deck around a specific plan and then watched a scenario punish that plan in a way that felt narratively earned instead of just mean, it’s a different kind of frustrating than most co-op games get. Core box alone is honestly a little weak, comma comma, I’ll say it, it’s the entry fee, not the meal. Where the game actually turns into what people are talking about is a couple campaigns in, once you’ve got a deck that’s survived some trauma and has the scars in it.
The thing that hooked me isn’t the horror theme exactly, though it’s genuinely well done, Lovecraft licensed stuff is usually a coat of paint and this one earns the mood. It’s the amalgamation of deckbuilding and honest to god roleplaying, your investigator remembers what happened to them between scenarios, physical and mental trauma carries, and a character dying partway through a campaign is a gut punch in a way dying in most games isn’t. My group’s Wendy Adams died on scenario four of Dunwich and we sat there for a minute before someone reached for the next investigator.
Replayability is the real fault line in the reviews I’ve read and I mostly agree, once you’ve played a campaign the mystery’s gone, this isn’t a game you’re replaying the same scenario for tactical reasons, it’s one story you get to experience once well. If that’s not what you want from a card game, this’ll frustrate you. If it is, nothing else on my shelf scratches it the same way.
Setup and teardown between sessions eats time, an hour campaign night can lose fifteen minutes to sleeving and sorting if you’re not organized about it going in.