Ironically however, the game's characters are also the game's biggest weakness. While you never get tired of Cthulhu cast in the role of “grumpy and unwilling saviour”, or some of his tag-along friends and the sharp developer wit their personalities exhibit, other characters are downright obnoxious and unnecessary. Your first companion, Umi, is a tiresome groupie whose shtick gets old really fast. Other characters like the necromancer (October), the sword (Sharpe), or the cat alien (Paws) are much more interesting and switch between parodying tropes of the genre, being cool characters in their own right.

As a game, Cthulhu Saves the World is a sufficient but forgettable experience. You walk across a fairly linear overworld or map with your band of ragtag saviours, collecting items and fighting battles, both random and hand-placed. The battle screen takes you to the standard JRPG line-up, where enemies and player characters stare each other down face-to-face, taking turns to inflict damage upon each other.

You might think the game is bad or bogged down from my choice of words. This, however, is not the case. Cthulhu's characters and enemies are varied and you have plenty of different tactical options at your disposal, thanks in part to a clever progression system that offers a choice between different skills and stats bonuses at each level-up.

Ultimately, Cthulhu Saves the World is more than enough fun to justify the measly 2 dollars being asked for the game on Steam these days. It is one of those rare games, like the original Doom, where playing it gives you a sense of who its developers were, what they enjoyed, which time they were raised in, and which culture produced them. For this reason alone, the game is worth a glance from any would-be RPG connoisseurs.