We already gave Call of Cthulhu plaudits as part of our Rare Air - AusGamers' Official Top 10 Best Games of E3 Awards, but today we've taken a deep-dive on a number of newly-outed design initiatives developer Cyanide Studios is bringing to this unique "Investigation-RPG" hybrid.

And all of this stuff is adding up to an experience really unlike any other, especially when you compare what we deep-dove into after last year's E3 showing. Here's a snippet from our most recent in-depth preview:

The investigation side of the game, we learnt, is deeply layered; designed to serve a curious player. However, the madness side of the game (or the “ever-changing sense of inner self”) is intrinsically tied to this, and nothing is hard and fast, nor black and white. Shades of grey permeate the experience, which is amplified by player-choice. It's wonderfully paced, at this point, and while you can stretch the experience out to 20 hours (as revealed to us by Cyanide), if you truly embrace all the disparate mechanics; the way in which it all plays out promises to lead to true Water-Cooler gaming -- where your outcome, path and overall experience will differ to everyone else's, hopefully promoting multiple playthroughs.

The way in which the team has handled this, is in the multiple pathways to completion front. And we’re not specifically talking about the pathways to the game’s handful of endings: everything here has a multiple pathway -- from conversations and the relationships that form from them, to the way in which you progress through the game-world; puzzles, exploration, discovery and more. The patient, observant player, as we mentioned before, might find an item that makes a puzzle impediment easier to overcome. Or they might pick up on a piece of information for deduction that pushes the story, or specific information forward, or even laterally. The dynamic nature of how this is being presented is anything but binary, and we can only hope each and every moment that capitalises on this in the game, doesn’t follow a like-for-like suit. Which so far it appears to avoid.

Click here for our latest deep-dive on Call of Cthulhu.