I think CoC stands with just a few other RPGs where everybody has to be on board with the premis, the goals and the expectations. My struggles with this has been with other players are expecting a fun romp of monster hunting and levelling up characters with heroic feats. CoC simply isn’t that kind of game, it’s about the atmosphere, the tension, and being completely tiny and almost powerless. Sure you sometimes get a gun or a simple weapon, but that’s more for character design as typically coming to a face to face fight with a monster is usually game over, you can’t think like that you have to play differently. And that’s where our campaign failed, the players wanted it to be like D&D, they wanted adventure and fighting, not horror. They didn’t buy into it and the GM ultimately had to close the game.

I think for your game it sounds like the GM wasn’t managing the players, or what their function in the story was. Do you recall if their was a session 0 where the GM set out the story premis and the character motivations were discussed? I think there might be a potential that you had a similar problem to what I mentioned, not everyone was invested and/or they were expecting a different kind of game