The Sinking City Review
The Sinking City, a detective action-adventure game from Frogwares, offers an in-depth Lovecraftian Prohibition-era story dredged with a handful of moral dilemmas and a bit of mild racism towards the fish folks and married to a fun figure-out-the-clues investigative style of play through an open-world city filled with grotesque enemies and dwindling sanity all underscored by Cthulhu-esque Great-Old-Ones undertones.
Starting Off
Arriving in the city of Oakmont, you play as Charles Reed, a private eye looking into strange visions. The setting feels a lot like The Call of Cthulhu: the book, not the game. Rotting fish are strewn about everywhere due to a mysterious flood lasting several weeks, and everything seems to have a green tinge.
I don’t want to give away too much of the story, but I’ll add a little context. It’s the 1920s prohibition era, everyone’s trapped in a town in New England that isn’t on the map, people are having visions and going mad, dark Lovecraftian creatures are on the loose, and some fish-faced people are living amongst usual humans. Your goal is to figure out what’s going on.
One of the core gameplay mechanics is investigations. After finding all evidence at an investigation site, orbs of light appear and show you scenes from the past, and you figure out in which order they go. Occasionally, the supernatural investigator sense shows some spooky humanoids pointing you in the right direction.
Consequential moral decisions are ripe throughout the main story of The Sinking City. I spent a good few minutes contemplating each one; so, I would say Frogwares did a great job of character and story building there. I’m not convinced that my choices mattered, though, because I never heard from those folks again; so, there could have been a bit more butterfly effect to pair with the moral dilemmas.
Horror
The Sinking City is about as much of a horror game as Left 4 Dead: it’s a bit scary at first, but you quickly realize it’s just the same shit with a different backdrop. Sure, the spontaneous creaks and bangs in the background add some tension, but it gets old! Oh, look, another building that looks like all the others with the same four enemies inside; I wonder what I’ll find. The key to a good horror game is building a suspenseful dread and gradually introducing more and more uncomfortable elements; this game shows its hand in the first quest and just increases the number of enemies you need to run past to build tension.
I loved the dark atmosphere; however, I felt it lacked the iconic looming existential dread typical of Lovecraftian style. There was dread at the open, but it quickly normalized as I found myself farming ammo and exploring negligible side quests. While the combat was intense at times with survival-horror-level ammo, dying was only a slap on the wrist. Hello, police box from two minutes ago. The townsfolk all seemed to be going about business as usual, too. Don’t mind the heaps of rotting fish everywhere, nightmarish monsters killing folks, and complete cutoff from the mainland with little hope of survival; we’ve got important places to be!
Speaking of the townsfolk, the walking simulator could use a bit of work. No one seemed to be capable of navigating around permanent fixtures in the streets; walls, for instance. People spawning behind toothpick-sized lamp posts took away from the experience a bit, too. Occasionally, the police NPCs would start shooting at me on the street for no reason, and everyone seemed to walk on by like it happens all the time. How rude.
Gameplay
Controls aren’t exactly intuitive in The Sinking City: the shoot button and the run button are both R2, the super special investigator skill button is D-Pad Down, and you’ve got to aim the healing syringe into your arm like a gun before shoving it in. Yikes! Turning the character feels like pointing a tank at times, too. There was one thing I particularly liked about the controls, though: the resistance of the R2 button changes dynamically when pressing L2 to aim; kudos for that, it’s an excellent detail.
Manual map pinning for each quest is clever, but each quest tells you exactly where to put it in the same format: on X street, between the fucked-up armadillo-looking thing and the fish guy. Kind of takes the fun out of figuring things out.
Conclusion
Overall, The Sinking City has a lot of good points and a few lulls. On the positive side, storytelling, character diversity, atmosphere and investigations are all well polished. On the not-so-positive side, the huge amount of story content and the open-world city made the repetitive gameplay a bit stale after a while. The game is worth playing a while, even if you don’t have the time to finish it.
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