Developer: Frogwares
Publisher: BigBen Interactive
Released: June 27, 2019
Completed: April 30, 2020
Rated: M for Mature
The Sinking City is one of those games that should have been better, but could have been so much worse. As I put hour after hour into this Lovecraftian mystery, I encountered numerous bugs, anomalies, glitches, and problems, yet I still couldn't put the controller down. In spite of all its flaws, major and minor, there's an engaging game here that really got its hooks in me.
As I said in my Call of Cthulhu review, I'm generally a fan of Lovecraft's work, and the games based on it. The Sinking City does a marvelous job adapting elements of various short stories and novellas into an original story, and most admirably, addresses the concerns of racism present in many of them rather than sweeping them under the rug. Racism exists in the real world, and in Oakmont, the fictional town (and neighbor to Lovecraft's famous Innsmouth) where it takes place. Indeed, one of the greatest moments in the game for me was mocking a Grand Wizard of the KKK enough to provoke him to attack me, and then promptly shooting him in his stupid face, but the game doesn't force you down that path either.
There's a lot of freedom in The Sinking City. As an open-world adventure - or as open as a city more or less closed off from the world by a supernatural flood can be - you'll scour the town for clues, accept or decline quests, upgrade your character, and engage in clunky combat. This being a Lovecraftian game, it has the requisite sanity system as well, which will cause your vision to blur and all that jazz as you descend into madness. Let it dip too far, and you die. It's all pretty standard for a third person horror action-adventure, but what I did appreciate was how I never felt pressured into playing it a certain way. Puzzles can have different solutions, and unlike most games where I just accept every quest offered to me, there were several I declined because I didn't like the person asking for my assistance.
That's what The Sinking City does best. It tells a captivating story and sells a believable, if surreal, world. There are people I simply didn't want to associate with, and in some cases, decided the world would be better off without them (see: the KKK member). There are other members, such as the ape-like Mr. Throgmorton, that are shades of gray. He's an abrasive, rude, and elitist rich man, but he also seems genuinely concerned with his missing son in one of the game's earliest quests, and keeps his word to you. Frogwares even went out of their way to make some of Innsmouth's transplants likeable, no small feat for fish-faced humanoids. Just don't get too attached to anyone in particular. This being a Lovecraftian game, there aren't a lot of happy endings.
You're given more or less free reign to explore Oakmont, though certain areas will be inaccessible until your procure a boat to navigate its flooded streets. There are numerous generic houses you can enter to search for items that can be used to craft valuable resources, including bullets which, in a clever touch, double as the game's currency. There are certain areas of town that are infested with grotesque monsters, making them extremely dangerous to enter. Should you need to, it's advisable to run instead of engaging in combat lest you be quickly overwhelmed and sent to a long, slow loading screen.
The monsters themselves come in only a handful of varieties. There's a spindly spider-like creature that flits about, making it hard to get a bead on, a gigantic mass of flesh called, appropriately enough, an abomination, and a creature that looks very much like one of the straightjacket enemies from Silent Hill 2. In addition to otherworldly beasties, you'll encounter the occasional human enemy as well. No matter who or what you're fighting, combat is the least enjoyable part of the game.
By contrast, the investigation sequences are an interesting idea that felt just a little undercooked. Given that you're a private detective, you have some special mental power that allows you to see visions of the past - because of course you do, this is a video game. At certain points, you'll be tasked with reconstructing a crime scene by viewing the events, then selecting the correct order in which they occurred. These are seldom difficult, but I enjoyed it from a storytelling perspective and wished the mechanic was a little more fleshed out instead of three or four moments easily pieced together.
The Sinking City is rough around the edges in most ways, including its presentation. The character models are OK-ish, but they look at least a generation behind in most instances. The city itself is rather gorgeous with its wet, slick streets and antiquated aesthetic. The lighting plays a big part in this too, making it attractive to look at in stills, but the rampant screen tearing and graphical glitches spoil it in motion. I lost count of how often monsters would clip through or get caught in scenery, or enter one of those endless physics based death throes where they just twitch non-stop.
As if that weren't bad enough, the framerate is woefully inconsistent, often dropping well below 30. I'm generally not bothered by things like this, having grown up during the early days of 3D gaming and all that entailed, but for a system as powerful as the Xbox One or PS4 to struggle with a game like this definitely shows a lack of optimization.
Building interiors are generally recycled from one of about three templates, which makes exploring the random houses a bit dull. On the flip side there are also several unique structures to balance it out. The water, obviously a prominent part of the game considering its name, looks decent enough. Basically, the graphics are a mixed bag.
The sound fares a little better. The voice acting is more capable than you'd probably expect, though certainly not the highest caliber. There's not a lot of music that I recall, but the ambient sound effects are quite well done.
One other issue worth mentioning is the game's map. You'll need to rely on it a lot to navigate the confusing streets and waterways, but it can be very finicky. Oftentimes, my quest markers would simply disappear until I went back through my active quests, which caused them to reappear. As you might imagine, this was annoying.
But to be honest, I enjoyed The Sinking City way, way more than I expected to. It's a gripping tale of Lovecraftian horror with excellent writing that also intelligently handles some of the author's less admirable qualities. The game doesn't hold the player's hand, and it respects them enough to make their own decisions instead of telling them how to feel one way or another. It's rare to see a game demonstrate that level of maturity, and even though I happily shot the grand wizard without thinking twice, I respect that the game didn't get all preachy to tell me what I already know: racism is bad. Instead, it just presents situations to you and you deal with them as you see fit, allowing you to immerse yourself a bit more.
True, the immersion breaks whenever one of the game's graphical glitches, extremely long load times, or even the occasional hard crash crops up, but none of it was enough to stop me from playing. I was engaged until the very end, and satisfied with the conclusion I received (out of three possible endings). Frankly, it's one of the better Lovecraftian games I've played, even if it's held back by its technical issues.
The Sinking City was completed on an Xbox One X with no cheats.
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