The Sinking City

 


The Sinking City is a game with a weird and twisted history and reputation ranging from a barrage of legal publisher issues and confusions about what the "real" version of the game is. Its a third person, detective HP Lovecraft Cthulu inspired adventure/survival horrorish kind of game. Despite its weird history and reputation I'll mostly avoid going into details. The gist is, the publisher 'stole' the game from the developer Frogwares, and put it on Steam without asking. This Steam version is the very earliest 1.0 build, which is rough around the edges, has some bugs and jank, but the actual 'official' developer version is released elsewhere, like Gamesplanet, that version is much updated like 2.0. I have the game on Steam, because I kind of refuse to buy games outside of steam for consistency and ease of use, so thats the version I played.

The game has you playing as Charles Reed, a detective who hasn't been able to get a good nights sleep in a long time, his face is all sunken in and he looks edgy and malnourished. He goes to this city Oakmont to somehow figure out how to stop his nightmares and finally get some sleep, something like that. You get off the boat and are introduced to this strange man that looks like a half gorilla or something and he sets you on a series of quests. The characters, atleast at first, have a wide variety and lots of oddity to how they look, the game has a distinct artistic style with throwing weird surrealist characters and vibes at you just to fuck with expectations, like fish people, monkey men, a librarian with her mouth sewn shut for seemingly no real explained reason besides "a punishment" , guys with strange wounds etc. It's all very mysterious and makes you intruiged to figure out what's going on.

Now, the game at first, or the first quarter or so, is a total clusterfuck and almost seems impossible to figure out. Eventually, you figure out how it expects you to operate its various menus and UI elements and how to navigate the world, but for the first few hours you're totally lost. That's because The Sinking City doesn't operate like other typical games in trying to determine where or what to do. It's more akin to something like Morrowind where you are presented with pages of journal entries/notes that you have to read paragraphs of and try to piece together what you're supposed to do. Then, you need to open the map and literally read every single street name and manually place a marker on where you think you might have to go. Yeah, at first this seemed like a huge daunting annoying task, but eventually I started to figure out the cues on how to more easily navigate this stuff. For instance, when you look at your notebook of 'objectives' or journal pages, there will be a tiny yellow icon above the ones that are actually relevant that have things left to do in them. I missed this for the first few hours, so it resulted in just doing the same 'objectives' over and over without really knowing if I was finished or not. Second, these tiny yellow icons also have even smaller icons inside of them that signal exactly what it expects you to do. This can be things like, Explore the area, Go to a local archive to do research, Talk to a person, and a few other guidelines. This is extremely easy to miss for the first few hours because one big issue (among many) is the general UI design and specifically icon size is WAY too small. I mean these icons are barely legiable, even if you press your face to the screen. I'm talking like 32x32. So for the first few hours of the game you cant even notice they're there. Thankfully, if you press Escape and happen to notice the 'How to Play' section, it will show you these icons and what they mean. But its then up to you to figure out where these icons even appear (the notebook). After I figured that out, navigation became much easier and more straightforward. You still have to manually place the waypoint on the map, and read the street names, but you no longer need to endlessly re-read paragraphs of every single journal entry, you can even press a button to 'pin' the selected entry on your screen, which grants a condensed version of the entry. So usually something like "The intersection of Pleasent Lane and Montgommery st in East Grimhaven bay" kind of thing. After the 20 hour duration of the campaign, I'm still not sure if I even enjoyed having to constantly manually skim through the map looking for street names and guessing where to place the marker, but I have to admit it is a unique characteristic of the game that makes it unlike any other open world game and does make you feel a bit more immersed in the world like an actual detective. They could have just done a better job with the icons and explaining things better.

So from this introductiary 'case' you spend a large majority of the game constantly opening your casebook, looking at these entries, trying to figure out where to manually place the marker to travel to next, running around to fast travel stations to get closer to the marker, then you usually end up having to talk to some NPC's with closeup, multiple dialogue option choices, which are very well voice acted and the story is quite interesting and mysterious and dark with varied strange characters, or you have to go to some area and explore a close proximity looking at objects to piece together what happened there. There's also this supernatural minds eye kind of mechanic where if you get close enough to certain points, your screen will go all funny and you have to press a button to go into this supernatural vision mode where you can reveal more clues. Once you gather enough clues, this portal will open that you walk into then you walk into more portals which reveal what happened in the past, and you have to choose the correct order that the events took place. Its usually only 3 or 4 choices and you can fail unlimintely so its just a matter of correctly understanding the story, or using deduction to choose the right numbers. This mechanic is fine, but it does start to feel a bit repetivie having to do this same mechanic all the time, because its not all that engaging.

The game surprises you with a spin where it actually sometimes turns into a kind of survival horror type game, where you have very limited ammo, and these creepy mutated monsters come out of nowhere and attack you. The combat in this game is quite clunky and awkward, you rarely have more than 15 bullets at a time across all weapons, but it kinda works. You start with a basic pistol, then you get a revolver, a shotgun, a machine gun, and a rifle. For the first 6 or so hours combat is pretty awful, you're better to just run past everything until you can start to get more weapons and thus more total ammo. Theres melee but...the melee just isn't worth doing, it just does this one repeating stock animation of swinging a shovel and if you're lucky it will hit the enemy and do some damage but it just feels so jank and bad I pretty much ignored melee. Theres a decent variety of enemies, first it starts off with these bizarre little crab mutant things that dance all around and have animations that really fuck up your aim, but only take 1 of the weakest bullets to kill. I kind of like how the enemy AI is constantly fucking with your aim, taunting you to just waste ammo missing when you're already desperately low on ammo, it creates this good feeling of tension. The tension starts to go away when you realize how easy it is to exploit the AI, I mean the game really does feel rough around the edges, certainly not really a AAA experience. Basic things like just being able to run behind a door and the enemy wont follow you (haha modern Resident evil) to things like leaving the building which seemingly replaces the enemies back in their stock location, but keeping the same damaged health state. Other things like merely jumping on an object will make most of the enemies helpless and just stand around waiting to be picked off. But still, the first quarter of the game you'd better just avoid combat which I mostly did. There was one point early in the game where I'd wander into a side quest area that suddenly contanied dozens of enemies, me with just a measely starter pistol, then I realized you're really not supposed to always do combat in this game and just leave or come back later. But about halfway through the game you start to feel like you can take on combat encounters. This is because once you have a few different weapons, you can craft multiple types of ammo, giving you a decent 'net pool' of available ammo. So the way crafting ammo works is there are containers in the world like shelves, lockers, boxes etc that you can interact with that give you supplies. Remember earlier in this review when I said the icons in this game are way too small and you can't even see what's going on? Yeah thats a problem here too. You loot these containers and all sorts of icons pop up of items you obtained, but even 20 hours in I still didn't have a clue what any of them meant. Anyway, then you open your inventory screen and can just craft all the types of ammo you want using these resources. You can also craft med kits, up to 3 at a time. At first you can only craft like 6 bullets per gun, you can increase it if you want through the upgrade skills tree, but you wont be able to craft that many anyways so its not much point. But at this point, combat becomes kind of fun...mostly. You start to feel like you can take on the basic enemies, and they grant experience which gives you skill tree points so its not like you necessarily want to avoid them either. The movement speed of the monsters contrasted with your character movement speed makes it so its not really easy to get away either, you really need to plan your shots and movement carefully, theres some strategy behind it, reloading is especially important and you need to carefully plan out when youre going to reload and where youre going to stand etc. The combat is decent enough, overall. When I said its 'mostly fine' I just mean in relation to the bugs the game has. For instance, it seems every single time you shoot the Shotgun, the game literally freezes for 2 seconds. This is a confirmed bug, its not just me. Many people on Steam forums and I think even the developer acknowledged this issue, yet the Steam version is not being updated due to that strange publisher drama. Unfortunate. Like yeah it kind of takes some of the fun out of it when the best gun in the game freezes your screen constantly. This is especially bad because on the skill tree you can spec into getting shotgun upgrades, only to get the shotgun and realize it techincally sucks cause it freezes your game. Oops. Besides that, there is this one gigantic enemy that is a massive bullet sponge and doesn't really make sense. It seems like you have to shoot him 20 times to kill him, yet the game is designed for you to never have any ammo. You can try playing with the explosive options like molotovs or grenades, but it doesn't seem effective. You can try playing with the bear traps you can craft, but he doesn't seem to get stuck in them and you just find yourself instead walking into them in frustration. So you kind of just end up running around trying to complete the objective avoiding this guy and it feels like a mess. I killed him once and wasted all my ammo and I don't even think I got that much more experience than a generic monster it just felt like a waste of time. This guy pops up a few times throughout the game and it just seems like his balance needs to be tweaked. Another rough around the edges type oddity this game has, is you can trigger NPC dialogue scenes while being chased by monsters, and while youre talking to the NPC there will just be monsters running around behind you and it just looks stupid and out of place.

Speaking of the skill tree, theres three of them. Mind, Vitality, and Guns. Overall the skills are pretty uninteresting and don't really change that much about the gameplay, its minor stuff. Things like slightly more health, 10% more damage, reloading certain guns slightly faster, a 20% chance to reserve crafting materials - theres nothing that really stands otu or really feels like a big boost to your character. Even 15 hours into the game with a lot of the tree filled in, I barely felt much of a difference. Yeah I guess having more health was the big one, but it doesn't really matter if its a waste to use a healthkit to go from 80% to 100% and wasting half of the potential healthkit. It felt sorta exciting to get new skill points and gain XP from killing monsters, but ultimately I never felt like it made a huge difference. Only getting new guns and crafting more ammo helped really.

The atmosphere of Oakmont is pretty immersive, theres lots of npc's walking around, doing their thing. You'll find guys just vomiting on the sidewalks, beggers, sometimes people get mugged, it does feel like a living world but unfortunately you can't really interact with generic npc's much. Usually when you try talking to people twice they just repeat the same line over and over. Like I said before though, there is a plethora of interesting characters to actually talk to and they do send you on adventures that are interesting. Unfortunately another problem the game has is that since it introduces so many different characters and names, it gets really hard to rememeber who is who. A simple solution that would really help this, is just some ability in the menu to see a list of characters with their faces to help you remember. Sadly, no such feature exists. So you go through paragraphs of dialogue and journals reading name after name like Go to John then Decide the fate of James then did Jones commit the crime or did Dan? Then actually Jimmy may have had something to do with it ... you're just like wait, who the fuck is who again? So that alone kind of really drags down the ability to competently follow the narrative for most of the game.. This is especially bad on the menu where you piece clues together and then can do 'Deductions' to decide, I guess, the outcome of the story. And it asks you to choose between all these different names of how the story will play out, but more often than not I just felt myself confused trying to remember who is who so the choices I was making just felt rather aimless and meaningless because I was struggling to follow the narrative. Again, If the UI just had pictures of the characters faces with their names by the choices it would have helped a lot...So yeah, the UI really has some flaws that hamper the overall experience.

Still, the game definitely has a lot of character and uniquness to it. There's even a mission where you infiltrate a KKK headquarters and can choose to kill the racist grandwizard. You don't really see stuff like that in games very often, its atleast memorable. The kinds of adventures and mysteries you get tasked to solve are usually intruging and dark, disturbing and gorey. The whole atmosphere and tone of the game, being that there has been a massive flood that at some point sunk half the city, so theres this misty, murky water everywhere and every other street you go down will suddenly turn into flooded buildings where you can choose to take a vehicle section boat ride to get around, it really ties in the Lovecraft vibes. There's a lot of occult going around with the townsfolk and cults and people talking about what lurks below. There's even a handful of these sections where you put on a really archaic diing suit and dive underwater, with these creepy cutscenes showing your descent, then you play these mini underwater sections, slowly stomping around trying to navigate to the nearest above water cave. These sections are usually short, but can be pretty annoying and sorta janky because sometimes there will be these jet streams coming from the floor that damage you, but it feels like the hitboxes on these things are way too big and you take damage from too far away so it can be frustrating. But these underwater sections also have some of the coolest / most horrific visuals of the entire game - you can get attacked by these sea creatures and fight back with these shitty infinite ammo underwater guns, I dont think you can kill the but you atleast stun them or something it was kinda clunky but cool nonetheles. But also, you can often see in the distance gigantic nightmarish Cthulhu type monsters too. Then, at the end of the underwater section you usually go into this cave usually with crazed cultists and have to find some clues in there and you can escape back to above ground. This one time, there was what seemed like a boss fight of this giant center monster spitting shit at you, so I shot at it for like 30 mins dying and reloading, but it turned out I just had to run around and pickup a book. That was kinda awkward and incoherent also, but also cool in concept atleast.

Speaking of dying, the way dying works in this game is once again, clunky and incoherent. You kind of just wake up at the nearest fast travel location. But the thing is, you can also manually save. So you'd think its something like Fallout or Skyrim or you know quicksaving in classic games, where you just pickup back where you left off, but no even if you load your manual save it just loads you to some random nearest fast travel station. So its hard to even tell what save youre even playing. Am I wasting ammo everytime I die and reload? Am I wasting health? These are questions I had for half of the game until I finally deliberately tested it to see how the fuck it works. It's like, it autosaves before you do anything 'important' then if you die, it can spawn you minutes away at some random fast travel station so its just confusing. There's nothing in the way of any kind of explaination , no "You woke up from the hospital" or anything like that, I think it just instantly loads the last autosave.

Towards the end of the game you're tasked with a series of choices to decide the fate of the city (or world?) but its sorta hard to decipher and by that point (20 hours in) I stopped really caring all that much about the story because of the afformentioned troubles with following along so I kinda just picked the option that sounded the coolest (annihilation?) It gave a cutscene showing I guess what must be Cthulu so that was nice. After the game ends, thats it, doesn't seem like you can keep playing the open world to do side quests. I tried reloading my previous save to see the other ending, which I found another one, Im not sure how many there actually are, but the other ending is basically the same thing it seems like. Except this time hes standing in a bar and then it slowly fills with water. So its like no matter what you choose the place gets flooded anyway. I'm sure theres probably a bunch more endings that I will watch on youtube. And speaking of side quests, theres a ton of them, and doing them even unlocks different costumes for your character you can equip at the main hotel. I only did a few, and they seem just as long and winding as the story quests. I'd say the side quests are well done, it doesn't just feel like dumbed down fetch quests but the ones I did felt just as significant as the main story. But yeah I figured the game is already gonna be long enough at 20 hours I don't feel the need to drag it out with another 20 hours of side quests so I left most of them alone.

Overall its a unique game, with tons of unique mechanics, its got lots of flaws and jank around the edges, the lack of high budget is apparent in many ways, its got interesting weird characters and awesome atmosphere and its probably the best game I've seen that does the whole Cthulhu vibe. The publisher drama and perpetually outdated Steam version is so strange, but also that whole ordeal is entertaining as well. The main character is interesting, this jaded down to earth, no BS, detective insomniac with good voice acting. So, I'd say its a pretty decent game, overall.
 

8/10