Ultimate Review of The Sinking City - GameGame

Love craftian games are definitely on the rise in recent years with varied degrees of success, but The Sinking City's blend of a mysterious and cosmic plot with clunky but serviceable third-person action rises above many of the rest of this fleshed-out genre. That said, while developer Frog wares' delve into Cthulhu lore has incredible moments, the tedious backtracking and trial-and-error puzzles of this pulpy 1920s tale can be the wrong kind of terrifying. The Sinking City feels like it's picking up eight movies into a Lovecraft cinematic universe, delivering a concentrated dose of its distinctive flavor. The first five minutes alone pull from so many of Lovecraft's plots, quotes, and themes that it reverently captures the intrigue and interest from these pulpy stories. Inns mouthers' bodies were blessed by the sea. You gonna see a lot of us here, so you better get over it. It's not free of clic he, though. This is hardly the first story in this universe where you play as a private eye, for example. Let's just say I'm a private detective and leave it at that. But its mysterious, twisting plot is compelling and does a respectable job of combining old ideas in a new way.- Welcome to the proud city of Oakmont. Alas, now is not its finest hour, though it is its most important. The Sinking City's open world is set on an island on the Eastern Seaboard that has suffered a huge flood, and the impressive environments find ways to enhance the story telling. It's reminiscent of memorable games like Bio shock and the Silent Hill series. As one might expect from a Love craftian game, discovering clues, fighting monsters, and visions of macabre and otherworldly imagery propel detective Charles Reed down this path, taking a toll on both his health and sanity. It's a real hoot. The characters that you interact with are interesting and well-acted, but I find it disappointing that The Sinking City frequently recycled the same character models. It's especially noticeable that all of the black men you actually have conversations with have the same cartoonish face. Other roaming black NPCs have some variety, but this strange reuse was distracting during some of the most shocking moments that otherwise do a passable job of portraying the racial tensions of the era. While the plot remained captivating, much of the actual gameplay of The Sinking City left something to be desired. Combat feels clunky, a bit like older Resident Evil or Silent Hill games but with characters that react to controls at a snail's pace. I don't expect to be an acrobatic crack shot ninja, but maneuvering Reed, who's supposed to be a military veteran, felt frustratingly slow. That said, the difficulty was fairly well-matched to his limitations and I rarely had real trouble, partially due to the glaring absence of any sort of boss fights. That seemed odd in a game about overcoming epic monsters and Elder Gods. Moving around the map is tedious and time-consuming especially before you unlock fast travel locations. The Sinking City makes an effort to show off its diverse neighborhoods by sending you through each of them in turn, which is great at first but quickly turned annoying as I search for shortcuts around the maze of the flooded streets. It's also a little immersion-breaking that its citizens walk around seemingly unfazed by the destruction around them, even as monsters are literally taking over. If navigating the city was a problem, the research system reached groan-worthy tedium. Quest information is often cryptic and borderline meaningless and not in a clever way. You're a private eye, yes? Well, I've highlighted the police station, city archive, newspaper, places you'll need to get to the truth. There are four separate locations spread throughout the map in which you are meant to interpret information, so when that information is vague, I had to resort to running to each of them for some trial-and-error. Then I had to resort to another guessing game in order to combine the correct quest item with the piece of information I needed and apply different combinations of filters in order to discover appropriate information. While the idea certainly has thematic novelty, the execution was laborious .One of these took me several hours of going back and forth until something popped. In contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed another mechanic tied to investigation called the Mind Palace. While nothing particularly new or inventive, it's a way for you to interpret information with decisions about how it plays into the bigger picture. It let me sort and re-sort my discoveries by drawing clues and conclusions from evidence and make decisions that determine the character's moral perspective. The choices you make here sway the outcome of certain events and determine your path to the end game. This process is often fed by a retro cognition mechanic which recreates elements of long-passed scenes Reed was not present for, actually creating ghostly apparitions of characters in the past. For those that also played 2018's Call of Cthulhu, this was very similar to a mechanic in that game. Take this, ape-face! As The Sinking City came to its closing hours, I began to notice that every character  that contributed in a large way to the story fell deep into the morally-gray category. This dedication to moral ambiguity made me appreciate the attention to detail and commitment to intrigue and surprise by the developers, and provided an ending with more than just a binary good or bad decision. Not so fast, Charlie. These endings weren't quite as climactic and exciting as the cosmic stakes had led me to expect, though. The Sinking City's creation of a new Love craftian vision pairs with compelling stories, exciting environments, and memorable characters to make for one of the better Cthulhu lore games I've played. Its commitment to tastefully updating the storytelling methods of the genre while preserving the setting and tone of Love craft shines through the tedium and frustration and of trial-and-error detective work and excessive back tracking. I really hope Sinking City gets to refine these ideas in a sequel because there's a lot of promise here that gets watered down by the tedious stuff. If you want more Love craftian games in your life, make sure to check out our review of Call of Cthulhu or check out some gameplay of The Sinking City and interview with Frog wares from E3 2019.For everything else, stick with GameGame, and until next time, remember, in his house of R'yleh that Cthulhu waits dreaming.