Frogwares The Sinking City is the type of game you don't see much anymore outside of the occasional release from the Sherlock Holmes series every so often. Detective Games are very niche and can often be criticized as being excruciatingly slow paced and merely one step above pixel hunting in old point-and-click adventure games. All the same, I love this type of game to death. They make me feel clever.
The Sinking City is a love letter to the Lovecraft mythos, and ties in many things from Lovecraft lore. I often spy signs for Whateley Fishing, a reference to The Dunwich Horror. A group of people you meet, the Innsmouthers, tell their tale much akin to a direct sequel to the story Shadow Over Innsmouth. Wrap that all up with strange abominations crawling out of the sea to eat your face, and the threat of a cosmic horror from the deep and conspiracies and cults on top of a Sanity Mechanic, and you have all the bulletpoints for a solid story worthy of the mythos.
If you look up articles on the game, most everyone is pointing out the use of Lovecrafts own particular brand of racism. I love Lovecraft and his work, but the guy was also a huge racist. The game tells you outright they included measures of racism and social injustice, as they were products of the time the game takes place in, and that ignoring them would be like saying such things didn't exist. I can respect this, even if the subject matter makes me uncomfortable. But this isn't a game you play to feel cozy and give good vibes. That's not the name of the game. We're about to embark on a journey into madness.
Story-wise, stop me if you heard this one. You play as Charles Reed, ex-navy diver turned Private Eye after an incident gave you Psuedo Assassins Creed Eagle Vision senses. You've been having dreams about an impending apocalypse scenario involving a city sinking below the waves and something bad waking up. Following the clues you windup in Oakmont, a sketchy city cut off from the rest of the world after a freak flood where the residents are about as welcoming as you'd expect. You're an Outsider, after all. You don't know their ways, their traditions, or their ways of life. They don't want you here and they'll tell you as such. But you're not here by choice. You have a job to do, investigating the visions you, and many other people have been having that all have them eventually arriving in Oakmont.
Your first contact on your mission has you working for a local pillar of the community, Robert Throgmorton. This is where we realize that Reed has probably seen enough by now that he's not shaken by the unconventional. Throgmorton appears at first glance to be an ape in a nice suit. You can ask him about this, to which we learn at some point in his ancestry, his family married into a "prestigious royal line" that gifted them their unique appearance. I asked myself the question, and chances are so will you...And spoiler alert, yes, it turns out Roberts father banged a monkey while on expedition in Africa.
Does Reed freak out about this? Does he freak out about anything? Hell no. He's already plagued with visions and hallucinations as is. People like Throgmorton and the Innsmouthers with their fish-like countenances are perhaps the sanest things that Reed has gazed upon. Reed is rarely visibly shaken by anything. He seems like the sort of guy who uses sarcasm as a coping mechanism. That's pretty hardboiled if you asked me.
This is where the game's sanity mechanic comes in. Observing or investigating certain things, or being in the presence of creatures trying to eat your scrotum can take a toll on the blue meter by our health. When it drops to about 75%, you're going to start seeing things, ranging from drippy ink people, esoteric letters crawling all over the wall textures, to phantoms coming at you. Occasionally I'd see the common crab spider enemy skittering at me before vanishing, but more often than not I'll see a vision of what appears to be a doctor with bloody empty eye sockets coming at me like I owe him three fifty.
We can say Reed has his hands full here.
Gameplay wise, the primary focus of the game is solving mysteries and investigating. You're new to town so naturally you don't know where anything is, and while there is a compass waypoint mechanic help you navigate around, you have to place these markers yourself. See they incorporated finding locations into the investigation. Say I find a clue that tells me a persons last known residence is at the corner of Here and There. Okay, I need to get to Here and There. I have to locate it on my map and place the ticker in the area I'm certain the spot will be. Then we hoof it and see what we find. But what if I didn't find an address? Well they thought of that too. I may not always come out with a name and an address, but maybe I picked up some other details I can look up. You can use the city services like the hospital and the police station to browse the archives and link information to get a clue you're looking for. You have to enter three topics of search criteria to maybe get what you're looking for and I often found myself scratching my brain which specific criteria the game was asking me for. For a particular case, I know I need to find where an old glass manufacturer is in town, which means I need to get to city hall and look up city plans and businesses.
This is where we reach my first minor gripe about the game. I might be clear across town to where I need to get to, and I can't always walk because the town is flooded and derelict. A lot of roads are underwater, which forces me to take a boat. If I swim, I'll eventually get nibbled to death by an unseen something, not fun. This can lead to a lock of quickly tabbing to the map to get your heading, and usually more than one boat trip across town. Sure there is a fast travel mechanic, but you can only use these after you've found them, naturally, and at the nodes themselves between them. This might be me personally, but I spend a lot of time in this game trying to calculate the path of least resistance between two points. Even with that I'm still stuck hoofing it most places. It makes the game feel padded because the city is indeed massive, but you do need these long stretches in between because they give you time to scavenge for supplies. There's no stores in town, the economy has gone to hell since the flood so you need to dumpster dive for stuff. Especially for health kits and ammo. For a game that makes me have to consult public records for my next clue, I'm surprised the game didn't force me to hunt down a workbench to craft ammunition. It makes me question the quality of Reeds ammo, because as a person who likes to hit a range now and again to burn ammo, I once had a box of ammo that kept firing dead. Curiously, I took one of the rounds and was able to screw off the bullet from the casing, and inside was...Well, I don't know the exact amount of gunpowder needed to make the bang happen, but I'm fairly certain this wasn't nearly enough. Then again, Reed was in the navy, and probably knows way more than me.
Now that I've touched on that, how's the combat? It's...There. It exists. I'm not terribly sure how much better to explain it. You have perhaps the stiffest melee attack, and I can never get a good look at it, but it looks like Reed pulls a shovel out of his ass and smacks whatever is in front of him. What helps with melee is if an enemy jukes you to the side, and they will, turning with them into the swing will still land the hit. But this is not a game where combat is the focus. You're not a warrior. Gun play is a little more viable because you really don't want most of these things getting too close, but you have to watch your ammo. Bullet casings and gunpowder are the best things to find. You start with a pistol that kinda gets the job done, but eventually you'll upgrade your arsenal as the case develops. Getting a little too crazy? Find a safe spot and jam a needle of anti-psychotics. Low on health? Find a safe spot and jam yourself with a needle of...Okay Reed what is in that syringe? I know healing in video games can be a little hand-wavy, but I really want to know whats in a syringe that going to heal bites and lacerations. I think if anything it's something to stave off infection.
Overall, that's the game. There isn't a whole lot of case files in the game, but each case is in and of itself a journey into a city of broken minds and shattered dreams. Once case will probably run you two hours, maybe more, depending on what's on the agenda. This is also because of all the running around you have to do. I want to call it padding it out, and it is, but it wouldn't be so bad if there were distractions from the case files and the occasional side objective. Oakmont is huge and sprawling. The streets are alive with activity, but there is nothing else to do or immerse yourself in other than the tasks at hand. I suppose in a way this makes sense. Reed isn't here on vacation. He's on the clock to find out why people are going insane, including himself. He doesn't have time to stop and smell the roses. When it comes to open world games, you need to have at least something going on other than the main storyline. But when you're a detective/survival horror game, I can understand how that might detract from the atmosphere. Something would seem off if they pulled like Red Dead 2 if you took a break from your investigations for a spot of poker at a bar somewhere. The town is going to get eaten by an underwater chaos being, after all.
Should you play it?
If you like mystery games, film noir styles, and lovecraftian mythos, I'd say give it a go. It'll keep you busy for a while, but I'd probably wait for it to go on sale or reduce in price, as fresh on the shelf price like I paid is a bit too much for what you get. This is a 39$ grade title, not a 59$.
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