The Sinking City

A truly groundbreaking experience is not the mish-mash of clues, uninspired fireworks and quite appealing story with a rather lame ending - but for answering difficult questions, you have to beat The Sinking City more than just on the back.

The Sinking City is a very interesting game, with some great ideas but also some shortcomings. If you’re looking for a slow-paced, investigation-based game, make sure to check this out.

Even if the uneasy Lovecraftian atmosphere of The Sinking City can hook us with its gloomy graphics, the game is a technical mess. It's not the senseless battles that we will remember, but rather the investigative gameplay. Above all, the narrative around madness is remarkably well transcribed, both visually and acoustically. Fans of the genre will undoubtedly ignore its shortcomings and better appreciate its universe.

Though it muddies the waters by needlessly cramming in a boatload of gameplay mechanics that drown out some of the fun, The Sinking City delivers a believable turn-of-the-century Lovecraftian setting and infuses it with fittingly macabre story beats that would do the author proud.

The Sinking City feels more like it is based on a Sherlock Holmes novel rather than a game inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's work. The part of the story focusing on supernatural elements is pretty weak, but side-quests more than make up for it. This game has a very strong "one more place to visit" or "one more conversation" vibe. It's clunky but effective.

The Sinking City is a near-miss, and a unique foray into surivival horror. It doesn’t coddle you, and it certainly doesn’t do any hand-holding, which makes it a unique detective outing let down in its execution by a number of tiny flaws. A sequel that focuses on making cases less humdrum, and cuts back on the combat, could be a hell of an offering for devout fans of the detective genre. The game isn’t bad, but it’s hard to care about what you’re doing when many cases in The Sinking City are so banal.

Let me get something out of the way right now: The Sinking City is a noir detective game, not a psychological horror game or a survival horror game. The trailers give you serious Silent Hill / Eternal Darkness vibes, with a side of Resident Evil 4, and while this game visually refers to the horror game history of the last twenty years, it’s doing its own thing.

The first hurdle is certainly the shooting, and more generally the entire combat system, which is too old, woody and clumsy.

This is a good adventure with a very satisfying investigation system. Sadly its combat mechanics, the variety of the setting and the technical compartment lack quality.

Frogwares creates an open world and a story that both fit perfectly inside Lovecraft's mythology, but The Sinking City fails to sit aside the best games of the genre.

It’s clear The Sinking City tries to punch its weight with triple-A’s but overstretches itself. The fundamental lack of polish is problematic in light of its blockbuster RRP. But if nothing else, I feel it has the makings of a new cult classic.

The Sinking City feels like a mystery novel brought to life within a video game. The developers have captured that feeling of intrigue and danger perfectly. Sure, there are some rough bits attached to the entire ordeal, but overall Frogwares’ latest title is a fun romp through a dark and dangerous world that’s rife with problems for players to solve. If you’ve ever been a fan of Lovecraftian horror or just mystery stories in general, The Sinking City is one stop you’ll want to make a little time for on your trip down the rabbit hole.

If you can ignore The Sinking City's technical failings, set the combat difficulty to easy and stick to getting embroiled in the story.

While some of the quests do contain interesting stories, it’s not quite enough to make up for the weaknesses of the setting. I really wanted to like this game, and perhaps fans more interested in the source materials of Lovecraft or those interested in Frogwares’ evolving mechanics of detection will get a bigger kick out of it than I did.

It was a bad decision to create The Sinking City as an open world game, which makes the gameplay like a heap of loose sand. But the story is interesting, as is being a detective.

For the entire game you’ll have the feeling that something significant is going to happen soon – but it won’t. Story never takes a sharp turn, every interesting character is introduced in the first third of the game and there are no meaningful rewards to find in Oakmont openworld. [Issue#239, p.56]

An occasionally entertaining detective game blighted by poor writing, rote combat, and a dreary open world.

At some points The Sinking City shows small signs of the Lovecraftian horror that engulfs the city of Oakmont. Huge edifices of long forgotten deities, gargantuan subsea species and the madness of some of the citizens comes to light in, unfortunately, a few memorable segments. For the vast majority of the game though we go from one dull fetch quest to another to reach a sudden and quite uneventful ending.

Story of The Sinking City is good as novel but just story is interesting nothing more. Also animations and game mechanics feeling like playing old generation games.

Creators of the Sherlock franchise have hurled themselves into a watery abyss full of monsters and completely drowned their own brilliant investigative formula. The world is open, but terribly empty, the fights are dull, and the RPG mechanisms are lacking. Only the investigation remains fun - and it is not enough.

A brilliant concept with some excellent ideas, let down badly by the game engine, inconsistent writing and plotting.

An interesting game that scratches the detective itch, without ever reaching great heights.

The Sinking City promises a nightmarish journey through a Lovecraftian townscape filled with monsters and threatening cults, but too often falls into a loop of forced combat and resource hunting. The investigative parts are excellent, and this is probably the best Lovecraft adaptation since Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth, but it still never really lives up to its potential. Close, but no Shoggoth.

I had the same response in general to playing The Sinking City. There’s so much wonderful potential in this game that its flaws are all the more maddening. I wished that it had followed Call of Cthulhu in abandoning combat altogether and just used its larger space and considerably more nuanced investigation system to tell a great story. But it seems I’ll have to keep waiting for the perfect Lovecraft game.

The Sinking City is a Lovecraftian game with an excellent narrative but with too ambitious mechanics.

The Sinking City is certainly more involving and had more care put into it than last year’s official Call of Cthulhu game but besting its spiritual predecessor doesn’t mean it reaches its full potential. The detective work is quite involving, but the combat is a mess and the pretty open-world doesn’t have enough in it to justify its existence. It would’ve been better suited as a series of locations you hop between, rather than dull jaunts to get to places of interest or the various archives of information.

It won’t scare your socks off, but if you can avoid getting bogged down by The Sinking City’s clunkier elements, there’s enough to enjoy here.

Oakmont is a convincing Lovecraftian town - but the point of those stories is that these are places you'd never want to find yourself. [Issue#335, p.114]