This is a game I had recommended to me and bought at the same time as Paper Mario: Origami King, but it took me way longer to get around to playing it (despite that fact that it arrived significantly before Paper Mario did ^^;). I had heard that it was jank, but had a lot of goodness underneath that jank, and several people whose opinions I trust told me it'd be right up my alley. They were absolutely right, and I was really happy with my time with the game, although it took me a day or two of thinking when I was done to get to the point I was happy with X3. It took me like 30-ish hours to beat the game and most sidequests at medium difficulty for both combat and mysteries. Fair warning: I will be getting into somewhat spoilery territory on my analysis of the narrative.

The Sunken City follows private detective Charles Reed. Plagued by relentless visions of otherworldly horrors whenever he sleeps, he traces similar cases of this mysterious mass hysteria to a tiny town of Oakmont off the coast of Massachusetts. Oakmont is a tiny town not on most maps, and it's also been struck by a horrible flood recently, and a lot of the city is still underwater (it being the titular sinking city). Reed quickly gets involved with one of the city's three great families, the oddly ape-like Throgmortons, as his quest for answers to the source (and hopeful cure) of his mysterious visions brings him deeper and deeper towards the cosmic horrors that lurk beneath the city.

The narrative of The Sinking City is very much inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and is made by people who clearly know their Lovecraft very well. Among the main quest and side quests, there are oodles of homages and references to different Lovecraft stories all building towards a greater point.
It's no secret that Lovecraft was a horrible racist, and that those fears of an impure racial/cultural unknown fueled a lot of his writings. The Sinking City goes out of its way to use a lot of his metaphors in ways that thankfully don't just parrot his awful opinions, but try to convince the player to reflect on the world they themselves inhabit. The Sinking City's narrative is ultimately a very hopeful one. Though it has the player get mired in the swamps of all of humanity's evils (from racism to xenophobia to literal klansmen (whom you get to kill the fuck out of) lynching people), there is a consistent thread that one person with good intentions, namely you, can still do something to make some small parts of the world a little bit better. It's a story about how, despite all its evils, humanity is something still worth sacrificing to save, and having the player deliberately make that CHOICE to save humanity is a big reason I forgive what could easily be seen as an oddly lazy Deus Ex-style "pick a door" ending.
In short: I really enjoyed the narrative of the game, and I think it's done really well, with lots of memorable characters and locations throughout the game.

The gameplay of The Sinking City is most easily described as "L.A. Noire but you're actually doing detective work, and the combat is a bit better (and there's no driving)." You're a private eye, and that means detective work. As you do different quests, you routinely get info that you don't really know what to make of at the moment, so you need to go to one of the archives around town to use what info you DO have to try and pinpoint your next location you should check out. Whether its information about a patient at the hospital, the location a politician might live from some interview in the newspaper, or even trying to find your next inquiry spot by looking at past murders that are similar to the current one you're investigating at the police station, you really get to feel like a detective. You even have to place your own waypoint markers on the map using the addresses the game gives you.

The game's difficulty for the mysteries starts out at the easiest one, where it actually gives you waypoints, but the way to play the game is definitely to put it to the middle one where it doesn't (or if you're feeling really brave, you can even put it to the hardest one, where you aren't even told what evidence is of key importance to even try investigating further about). Plenty of people will definitely find the detective stuff to be a bother not worth troubling themselves with. Especially the way that fast travel is limited to only between nodes and getting around the city by boat is also pretty slow and annoying, there's a lot that will come off as fairly irritable design to someone more familiar with these types of open world city games. But all in all, I think the detective stuff and city exploration is a really cool way to make the whole mystery more engaging for the player in a way other than just having an L.A. Noire-style phone call to base to be told where to go next.

You're also fighting monsters quite a lot, and for that you'll need guns, which you slowly get as you complete more and more main quests. There are only four enemy types on land, but they're very formidable opponents, as you can get downed pretty damn fast if you're not careful. Different monsters have different weak points to aim for, giving you a strategy for each kind, but generally just using powerful guns and explosives to kill the baddies works out best. There's also a crafting system where you find materials around to stop whenever to craft more ammo and supplies, and also an XP system where you can give yourself slightly better odds at combat/crafting/questing (there's even the remnants of an apparently (and thankfully) removed stealth system), but combat is definitely not the main reason to play the game. I had fun with the combat, but if you're coming for a Lovecraftian shooter first and foremost, this is definitely not the game to seek out.

I played the game on a PS4 Slim (so non-Pro hardware), and I thought it looked and sounded nice. The game generally doesn't have much music in it, and it has some really bad pop-in on this hardware, but it overall ran pretty well and has a really nice, dreary aesthetic to it. It has a heavy atmosphere to mirror the dire straits of a city on the edge of starvation, paranoia, and reality. The main character and supporting characters all have very nice designs, with Reed in particular having just such a well suited basic costume that I never thought it felt right to try putting him in the different outfits you unlock later on. It technically runs just fine too, with some troubled framerates in more crowded spaces, but otherwise being totally playable.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though there is some seriously troubled stuff with the publisher of this game (they're really shady and awful, but thankfully the Switch version is self-published by the developers), this is a game I enjoyed too much to not recommend. I have no trouble comparing it to something like Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, in that though there is combat, and even though the mechanics can be janky, the main reason you're here is for the narrative, atmosphere, and themes. Though there certainly isn't the degree of personal choice like in VtMB, and while plenty of people will probably bounce off this game for the bumps it has (though thankfully a lot of QoL stuff has been improved since launch), if what I've described sounds like something you'd enjoy, this is absolutely a game worth hunting down and playing for yourself.

A good setting and while it often involves combat it at least doesn't have you fighting the style of threats you should have absolutely no chance against like some other Cthulhu games but the combat is never good enough and it involves too much busywork.

The investigation mechanic is too basic with pixel hunting on the harder difficulties and easily being able to piece things together with the main gimmick being the need to frequently look up records in the library, city hall, police HQ, and newspaper to find the address of people and places. Fast traveling to those locations and walking to the place you discover is where much of the time is spent. It's unfortunate these mechanics weren't better handled with the developers long running series of Sherlock Holmes games.

Cases often give you two or three ways to handle the finale and what side characters live or die but it never actually effects anything that meaningful except maybe a brief vision later or a few different lines. Even choices warning you that it will increase the spread of madness in the city never actually do much of anything. The game is too focused on finding crafting components to make more ammo, main and side quest rewards are ammo and components (sometimes a new gun), skills are mostly based on combat and crafting and there are infected areas of the city with good loot that require you to fight or avoid a lot of enemies (probably spending a lot of the loot you are acquiring anyway) that I just ignored. You have a sanity meter that never really matters, if it gets low enough hallucinations might attack you. The most interesting thing it did was create a hallucination of a fake box that gave me items when I searched it and then vanished.

The lower budget does show through in animations, walk cycles, bugs.

It can be an ok but repetitive playthrough if you like the theme. It did have one of my favorite NPC interactions in a game though https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1765647639973089742

Imagine being a game dev studio that's made like ten Sherlock Holmes games, and your big non-IP game is a boring mystery with incredibly repetitive mechanics.
The protagonist never grows or changes; he stays the same troubled apathetic guy that you see in the beginning. His voice acting makes it seem like he doesn't even care about the mystery!
The main plot never stops meandering, especially with chasing leads among the townspeople. We're supposed to believe that a flooded New England city in 1920s has a fire cult, KKK, ocean cultists, and 3 other cults along with strange individuals (a Mayan vampire? Seriously...?)
Surprisingly enough the worst part of the game is the UI. How do I know if there are more clues in a space? How do I know if something is a clue without having to step 2 inches away from it?
Using the archives and boating across flooded roads is cool. The visions are interesting and piecing together clues to unearth leads is unique but gets really tired after you do it 30+ times.
This game needed more drama. There are no big Eureka moments. The narrative isn't that compelling. If anything the Lovecraftian elements bogged it down. It could've been really great

The Sinking City is definitely a game for Lovecraft fans (maybe for some fans of investigative games like the Sherlock games). I would think that others might ditch this because the graphics are okay, it's not programmed properly, the shooting is a joke and the core gameplay is super rudimentary. So why should someone play this? The answer is atmosphere. Over the small fishing town of Oakmont hangs this incredibly rainy dread. Homeless people, Innsmouth refugees and scattered religious fanatics roam the streets. Most of the streets are flooded and only passable by small boats. Street signs and shop names are reminiscent of many well-known stories from the Cthulhu Mythos. This drew me in so deeply that at some point I didn't care that many places look similar and that many of the houses that can be entered are simple copies. Even if you know some Lovecraft stories or have played games, the story of Charles Reed is still exciting. Reed is called to Oakmont in dark nightmares and begins his work there by searching for the son of a well-known family who disappeared in the town after an expedition on the high seas. Over the course of about twenty hours, we now set out to solve the mystery and also solve some side quests, which have even more Easter Eggs and references to Lovecraftian stories. We progress through the game by talking, deduction and shooting. The main gameplay is solving puzzles and putting together jigsaw pieces of information. In this way, you always come to a place where something important is happening. Thanks to a gift from Reed, he can see fragments of the events and you have to put them in the right order to understand what has happened here. Within a chapter, you collect several of these insights and have to put them together in a meaningful way to find out motives, approaches and locations. Again and again, you have to refer to the city's archives. Mostly to track someone down. For example, Charles receives information about a crime and have to use clues (district, people, section, period) in the police records to find the criminal's accommodation. So we puzzle our way from place to place to get more information. This is never really difficult - this sequence of events in particular is usually simple from one corner of the room straight to the other - but putting the information together sometimes ends in trial and error due to poor wording. As a filler between these moments, moving around the city and combat serve their purpose. However, the latter should be seen as more than just a nice addition. The shootouts are never challenging, visually impressive, and the gunplay feels impactless and vague. Despite the standard arsenal including a revolver, shotgun, machine gun, and more, it could have had potential. On the side, we craft grenades, Molotov cocktails, and spring traps to counter the monsters. For this, we diligently loot all marked crates, shelves, and trash cans to craft additional ammunition and healing items for health and sanity points. Although each fight earns us experience points, which we can use in several small skill trees to, for example, strike faster, carry more ammunition, or deal more damage, these points are easily obtained throughout the storyline by completing quests, thus allowing you to avoid random fights. Another potential disappointment might be the just-about-okay technical state of the game. Effort seems lacking in many areas or the game appears to have been rushed to market. For instance, when boarding the boat for the flooded streets, the transition lacks animation, the characters just plibs onto the boat; opponents are sometimes thrown around in a ragdoll-like manner, and in cutscenes, Charles always wears his standard outfit instead of the unlockable clothing. Navigating through menus is also not well thought out and is cumbersome. Instead of simply being able to go back a menu with a right-click, one must press the displayed key, such as Escape. It's not even possible to go back by left-clicking the word. A better, cohesive gameplay experience could have significantly enhanced the credibility of the atmosphere. These are indeed numerous issues that could certainly deter players, and rightfully so. However, somehow, The Sinking City manages to be appealing as a whole. We delve deeper into the Lovecraftian rabbit hole, discovering more about the fate of the city and Reed with each step. Every side quest exposes us to darker moments, and the journey through the city consistently indicates that something is amiss. Yes, I believe as a Lovecraft fan, one can't go wrong here.

However, what the folks at Frogwares definitely failed to achieve is a satisfying ending. None of the three endings manages to do justice to how players have behaved throughout the game—they're freely selectable, abrupt, and bluntly concluded. Hence, it's better to cherish the main gameplay instead.

Well, I was not invested. The best part of this game was this amazing trailer, the concept and lovecraftian art is the last good thing this game has going, the actual gameplay is so bad or just ok.

Map/map menu and fast travel: bit messy, was ok.
Clue system: (one of the main things about this game) not as challenging as expected at first glance, repetitive and eventually boring.
Dialogue: was ok, only sometimes interesting.
Combat: almost a main aspect, and by far the worst part of the game.
Story: I lacked motivation to continue this game, so I'm not sure about the quality of the story.

I'll say, if you're a Lovecraft fan maybe you can ignore everything and focus on the story and aesthetics, and if that's not enough to keep you going back to the game, maybe just watch a good story compilation on yt to get your fill with this one.

Gute Story, Lore und schönes Design der Stadt und ihrer Bewohner machen Sinking City zu einem der interessanteren Cthulu Spiele, die es zur Zeit gibt.
Alles ist dreckig und vom Wahnsinn befallen. Manche geben auf, andere wollen davon profitieren, und wieder andere verfolgen ganz eigene Pläne. Alles von der Atmosphäre bis zur Charakterisierung der NPCs stimmt und ist eine gute Umsetzung des Lovecraft Universums.

Leider ist das Gameplay nach 1 Stunde auserzählt. Die wenigen Möglichkeiten zur Interaktion mit der Welt werden im Intro vorgestellt und dann nicht mehr erweitert. Eigentlich schade, weil das Grundgerüst schon nett war.

Einige Charaktere sehen sich leider sehr ähnlich, mir fiel es schwer NPCs wiederzuerkennen.
Das Kampfsystem ist nicht gut, es fühlt sich sehr draufgeklatscht an.
En paar Cutscenes sind etwas hölzern und wirken manchmal sogar billig.
Trotzdem bringt Sinking City nette Ideen mit und verdient sich in meinen Augen auch eine Fortsetzung vom gleichen Team, hoffentlich mit mehr Zeit und Budget.

I played this with my girlfriend since be both love Lovecraftian art and while she loved it I couldn't bring myself to really like anything about the game. The world feels like a liminal space for all of the wrong reasons. The design of the city itself would be great if it wasn't so god damn repetitive. The combat system is clunky and feels mostly unneccesary. So does the skilltree and researching things at the archive etc. 90% of the interioir feels recycled mostly because it is. They copied most house and furniture layouts multiple different times and didn't change shit about it except for maybe adding some quest items or painting the walls a different color. The story wasn't interesting and while I thought it was cool that there was an actual open world which didn't force you to do take any paths traveling felt tedious and more like a task to complete to finally continue the story than anything else. The sound design feels uninspired at best and the 3d models are glitchy. Decisions, even the final one at the end, don't feel like they've got any actual weight or influence on the game. I hate to give the game such a bad review because I think that a bit more polish could have worked wonders but I was relieved when the game finally ended and I could move on with my life. It's outrageous they take 40€ on Steam for this, I picked it up for around 5€ on sale and still feel ripped off

TLDR: No

For me, The Sinking City is a game that, unfortunately, is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. It's one of those games that starts off strong but loses much of its appeal as it goes on.

The story at the heart of The Sinking City is perhaps the most compelling part, however. It follows private investigator Charles Reed, who is tormented by images of Oakmont, a coastal city he has never seen before. Reed makes for an enjoyable protagonist, approaching Oakmont's bizarre locals and locales with a dry wit and charm that perfectly balance Oakmont's inherently cryptic nature.

While The Sinking City's residents and overarching narrative provide a captivating mystery to engage with, how that mystery is delivered is what eventually gave the game its mediocrity, in my view. The game employs a deliberately loose structure for its detective work. Most of the time, you're given a name, some general hints, and occasionally a vague location. Using this, you can cross-reference the information with city records or police reports to come up with something more concrete.

While in theory this does sound appealing and cool, in practice it can leave a lot to be desired.

A lot of the mystery-solving in this game involves sprinting across the incomprehensibly large open world of Oakmont. Seriously, this game really didn't need to be as large as it is. It's not even like you get to see all of it either; you mostly just visit the same dozen neighborhoods ad nauseum. Oakmont could have easily been an eighth of its size and been so much better off for it. As it stands, you'll spend close to half of your total playtime running between locations, sometimes broken up by a laughably short boat trip merely to cross the street.

Combing through clues is no picnic either. So much of the time, it gives an air of pixel hunting in old adventure games just to find whatever piece of the puzzle you're missing. You'll go over the same area several times only to stumble on the missing clue that's right next to the prompt for one you've already looked at a dozen times. I assure you, it was as exhausting to play as it is to read my summary of it.

Alongside the open world, combat is also something that feels like a quarter-assed addition that's only included to add some spice to the investigations. Your melee attack is next to useless, none of the guns feel particularly good, and aiming is slow as molasses. Even with the controller sensitivity and aim assist on full, along with dropping the combat difficulty down to easy, I still wasn't able to make the game's combat as satisfying as I would have liked it to be. As it stands, I can't help but feel it's just a pointless addition to try and emulate the experience of L.A. Noire.

All that said, while I did enjoy the narrative and mysteries at the heart of The Sinking City (aside from the Mass Effect 3-esque ending choices), it was everything else around it that made it such a sticking disappointment by the journey's end. The freeform detective work is definitely inspired, but its execution and the lack of effective tutorializing had at times left me lost and confused, and not in the intended ways.

I'm no doubt still very interested in dipping my toes into Frogware's Sherlock Holmes series, but their standalone Lovecraft adventure sadly left a lot to be desired.

5/10

Intrigante pensar nesse game, pois ele me irritou muito e com bastante frequência, por sinal. O jogo possui um sistema de investigação interessante e uma trama ok. Mas todo o resto é bastante ruim. Sistema de combate terrível. Correr constantemente pela cidade é irritante, Monótono e entediante. Além disso, gráficos e animação são bem ruins. Seria melhor se os desenvolvedores prestassem atenção não à escala da cidade, mas ao seu detalhe e qualidade, que deixa muito a desejar.

Mas... apesar de tudo, eu considero ele um game 5 para 6, principalmente pela atmosfera do game. Ele obviamente não é um jogo de muito orçamento e levo isso em consideração. Gostei até certo ponto de jogar ele, apesar de sofrer de muitos problemas. O que me chamou atenção para esse game foi justamente seu segundo jogo anunciado. Espero de coração que tudo de ruim que tem nesse primeiro, que não é pouca coisa, seja melhorado e todo o resto que é bom seja mantido e elevado no seu segundo jogo.

Pontos Positivos:
- Atmosfera do game bem legal
- História salva até certo ponto

Pontos Negativos:
- Jogabilidade Fraca
- Mecânicas de game confusas
- "Mundo aberto" extremamente monótono
- Combate lixo

Versão utilizada para análise: XBOX

im gonna be biased here
enjoyed my 14 hours

this game is not for every one and thats so fine
lots of walking(unnecessary walking - you walk a ton in obduction but for a reason ,waling here is just a chore)

i first saw this game in a gaming magazine years back before its release i was so hyped about it
i bought the game day one i played it for half an hour and forget about it
but this time was different i wanted to finish it so bad

story wise it was fine
and had potent story
but never delivered

super great character design
slith mouth librarian
throgmortan family
johanas and his yellow slick suit
insmouthers
father and son of carpenters
such a bliss

fun mystery solving(at least for the first 5 hours or so)
no new quirks added after playing for 1 hour (wasted potential)

this game tackles politics and racism but ends them with a cliffhanger (such a waste)

graphics are good(kinda)
lots of npc spawning out of nowhere

npc and monsters ai is so garbage

you see lots of reused assets
houses,inside the houses
npcs ( you kill one in story then see lots of the same npc on the street like dude dont reuse your main npcs as a street fodders im so pissed)

combat is so garbage
you get a rifle but it feels like a snowball gun
hitting them with your shovel feels like your petting the monster
its "medkit" but it heals so litttle and you have no other option

crafting mats are everywhere but you can carry so few lol
survival horror with a bandaid

there is a skill tree but lets forget about it
its there for the purpose of being there

and the diving sections are just bad

This game is the definition of mediocre. I can't think of anything this game does particularly well. As far as atmosphere and story go, Call of Cthulhu (2018) did a better job at scratching the Lovecraftian itch. The investigation parts are not very interesting as the game does most of the heavy lifting for you. Navigation around the city is not particularly fun, and the main story never got interesting enough to hook me. All this added up to a game that took to long to finish and never became fun to play, but felt like a chore. I wouldn't recommend picking this one up unless you really need some Lovecraftian gaming content. There aren't many good options in that area unfortunately.

Not really a "Lovecraftian" game as such, more a game that asks "What if Lovecraftian stuff was real?" Doesn't really explore the mystery or the unknowable, it just drops you in a city where all this stuff exists and is normal. Luckily, the detective stuff is pretty fun, and the deductions let you choose how to close a case.

For the best experience, set combat to easy - it's just bad, it's not fun, get it over with as quickly as possible - and skip the obvious collectible side cases. If a case gives you a half-dozen or more leads at the start, it's just going to take you into generic reused interiors and infested zones. Waste of time.

The Sinking City is a good Lovecraft adaptation caught in a mediocre game.
The open world seems insanely detailed and intricate at first glance, but unfortunately there isn't as much hidden behind it as hoped. On the one hand, some side quests are interesting. They offer quite a bit of variety in terms of content and expand the lore. On the other hand, the game hardly rewards you for exploring. Apart from crates, there is hardly anything to discover off the quest paths.
The big problem with the quests is that they almost always follow a very similar pattern. You enter a place, shoot a few monsters, examine all the clues and reconstruct the events. With the clues gained, you then move on to the next station at the other end of the map. In between, you look at loading screens and popping textures very often. Not particularly challenging and or fun.
The combat and really all the other mechanics seem screwed on and don't quite fit. I was grateful for the variety, but the implementation lacks skill and budget.
Focus would have done the developers good in general, because many elements are also really great. The character design, though clunky, is something else and shows a lot of innovation. Apart from ape-ish looking patriarchs and fishy looking dudes, even the protagonist looks a like guy who has lived through and seen some effed up stuff. The same goes for the environments. The city really feels like it could exist exactly like this in a tale by Lovecraft. I also liked how grey most of the important "choices" felt. No obvious good or bad ones.
Certainly the better game compared to Call of Cthulhu (2018) but had much more potential.