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.
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.