The Sinking City is a game that I started playing a year or 2 ago, after picking it up on sale on PSN. I fell off of it last year though. It wasn't that I wasn't liking the game; I was liking it quite a bit. It's just that other games came along that demanded my attention. Games like Alan Wake 2, College Football 25, and Silent Hill 2 remake kept pulling me away from finishing Sinking City. But I left The Sinking City installed on my console, fully intending to come back to it.
But there is a sequel due out sometime this year, and it's being marketed as a full-fledged survival horror game. That puts it firmly in my radar as a potential "must-play". In anticipation of the sequel's release, I wanted to go back to The Sinking City to finish it and review it.
While the sequel to The Sinking City is going to be more strictly a horror game, the original is actually a very different game. While it has Lovecraftian Eldritch monsters, and a madness-inducing plot, it stays more in the territory of a detective noir mystery. Think more along the lines of L.A. Noir than Resident Evil. And that makes sense, considering that most of the developer, Frogwares', catalog is Sherlock Holmes games.
Sinking City is a detective noir; not a proper horror game.
The horror of Lovecraftian racism
I admit, I was expecting more of a horror game. So I was surprised to find that Sinking City is 100% a full-blown detective noir mystery, with only light horror elements. Well, the horror may be light, but the Lovecraft-ness is dialed up to 11, and that includes the racism that was so present in Lovecraft's work. But thankfully, Frogwares is fully aware of this racism, and so the game is self-aware and hyper critical of its racism as well.
There's a splash screen at the beginning of the game that talks about Lovecraft's books being very racist, and that the developers made a conscious decision to include many of those racist elements for the sake of "authenticity". This means that characters who are coded as "black" or as other ethnic minorities are depicted as ape or fish men, and that misogyny is common place. It makes for an interesting approach to a genre period piece, since this is how many white Americans and Europeans really did see Africans and indigenous peoples: as little more than animals. However, The Sinking City doesn't make this a simple matter of perception. These characters really are ape and fish people. It's a literal depiction of how racist white Americans saw the world. But the game goes out of its way to make sure that these characters are not depicted as being inherently inferior to "normal" (e.g. "white") human characters.
Racism is a major component of the game, and sometimes, we get to shotgun Klansmen in the face!
What the splash screen doesn't mention is the way that this would be turned against the player. Right off the bat, the player is made to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome in ways that closely resemble racist bigotry. While there are plenty of characters who welcome the player character and are perfectly friendly towards him, there are also plenty of people who are outright hostile to him. The word "newcomer" is this game's N-word. Even when dealing with characters who are outwardly friendly and tolerant of the player, there is often an undercurrent of tension in their interactions, as if the other characters just want the interaction to be over with, so that they don't have to be seen in public conversing with a "newcomer" any more than they have to.
Frogwares doesn't go so far as to include other more overtly racist allegories in the game. Like, you aren't going to be stopped and harassed by police when the sun goes down, nor are you ever asked to show your papers, or to enter and exit public establishments through the back door. The NPCs' distrust of you as a "newcomer" never obstructs or interferes with your ability to play the game and complete your objectives, which does make the whole thing fall kind of flat. Yet that sense that you aren't welcome is always there, lingering.
We don't take kindly to Newcomers around here.
Lovecraft Holmes
The bulk of Sinking City's gameplay, and the place where it shines, is its noir detective gameplay. The player will be given a task to complete or a mystery to solve, you explore the site for clues, and then you try to deduce what happened. When you reveal enough clues, you'll be able to perform one of various "deduction" mechanics. One of which involves combining clues together in your "Mind Palace" in order to unlock new clues or to progress the quest.
The other is to go into an otherworldly version of the scene, in which you see 3 or 4 scenes from the event in question. You must then put them in the order in which they happened in order to solve the mystery or progress the quest. Neither is super difficult, and both can be brute-forced.
Charles puts together clues both in his head and in otherworldly versions of the crime scenes.
But brute-forcing a puzzle is rarely required because the game's case log is very effective at summarizing the clues and progress of each quest. As such, the key pieces of information are always presented in a way that makes them very difficult to misunderstand. But yet it still, somehow, does not feel like the game is holding my hand. I had to find each of those clues, and combine them to create the deductions, so it all feels earned.
A major part of most quests is to use one or more sources of public records to find or follow-up on a lead. The police station has records of crimes, the city hall has records of citizens and official documents, the local newspaper has records of past headlines and articles, the university and library have academic and arcane books, and the hospital has patient records. A quest might start out by only telling you a name, and you'll have to use the city hall to look up the person's address. Or there might be a reference to a past event, and you have to go to the newspaper archive to find the full article and learn where it happened or who might have witnessed it. Or maybe you hear about a crime or a missing person, so the first thing you do is go to the police station to look up the actual police report to learn the names of the victims and witnesses, and where the crime took place.
Again, it's not hard, and these record searches can be easily brute-forced. But again, I never had to brute-force them because the clues I was given were clear enough that I usually knew exactly what I was looking for. By simply putting in the correct categories, the game just gives you the single relevant record. It might have been cool if the game would give 1 or 2 red herring results, and the player would have to skim through them to pick out the one that is actually relevant. But it doesn't, so the process is fairly automatic.
Reed can search public records from the City Hall, Police Station, Newspaper Archive, and so forth.
While this might not have taxed my brain all that much, it did do a wonderful job of making me feel like I knew what I was doing. And that translated to creating the impression that the player character is really good at his job. The information being clearly presented means that I never felt like I was too far ahead of the player character, nor did I ever feel like I was completely lost. It all just works, and is very smooth.
But that smoothness of the detective gameplay also means that, like 90% of the game comes off feeling more like busy-work. I'm not making grand discoveries or deductions; I'm just piecing all the pieces of a puzzle together. A puzzle that has fairly large pieces, and a very clear picture of what it's supposed to be.
Oakmont as a character
The city and map is one of the stars of the game. Oakmont has a lot of character. It's appropriately moody and ambient, with the different districts all having their own distinct look and feel to them. The city is dingy, dirty, run-down, and (of course) half submerged. But despite the overall grimy look of the city, there are still clear distinctions between the parts of the city occupied by the "haves" versus the "have-nots".
Sinking City does not use conventional objective markers. It's one of the many open world games of its time that require the player to place your own objective markers. This forces the player to more closely engage with the evidence that the game provides you, and with the city map itself. To progress the game, you need to read notes or clues that tell you the location of destinations by their address or cross streets, and then find them on the map. This requires the player to read the names of streets, learn the layout of those streets, and memorize the location of major landmarks.
Further, once you have placed a waypoint, the game doesn't let traversal become a simple process of zoning out while walking in mostly straight lines towards the waypoint marker that you placed. The streets themselves are not laid out in clean grids with right angles. Most city blocks are more pentagonal or hexagonal. You will rarely (if ever) be able to leave 1 location, walk straight down 1 street, make a single 90 degree turn at an intersection, and then follow that 1 perpendicular road to your final destination.
Markers must be manually placed on the map based on cross streets given by clues.
Furthermore, large sections of the city are flooded out, so you cannot walk directly between them. You either need to find a dry route, or you need to hop on a boat in order to traverse the flooded sections. This breaks up the monotony of walking down streets, and makes some locations more distinct and memorable, because they may require a boat to access.
Early in the game, you also don't have access to fast travel, because fast travel points have to be unlocked by walking to them. All of this combines to force the player to learn the relationships and routes between the districts, landmarks, and major streets. By the time fast travel between all the districts was made available to me, I was able to find fast travel points almost immediately because I knew exactly where the closest fast travel points would be to almost every location that I needed to visit.
In fact, much to my surprise, after not having played the game for the majority of a year, when I came back to it, I had no trouble finding my way around. I may not have been able to remember the names of characters, and had completely forgotten some of the early-game characters who showed up later. But much to my surprise, I still remembered the relative location of major landmarks (such as City Hall, the Carpenter Mansion, and the hotel), and of all the districts, and of many of the major streets within those districts.
Half the city is flooded, forcing you to use boats to travel.
The boring city
Unfortunately, the city didn't hold my interest through the entire 30-ish hour playtime. Most of what I just said in the previous section only really applies to the first half of the game, and starts to fall apart in the second half. Even though I had a pretty good memory of the general layout of the city, and the relative location of major landmarks, actually navigating the city eventually became a tedious chore.
The reason for this is that there just isn't a whole lot going on in the city itself. In fact, there's really nothing going on in the city itself! Unlike other open world games like Grand Theft Auto or Skyrim or the like, there are no ambient events that happen out in the city itself. All of the side quests will likely be found simply by following the main quest, since side-quest-givers tend to hang out right next to where you need to go to progress the main questline.
There really isn't much reason to openly explore, or to walk from point to point (as opposed to fast traveling), once you have fast travel points unlocked. It doesn't help that there is no mini-map to show you the layout of nearby streets. Worse yet, the compass at the top of the screen is very hard to read, especially playing the console version while sitting on a couch 10 feet away. The "N", "E", "S", and "W" are tiny, compressed fonts, and can easily be obscured by all the markers and icons that will appear on the mini-map. So even if I know where I'm going, I still have to use the mini-map to orient myself at intersections because the compass is nigh-unusable.
The same building interiors are used over and over again.
Walking the twisting, maze-like streets of Oakmont becomes a completely pointless and tedious waste of time by the second half of the game, and the city starts to loose its appeal as a setting.
Worse still, the limited budget of the game starts to become more apparent, as the same interior layouts are used for many different buildings. I often walked into the a building in the second half of the game, and immediately stopped and wondered "wait, haven't I already been here?" In fact, there's one late-game side quest that requires finding collectibles hidden throughout the city, which requires you to visit the same copy-pasted building like 3 or 4 times in one quest, complete with the same false walls.
Errant shots
The tediousness of the second half of the game is exacerbated by the escalating difficulty of the awful gunplay. The gunplay is bad. Really bad. The gunplay in Sinking City is some of the worst I've ever played. It's the kind of thing that can be a total deal-breaker, and I can't really blame anybody for falling off the game because they can't stand the gunplay. It really is that bad. In fact, it makes me a bit worried about the sequel supposedly being more of an action-oriented horror shooter. I sure hope that Frogwares has learned a lot of lessons and has carefully studied other shooters, because if Sinking City 2 is even half as clunky as its predecessor, then the sequel will likely be dead in the water when it releases.
Thankfully, action and combat are nowhere near the focus of this first Sinking City. This is a game about investigation, conversation, and making decisions. That is where it shines. And you can always lower the combat difficulty if you don't want it to be too much of a burden.
Combat is floaty and imprecise.
But you won't be able to escape the gunplay completely. You will be frequently forced to engage with the awful gunplay on a regular basis. Almost every quest will have monster ambushes. You won't be able to hunt for clues while monsters are present, since they block all of your supernatural senses. And there will be times in which you will be locked in a room with monsters for mini-boss encounters. In situations like these, there is no running away. You will have to pull out a gun and shoot.
Most of the game's combat is spent back-pedaling while you fire wildly at bull-rushing enemies that like to lunge at you or hop back and forth from side to side, making them exceedingly difficulty to aim at. Combat has that same floaty, ice skates feel of the likes of Fallout 3, but without anything like V.A.T.S. to slow things down and give the player an opportunity to take a breath or get in a few strategic critical shots.
Sanity effects can be genuinely dangerous, but are obnoxious during gun fights.
The sanity effects don't help. The presence of monsters continuously drains your sanity, which eventually causes various (common) insanity effects. These will include the usual fare, such as a wobbly camera, Dutch angles, and a "drunk" filter. It can also cause the character to hallucinate additional monsters, which can attack and damage you. It can also cause the entire screen to start to fade out into black, extremely limiting visibility and making it all but impossible to accurately aim at and hit any enemy that is farther than arm's reach from the character. I know this is a Lovecraft-inspired game, and so these sorts of sanity effects are to be expected, and they actually work very well outside of combat, but throwing this at the player in the middle of combat that is already clumsy and uncomfortable is just salty lemon juice in an open wound.
The sinking economy
Inventory limits also keep ammunition at a premium, especially later in the game when the enemies become spongier. For most of the second half of the game, whenever I would loot a chest or cabinet, I would be met with multiple "cannot carry any more" messages for pretty much every inventory item except for cordite and gunpowder. Everything else was always full, except for those 2 resources. I never had enough cordite or gunpowder, which meant that my ammo supply always felt artificially limited.
That is, unless I went into one of the game's quarantine zones, which are abandoned parts of the city where monsters run amuck. These areas are also full of ammunition and crafting supplies, and they completely break the game's balance and economy.
Ammo and XP can be trivially farmed from the numerous Quarantine Zones spread around Oakmont.
The enemies and items in the zones respawn almost as soon as you leave. Anytime you're low on supplies, you can simply run through the nearest one of these areas, loot all the chests, and farm any enemies for experience towards skill points. You can even stand just outside the zone, and shoot at enemies from afar, where you are completely safe. Then run back through to repeat the process, until you are fully loaded with supplies, or gained as many skill points as you like.
The ability to farm these zones completely kills the need for doing side quests. There aren't any unique rewards for side quests, except for the occasional alternate costume. Quests and side quests only reward ammo and experience, which you can easily top off from a quarantine zone any time you like.
Good when a gun isn't drawn
Despite The Sinking City having a lot of rough edges, and the combat being a miserable slog anytime I was forced to engage with it, I still rather liked the game. The quest design, investigative mechanics, and overall story kept me interested enough to want to see the thing through. It's also a game that highlights both the best and worst of humanity -- our curiosity and ability for compassion, but also racism, bigotry, and greed. So when the anti-climatic ending comes along, the question of whether humanity deserves to be destroyed by the Eldritch monstrosities lurking under the water, actually isn't as cut and dry as it would otherwise be.