Taylor Bauer
Taylor BauerAnother Lovecraftian action adventure game? Well, luckily for us, The Sinking City gets a lot of things right, including the balance of gameplay and lore.
The Sinking City pulls its inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. In this story, the narrator heads to a port city named Innsmouth and finds out about a fish-humanoid race of people named the Deep Ones, who have a cult established in the town. At the promise of wealth, luxury, and a ton of fish from the neighboring sea, the Deep Ones are offered human sacrifices regularly. The rest of the story is worth keeping quiet about given the parallels between it and the game. Just know that Lovecraft is at his best in this story. The game does a wonderful job of adapting some of its content, as well as other creatures and creations, from Lovecraft’s extensive bibliography into the game.
The 1920s city of Oakmont, Massachusetts might be fictional, but the design and energy of the environment where the game takes place feels very much real. Charles Reed, your character and narrator through the noir-style presentation of the game, arrives to look into some visions he’s having. Since WWI, he’s been haunted by graphic, horrific images in his sleep, and they’ve brought him here. Upon arrival, it’s clear the town has a problem of its own. In fact, it has a ton of problems, and guess who just arrived with a knack for detective work and otherworldly investigations? Mr. Reed, at your service.
The game is riddled with what it attempts to represent as legitimate early 20th-century racism and prejudice. It’s killing the townspeople, and cults around the fish people and KKK are growing in power and number. It never feels like it makes its point well, but it’s not gratuitous for the sake of being shocking. Lovecraft wrote extensively about his disdain for people of color, and as his work continues to come back into pop culture, we can’t ignore it. The Sinking City attempts to use it to explain the dread of Oakmont, but you end up feeling sadder that such timeless world-building and sci-fi writing could come from such a vile human being.
An L.A. Noire style of missions follows your arrival. Each case you come across needs looking into, and while you do so, you learn more about the city as well as your visions. Frogwares, the team behind The Sinking City, made a name for itself by bringing Sherlock Holmes into the video game world for nearly 15 years now. They know their way around a detective style game, but that doesn’t mean every case you take on in this game is going to have you on the edge of your seat. The visions that pop up are much more interesting than the single missions, in the beginning, leading to what I can assume will be a lot of early exits from this one.
A number of features, including being able to replay past events using the clues you find, are even hot-keyed in your menu as a cheat sheet. The game slowly teaches you how and when to use the features that assist you in your investigation, but it never feels intuitive because of the sheer number of things you can utilize. Between case notes, a skills tree with very little substantial influence on your experience, and connecting clues to get ghost-like replays of events, the game feels like it’d be much better without it all. Give us straight clue finding and lead completing, then let the world do its thing and keep all these features out of the way.
Stick through it, however, and the game’s story doesn’t necessarily get better. That being said, it does get much more compelling. By that, I mean that the lore of Lovecraft is so well represented here that it stands out amongst the mediocre progression through which the cases take you. Towards the end, as the story gets darker in every way possible, you start to feel glad you finished things out. That’s only going to be felt by those who can trudge through the early levels and the controls.
The controls are going to likely be mentioned in every review of this game. They truly are terrible. It is clunky moving around in wide open spaces, let alone dark stairways and eerie basements. Combined with the lackluster missions to start the game, and it’s hard for The Sinking City to ask for your time. I don’t blame those who bail on it, but I stuck it through and was happy I did so. Controls and early missions aside, the game expands itself into a more than acceptable detective adventure.
One thing that really got me thinking in the game, however, was more Lovecraft related than The Sinking City specifically. Nearly every Lovecraftian video game made is a lower budget, sometimes indie developer, designed game. What games like Call of Cthulhu largely lack are the means to make the lore presentable. Simply sprinkling in the occult and elements of otherworldly creatures isn’t enough. The Sinking City nearly gets it right. The slow detective gameplay is going to turn off a lot of people though, as is the frustrating controls. Play the game through, and it’s my opinion that you end up with more positives than negatives. That being said, your free time is yours. Do with it what you must.
In the end, the game is worth a run through if you like finding clues and connecting dots. The Lovecraftian elements are well done. Controls and a slow start aside, this is the closest we’ve gotten to Lovecraft’s work becoming a good video game.
An Xbox One review copy of The Sinking City was provided by Frogwares for the purposes of this review.
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The Sinking City
$49.94
Pros
- Great Use of Lovecraft
- Story Builds Well Towards the End
- Realism Meets Sci-Fi in a Pleasing Way
Cons
- Controls are bad...like two console generations ago bad
- Early Missions Start Slow and Feel Like Work
- If You Don't Like Clue-Finders, You Won't Like This
