The Sinking City

1920s New England. A hardboiled private investigator from Boston travels to a small town off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate mysterious happenings. The villagers are secretive and distrustful of outsiders, otherworldly cults plot dark magics in the shadows, and our hero must battle his own mind as he hunts for the truth.

Welcome to The Sinking City.

(Note: In this review I discuss the structure of the game and the nature of the ending. This review doesn't reveal anything that I think would reduce anyone's enjoyment of the game but, because there is technically a discussion of the ending, I want to make this disclaimer to ensure no one feels "spoiled" by the review.)

(Another important note: If you want to support this game, only certain storefronts actually have the money go to the developer. See the second to last paragraph of the review for more information, but most notably Steam is not a "safe" storefront.)

Private investigator Charles Reed suffers from horrific visions, restless nights, and creeping visions, but has traced his affliction to the Massachusetts town of Oakmont, and sets out to find some answers. Unfortunately, Oakmont has been half-submerged since an incident known as the Flood two years ago, its residents are secretive and openly hostile towards outsiders, and the city is infested with monsters known as wylebeasts. The city is also trying to handle an influx of refugees from the neighboring town of Innsmouth, which isn't helping anything.

The Sinking City is an open world Lovecraftian horror mystery adventure game. Whew, that's a mouthful. But all those terms are necessary to give an accurate picture of the game; you're given free rein to scour all of Oakmont as you try to find the dark secret of the monsters overtaking the city and the madness overtaking your mind.

When I first started playing The Sinking City, it reminded me a lot of Deadly Premonition. Both are open world games that place you in the shoes of a man investigating supernaturally-tinged phenomena in a small American town filled with monsters. But even if they were similar on paper, it soon became clear that they provided drastically different experiences. Deadly Premonition was a technical mess that poured its heart and soul into the characters, setting, and atmosphere. The main plot was a direct, linear path (like a TV show), and we just had to push the protagonist forward along that path, killing every monster and examining every shiny object on the way. The Sinking City, while still a bit janky, attempts to have functional investigation and combat systems, and forces you to find your own way, both physically and morally, through an unwelcoming Oakmont. Unfortunately, without the wacky charm of the characters, no matter how much more technically proficient The Sinking City is than Deadly Premonition, it just doesn't come close to providing as wonderful an experience.

That's not to say The Sinking City is bad. In fact, I really liked it! But I think it will only really appeal to mystery fans who can enjoy soaking in ceaseless Lovecraftian gloom while accepting (or perhaps even reveling in) immersion-building pedantry and overlooking obvious technical limitations.

The vast majority of The Sinking City consists of the same gameplay loop: find out where to go next, go there, investigate a building, find out where to go next. It's simple, but there are enough variations to prevent it from becoming completely monotonous. First, most buildings you investigate will have monsters that you need to fight. Remember this, because I want to dive into that fact later. Second, there are a couple of investigation systems. You might need to use your sixth sense to dispel illusions, discover spectral omens that you need to follow for clues, or see visions of past events that you need to put in the correct order for a revelation. Or just investigate evidence normally, which gives you clues that you need to match together into conclusions, like the logic system in Ace Attorney Investigations.

Of course, to investigate a location, you need to get there first. The Sinking City doesn't merely give you an objective marker at your next destination. Oakmont is a city, and you need to navigate it as you would any other city: with a map and directions. Unfortunately, unlike most cities, Oakmont does not have street numbers. Instead, all directions just tell you what street the building is on or near, such as "at the corner of Market Street and Pelican Avenue" or "on Halifax Street, between Meadows Place and St. Michael's Way." So you need to identify the area on your map, go to that area (you can drop a marker on the map that will serve as an objective marker and help guide you), and then find the place. Buildings you can enter have special marks, but there still isn't any way to find the precise building you need besides trial-and-error.

This is how the entire game works. You never get a break or a short-cut, besides fast-travel points scattered throughout the city. If hunting streets for particular buildings sounds like it's going annoy and bore you, you probably shouldn't bother with The Sinking City. But I'm perfectly content putting in the effort for the immersion of having to actually traverse and navigate through Oakmont.

One of The Sinking City's strengths is the gloomy atmosphere of its setting. ...Normally you probably wouldn't classify that as a strength, but this is Lovecraft we're talking about. Oakmont might be the most depressing, wretched town I've seen in video games. Greenvale is a wacky, normal town during the day. Yharnam is an absolute wreck, but it's not so much a real town as a playground for you to rampage through. Oakmont is a city that went through catastrophe... and had to just live through it. The citizens of Oakmont have adapted; flooded streets have floating street signs, and the places most heavily infested with monsters have been boarded up. There's no façade of normalcy. This is a real city, a place where people actually live. (Well, not really—but it at least attempts to present itself as such.) There are a couple of oversights that prevent Oakmont from truly feeling alive—such as a lack of children or grocery stores—but the despair of a town that has had to survive through apocalypse is palpable.

Alright, I want to talk about the monsters now. I warned you this was coming, so strap in. The thing I find most extraordinary about the monsters in this game is their presence at all, and the fact that you can fight them. After all, these are monsters. They are supposed to be scary. But the scary is the unknown. When you can get up close to monsters, see them, and bash their head in with a spade, they lose their terror. (To a certain extent. I think the idea that these monsters are not magical invulnerable beings but ordinary creatures of flesh and blood that are fully natural yet completely outside of our understanding of biology is horrific.)

So maybe there is an element of existential dread, but the ability to easily fight and kill the monsters greatly diminishes the visceral sense of fear that most horror games attempt to instill. It's also not very Lovecraftian. The most Lovecraftian video game of all time probably is and always will be Amnesia: the Dark Descent. Its simplicity is its strength. You have no way to fight the monster, and merely looking at it will drive you mad. You are a mere maggot of the universe, and have no choice but to wallow in the mud in the hope that Greater things do not trample you underfoot. Not being able to see the monster in that game—not being allowed to look at it—just makes it that much more mysterious and scary.

But The Sinking City isn't just a horror game. It's also an investigative mystery game. And this is where I think things get interesting. How do you make a Lovecraftian mystery game? The two ideas seem almost diametrically opposed. The mystery genre is all about gathering information and using it to synthesize a solution to a seemingly impossible problem. Lovecraftian cosmic horror, on the other hand, is about existential despair brought upon by human insignificance on the cosmic scale, and the terror of things beyond human comprehension. How can you gather information about the unknowable? The genres don't mesh.

Maybe we'll do better if we tweak our viewpoint a bit. After all, even if Lovecraftian secrets are unknowable, that doesn't stop the characters from trying to learn. If we think about Lovecraft as an attempt to unravel these secrets, then both Lovecraft and mysteries become about gathering information. Success! Except... In Lovecraft, information brings madness and despair. In mysteries, knowledge is light, order, and power. Even if we look at the two genres through the lens of information, they treat information in exactly the opposite way.

So what do you do? How do you reconcile these genres? One obvious, straightforward answer would be to just have an investigative mystery game and put Amnesia-style monsters in it. You have mysteries, and you have a Lovecraftian monster system. But I think there would be two major issues. First, trying to investigate crime scenes while having to constantly hide from monsters just doesn't sound very fun. I want to get the evidence and learn about the crime, and I don't want to spend a minute in a cupboard doing nothing for every two minutes of investigation I get. Second, I'm not sure how the setting would work. Mysteries require people, and I'm not sure how you put people in a place filled with invincible sanity-draining monsters.

The better solution: a mystery with Lovecraftian themes. The Sinking City checks all the surface-level boxes like madness, visions, and weird, ancient cults. But it goes deeper than that. Lovecraftian horror is about realizing how large the universe is, and how small you are. Just when you think you're starting to understand the plot of The Sinking City, the game will throw an entirely new faction of characters into the mix. As the city's machinations unfold, you'll think yourself a fool for believing you almost had it figured out a few hours earlier, and might even begin to question the sanity of the writer as the plot reveals grow in scope. Unfortunately, since this is a video game it can't quite follow through on the Lovecraftian themes of insignificance and we end up being a special, important person. But I thought the effect of the unraveling conspiracy was really cool.

Since I'm talking about The Sinking City as a "mystery," I want to clarify that, while it is a mystery, it's solidly in the hardboiled or noir camp, and nowhere near orthodox detective fiction. It's about following each clue to the next until the answer is handed to you, not about cleverly assembling a known set of clues into an unexpected solution. Normally I don't really like hardboiled detective fiction, but here I think it works for three reasons. First, The Sinking City is a video game, so just putting in the legwork to find the clues still provides engagement. Second, the Lovecraftian nature of the game provides natural intrigue in the plot developments, shoring up a weakness in this area of the hardboiled subgenre. And third, the game still gives you some room to draw your own conclusions on certain situations, so the mystery plot isn't fully cut-and-dry.

The Sinking City also does a fantastic job with the lore and world-building. You can find a ton of documents and writings around the game, and they're all oozing (sometimes literally) with Lovecraftian creepiness. One aspect of the game's lore that I really enjoyed was the fact that there are so many different sides to the weirdness going on. There isn't just one Cult that we're facing down or something. People are diving into the madness in all sorts of ways, and you'll find a different flavor of the bizarre in every corner of the city. While they're all rooted in the same Lovecraftian ideas, the variety of "sects" made Oakmont's underbelly feel that much richer. Of course, when you have a bunch of people trapped in a city with monsters undergoing a slow-moving apocalypse and slowly succumbing to madness, you end up with some people doing some pretty terrible things... This is definitely not a game for kiddies. The most horrific scenes in the game rarely involve monsters.

Oakmont is a Lovecraftian city of doom and gloom, and the story is steeped in the same atmosphere. Most of your cases often put you directly in the conflict between two people, and you're forced to choose one. Unfortunately, Oakmont is a city of gray, and you're almost always picking between two terrible choices. Additionally, the vast majority of decisions you make have no further impact, which could be a big letdown depending on your expectations of the game. There are three endings. Your ending is decided with a simple choice at the conclusion of the game, and all three endings will be available regardless of the decisions you made up until then. And, like most other choices in the game, none of them lead to a happy resolution.

Looking online it seems a lot of people hated The Sinking City's ending(s), but I liked it. I think it comes down to your outlook and expectations. If you wanted a game where decisions mattered and a conclusion that built upon all your decisions up to that point, then yes, making a choice of one of three short cutscenes would be disappointing. But I think of it as the game letting you choose your one and true ending—and not putting up any resistance in showing you some other "what ifs." I know what my decision at the end was, what the consequences of that decision were, and what would have happened if I had made a different decision. And I'm okay with that. Or you could think of all endings as simultaneously existing, all three equally valid. Either way feels true to the themes of the game to me.

In addition to your main quest, The Sinking City has a number of side-missions, which can be hit-or-miss. Some of them really let you dig further into Oakmont and some of the side characters, while others are lazy fetch quests. A couple are tough to find, but most are triggered in locations that you'll be visiting during the main quest, so I overall liked the side quest design.

Speaking of characters, they're... okay. Only a few characters are present throughout the story, mostly due to the nature of the choices in the plot. As I already explained, the game often puts you into situations where you need to choose between character A and character B. After the case where you make that choice, chances are neither character A nor character B will show up again. This is how The Sinking City makes sure its plot works regardless of the player's choices. The character stories are interesting when you deal with them, but the fact most characters are there only for their 15 minutes in the spotlight and very few characters have a presence throughout the game prevent the overall cast from leaving a major impression. Also, while most NPCs are obviously built from the same basic models with different palette swaps and accessories, there are a couple of NPCs that have the exact same appearance. This is horribly immersion-breaking, and I find it legitimately kind of puzzling, because when I said it's "a couple" of NPCs, I meant it; it only happened two or three times in the game. I understand not making three brand new, totally original models for minor NPCs—but they couldn't make three more palette-swaps?

Anyway, now that I've said my piece about the story and intangible qualities of the game, I'm going to make a clunky transition back to the gameplay systems. Combat was simple, and relatively intuitive to me. You aim your guns and shoot at the monsters. Easy peasy. You also get some traps and bombs to help you out. There's a weapon wheel you use to select your weapon/gadget, and the game slows down time when it's open, so I never got overwhelmed trying to swap guns or anything. There are only four types of monsters so it doesn't take long to learn how they work, but each has variants so you aren't always facing the exact same monsters. Oh, and you have a sanity meter that monsters can reduce (and that also gets depleted when using your sixth sense), but I never encountered any major sanity threats. In fact, sanity was such a non-issue that I completely forgot about it in my initial draft of this review.

There are no stores in the game; everything has to be found or crafted. However, there was no point in the game where I was wanting for items. Containers that can be looted have a special symbol on them so they can easily be recognized, and such containers are generally plentiful and frequently bountiful. You can also get skills that allow you to hold more items and craft more efficiently. The maximum amount of items you can hold is low enough that you can never feel set for the rest of the game (or even the rest of the hour), but you find materials quickly enough that I rarely felt like my stock was being threatened. ...I should mention that I played The Sinking City on the easiest combat difficulty, which probably contributed to my experience. (There are separate difficulty sliders for the combat and for the investigations! Naturally, I played on the most difficult investigation setting.) But even on harder difficulties, I'm not sure how much different it would be. If you step away from a building all the monsters and loot will reset, which makes it extremely easy to farm items or experience once you find a suitable building. I never actually did that, but the option is there. (And, if you find yourself a bit over your head, the game difficulty can be changed at any time.)

The last major gameplay segment is diving, which I hated. (You didn't think you'd get a Lovcraftian game without getting down and dirty with the sea floor, did you?) Not because the diving segments are bad, but because they're so stressful. In most of the game, you can come in with full bullets and health packs, ready to blow up everything that goes bump in the night. But there's no ammo or items or upgrades or anything in diving segments. You have a flare and a harpoon gun and nothing else. And the harpoon gun doesn't even damage enemies, it just stuns them! There's no way to get rid of the enemies when they show up. ...Yes despite my fears, none of the diving segments were actually a problem in practice. I died in diving sections twice; the first time, after I died, I respawned at a checkpoint past the point where I died, and the second time, when I respawned the enemy didn't show up at that spot again. I'm not sure if these were glitches or intended behavior, but either way, my concerns about the diving segments ended up overblown. The diving segments were basically like a haunted house: horrible in the moment, but fun when they're over and you can look back on them.

Two more random gripes. First, there are "infested areas" that infinitely spawn monsters, and you have a "sixth sense" that can dispel illusions but cannot be used when monsters are nearby. However, there's one side quest in the game where you need to dispel an illusion in an infested area. Needless to say, this was quite frustrating. This was probably the worst-designed moment in the game for me, where they directly force two game systems to conflict with each other. The second minor complaint is that floor plans for buildings end up repeating quite a bit. Like the NPCs, I understand that the developers didn't have the resources to give every building a unique layout. And there actually is some variation, because buildings with the same floor plan might have different furniture and impediments. But then you start encountering buildings are that wholly identical, down to the illusion locations, and that's when things go downhill. "Exploration" is much less tense and exciting when you already know exactly where everything is. I really do believe that this was due to resource limitations rather than laziness, but it doesn't make the end product any better.

Overall, I thought the graphics were good, although I also don't particularly care for high graphic fidelity. The world is full of debris and various objects, and everything is full of details. Oakmont really does feel like it's sinking when you can see water damage everywhere and the streets are strewn with fish. That being said, there was one glaring flaw in the graphics... hair. For whatever reason, hair was rendered horribly, looking more like cheap shiny plastic than anything else. I played the Switch version, but based on screenshots online, the graphics look really good on other platforms... but you should be careful where and how you buy.

There's a legal dispute over The Sinking City, and the publisher has essentially hacked and stolen the game away from the developer to sell on its own. Here is a reddit thread detailing the storefronts to buy from that are authorized and supported by the developer from the developer's website. Note that the Steam version is not developer-supported. This legal issue has undoubtedly cause a massive reduction in the game's sales, so if you're interested and want to support this kind of game, The Sinking City in particular needs your support (but, again, from a developer-approved storefront)!

There are plenty of faults you could find with The Sinking City, or things that might hamper your enjoyment. Following street directions could get tiring. The monster variety is limited. Your choices generally don't matter. The graphics aren't cutting-edge. Some side quests are just be McGuffin-hunting. The gameplay loop never changes. But despite the flaws, I loved the core conceit of a fully interactive Lovecraftian mystery, which the game delivers on. The Sinking City is a niche game, but if you like investigating, exploring, and delving into the dark madness lurking in the corners of the human mind, it's definitely worth a dive.