Review: The Sinking City Doesn’t Earn Its Lovecraftian Credentials

Worse than the sheer tedium of shooting is the effect it has on the game’s atmosphere.

The Sinking City
Photo: Frogwares

The life of a 1920s private investigator is hardly a convenient or particularly romantic one, at least to hear The Sinking City tell it. The game’s fedora-wearing protagonist, Charles Reed, owns a shotgun but has no access to a GPS, a minimap, or a little earpiece to talk to some computer-whiz partner who does all his research. Reed is on his own, tramping through the dilapidated streets of Oakmont, Massachusetts to the university library, the hospital, or some such place, combing through newspaper archives or police records based on scant clues. With the right information, he digs up addresses that must be manually marked on the map after consulting the labeled city streets. Reed becomes such a familiar sight to the librarian, whose mouth is sewn shut as a punishment according to “local custom,” that she later sends him a note asking for help. A private eye’s work is never done.

Such decidedly analog activities are one of the most engaging elements of The Sinking City; in an open-world game like this, they’re a slightly more involved alternative to the usual process of mindlessly following arrows to the next cutscene and accompanying action sequence. Here, you need to make deductions in order to figure out where you’re going, to decide which archive has the information you need and which combination of search criteria will get it. It’s a fitting accompaniment to the game’s myriad crime scene investigation sequences, where you’ll comb an area for evidence and then fit together clues to form new, sometimes differing, conclusions in the “mind palace” section of the game menu.

Developer Frogwares is best known for a long-running series of Sherlock Holmes games, and that influence is clear in their latest adaptation, which is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his overarching Cthulhu mythos. Reed has arrived in Oakmont due to disturbing visions only to find the place devastated by a flood all but biblical in its proportions. And that disaster is decidedly ongoing; some ships have run so far aground that they block off parts of the city, and so many of the streets are underwater that citizens often travel by boat or on crude, makeshift wooden walkways. Thick crusts of barnacles seem to cake every surface, while hasty barricades wall off areas where the monsters are. Oakmont is a truly fascinating backdrop, where Lovecraftian horror has essentially become the new normal. Citizens simply step around the rotting carcasses of sea creatures that litter the streets of poor areas, and they’ve gotten used to weird new fauna like crustaceans that seem to wear dead cats like shells.

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In a rather tenuous attempt to address Lovecraft’s virulent racism, fish-faced refugees from nearby Innsmouth are a common sight, minding their own business as they try to feed their own families like anyone else. The game specifies that they’re not all wrapped up in a Dagon-worshipping cult devoted to getting human women to birth fish-people, but so many of them are and the game is otherwise so disinterested in the average Joe Innsmouther (or even people of color) compared to the exploits of the white Mr. Reed that its journeying into race relations feels more like a perfunctory disclaimer. When it comes to Lovecraft’s metaphorical expression of his own abject horror at the Mixing of the Races, the game is largely uncritical.

You will, perhaps, take some of the in-game prejudice into account when you make your deductions. Is their cult, for example, really up to no good, or is the man opposing them just a racist? (Answer: It’s the former.) Based on such context, as well as other factors like your knowledge of the city itself or the personalities of involved characters derived from evidence, you piece together your own conclusions and make story decisions as a result. And although these investigations can feel a bit guided and simplified since there are only ever two real conclusions, they always leave a nagging sense that perhaps you were wrong.

Most of The Sinking City, though, is spent putting boots to ruined pavement in what feels like little more than busywork. Despite the presence of fast travel points, the process of running between crime scenes, archives, and the various characters grows tedious; for as interesting as the city can be beneath the surface, its grim, gray ruination makes for a rather homogeneous sight. Other activities, like putting crime scene events in order, similarly feel like time-wasters, though nothing quite approaches the drudgery of the game’s frequent combat.

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Seemingly every crime scene, story area, and empty, side mission-hosting house with a similar layout is infested with fleshy gray abominations of inscrutable anatomy that Reed must shoot with a gun until they’re dead. Despite so much investigation, the game seems reticent to leave players alone with their thoughts for too long, opting to fill the spaces in between investigations with menial combat just in case you were getting bored finding clues. Loading screen tips advise that you flee when the opportunity presents itself, but the cramped environments and rudimentary stealth all but force you to make a stand over and over again.

Worse than the sheer tedium of shooting, however, is the effect it has on The Sinking City’s atmosphere; with the same four monster types lurking around every corner and conspicuous ammo crates strewn all over the place, there’s little dread to the experience of playing the game because you simply know what’s coming. The encounters are expected, and so is your triumph over them, which feels decidedly antithetical to Lovecraft’s favored themes of humanity’s insignificance and fragility in the face of forces it cannot understand. For what seems meant to be a horror game about piecing together clues and cobbling together what’s left of your sanity, long stretches of The Sinking City are inordinately concerned with killing the shit out of some monsters as a sort of Chosen One. With pistol in one hand, eldritch relic in the other, and fedora comfortably shading his white, stubbled face, Charles Reed looks and feels more like a mentally tormented Indiana Jones.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by HomeRun PR.

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Score: 
 Developer: Frogwares  Publisher: Bigben Interactive  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: June 27, 2019  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Suggestive Themes, Violence  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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