The Sinking City Review for PlayStation 4

If there are any words to describe Frogware’s upcoming title, The Sinking City, “wet” would be an understatement. From the amazing environmental design of its fish guts covered ports and rotting buildings to the constant dampness that coats our protagonist, The Sinking City never quite lets you dry off. Instead, players are forced to walk a mile in Charles Reed’s soaking shoes as he struggles to uncover the reasonings for his supernatural abilities, his mind-warping hallucinations, and the mystery behind the strange occurrences at Oakmont.

If I’m being honest, The Sinking City is a title that caught me by surprise. With an expansive map and high-quality environmental design, one would assume that the game is a product of an triple-A studio with hundreds of employees. Astonishingly, Frogware was able to pull off this level of quality with only a team of 80. Their devotion to bringing Oakmont to life shows through every rusted car, rotting carcass, and mildewy piece of furniture scattered throughout the city. I found navigating through Oakmont to be an interesting experience as finding locations based on streets and intersections made the game world seem more life-like. One of the more interesting aspects of the map is the flooded areas and abandoned buildings you can explore. There are notes, letters, and other small pieces of intrigued that not only inform you of who lived in each building but also the madness that slowly gripped them. With that being said, maneuvering the boat the game provides you proved to be more challenging than necessary at times due to the game’s camera getting in the way or the boat getting caught in debris. I did also notice a four to five-second lag that occurred sometimes when opening the menu/map which did slow me down a bit.

I would be remiss If I didn’t also mention the fidelity of the character models and creature designs. Like the environment, the character models for the game are also of high quality. From fish people to ape people, to regular human beings the game is populated with a diverse set of facial models all with the same level of quality. Although I did find the facial animations to be lacking a little during dialogue options this did not negatively impact my playthrough. In terms of the creatures, called Wylebeasts in game, I thought they were completely off-putting. If you crossed a human arm, a crab, a tarantula, and whatever you hope doesn’t lurk underneath your bed, you’d have a good idea of what they look like. Now your mileage may vary in terms of whether you find these creatures scary so take this with a cup of saltwater. In terms of combat, shooting feels incredibly stiff especially when most enemies move faster than you can aim.

Combat in this game sort of felt a little tacked on for an experience that is focused on investigation. I feel the game would have fared a little better if its focus had been on avoiding enemy encounters during exploration as it would have matched the sense of paranoia and fear the game is based on.

For those looking to feel like Sherlock Holmes, The Sinking City doesn’t deliver on its investigation based gameplay. Most of the cases are solved by picking up objects and finding clues using your supernatural abilities, matching two clues together in your mind palace to create a deduction, and then creating enough deductions to solve the case. There is no way to misinterpret evidence or lead yourself astray as the game walks you through what to do and how to do it. The more interesting parts of the game are when you go into the archives of one of the Burroughs and have to interpret clues to find the next location in your investigation. It provides a break from the case structure as mentioned, but even this interaction is relatively simple and does not provide that much of a challenge.

Moving onto the narrative, the game begins with Charles’ arrival to Oakmont and immediately jumps into Charle’s first case: the disappearance of Robert Throgmorton’s son. The case highlights one of the main conflict in the game between the Innsmouthers, who are poor fish people, and the powerful Throgmortons, ape people, who are the richest family in the city. The innsmouthers encounter discrimination based on their looks and while the game itself opens with a small title card denoting its use of racism in order to provide a real portrait of the era, showing real racism against people of color alongside fish people racism was a comparison that made me uncomfortable. On a separate note, I did find chasing down the side quests to be interesting and it provided me a reprieve from dealing with the main storyline.

While the game made ample attempts to make me feel for Charles’ character through warping the screen in various ways to highlight his hallucinations, I still found it difficult to care about his goals. This is primarily due to the fact that Charles has the personality of a rock. His reaction to seeing the Wylebeasts is the same as his reaction to talking to NPCs: absolutely neutral. While this is a fault of flat voice work, his dialogue is also to blame. His comments on what goes on around him are there to tell the player what’s going on and never reveals anything about his character. Most of his exposition on his identity and background occurs through cut scenes, which start with no warning, that aren’t gripping.

The Sinking City is a game that lures you in with amazing visuals and sets off an intriguing mystery but sadly failed to hook me into diving deeper into whatever lies beneath its depths. I give it 7 writhing Cuthulus out of 10.

Check Out The Sinking City Release Trailer:

For more information about The Sinking City, please visit here: https://www.thesinkingcity.com/