The Sinking City (2019)

 The Sinking City (2019), developed by Frogwares, published by Nacon

The first thing many people have heard of The Sinking City is probably the kerfuffle that sparked between the developer Frogwares and the publisher Nacon. Basically, it's still ongoing and there's a feud on if Nacon has the rights to sell the game outside Steam, and from what I've gathered, there are no winners in the battle, as I doubt neither side will recoup their losses. Anyhow, at one point, Frogwares slapped a DMCA order against selling the game on Steam based on Nacon selling DLC they had no rights on and so on. Both sides, as is usual, claim contract breaching from the other side, and from an outsider's perspective, it's all a tangled, ugly mess, that has managed to bury the game under it. If you want to know more about it, just google it, as many articles are floating around.

Now, for this review, I played the Steam version of the game, which is the Nacon released one. So that in mind, I have no idea if The Sinkin City is more polished on other platforms and if the Steam version is somehow technically inferior in comparison to the versions Frogwares is selling on other platforms. So you can take that as a caveat on everything I say, as while I did find the game interesting, I also find it rather poorly designed and the gameplay to be almost like from a highly polished prototype, which was never tested on actual players. There's a lot to like in The Sinking City, but it suffers from bad design choices that can be an instant turn-off for many people.

Charles Reed, a Bostonian private investigator, arrives at the city of Oakmont, the titular sinking city, that has just been hit by a severe flood, leaving large areas of the city underwater. His reason for being there is to investigate his own visions as well as cases of abrupt madness that seems to be an epidemic not only in Oakmont but outside of it as well. It all seems to have started after the flood.

Oakmont itself is filled with disagreeable people. While some of them are reasonable, many seem to be in the grip of madness, esoteric cults, terrifying occult studies, and all kinds of unsavory activities. The behavior of the people is more or less worse than the terrible monsters that haunt some of the abandoned buildings and flooded-out areas.

The setting, and the story for the matter, is a potpourri of elements picked from several H.P. Lovecraft. If you are familiar with his short stories, especially with his Cthulhu mythos stories, it's easy to pick up quite a few familiar things. Some are references to place names, some are characters taken directly from his stories, while some characters and events are heavily inspired by Lovecraft. It's all very bleak and very few stories presented in the game, the main story including, have anything resembling a happy ending. 

Story and world-building are the best aspects of the game. Had those not worked, I doubt I had mustered to play the game through. That said, while many quests in the game can be solved in a different manner, I don't know if I'll ever have the energy to play the game through again, thanks to how the gameplay works.

I'm going to give some kudos to the best aspect of the game first, which is the detective work, as limited as it is. The detective system is divided into three parts: the Mind Castle, in which you combine clues you've found, the investigation of sources, which helps you locate the places in the city you want to go and the locations, which you need to investigate for clues. In these locations, you can also use Reed's supernatural powers in order to see glimpses of past events. This is easily the best aspect of the game and you can see Frogwres is ladling heavily on what they've learned with their Sherlock Holmes games. 

the combat system is serviceable. It's not the most fluent system around, consisting of a melee attack to the use of several guns and some explosives. Depending on your difficulty level, the enemies can take some punishment before croaking. The amount of bullets and explosives is VERY limited, so the best practice is to try to handle the weakest enemies with melee and the toughest with guns. 

From the limited amount of bullets comes the second poor design choice. Despite the game very early on announcing, that money has lost its meaning in Oakmont after the flood and the bullets have taken their place, you still can carry only a handful of bullets for each gun. Not that it matters, as you can't really buy things with bullets nor with money, you can only scavenge and gain things as rewards. 

Most of the consumables, like health kits, bullets, and explosives, can be crafted, but you are also extremely limited on how many crafting items you can carry. Now, here's the kicker: as the missions give rewards in bullets and crafting items, it quickly comes evident, that the whole reward system is utterly pointless, as your inventory is usually filled to its brim long before you return to the quest giver. They all make the point of mentioning how they reward you for your work, but end up discarding it, as you can easily scavenge all you need and never run out of anything. 

Another almost pointless aspect is the character development. While in theory, it's a working system, the skills you can unlock seem rather badly thought out. For example, you can increase the number of bullets you can carry (each weapon has its own perk, so you need several points to get the maximum to all), but each perk gives only 2-10 bullets, depending on the weapon. So basically, you gain nothing from the perks, as increasing the number of bullets from 10 to 12 is more or less pointless. The other perks feel like similar placeholders, which no one managed to think out properly before the release. 

Then there are the buildings. While on the surface, when running on the steers of Oakmont, there's a feeling of a diverse environment, it soon becomes noticeable, that most of the places you can visit are based on something of 4 different layouts. These locations share not only the same layout, at times the same furnishing and even damage levels in environments. From time to time, some places can have some paths blocked, but other than that, there's not much variation.

Not much variation is also something that can be said of the enemies. The weakest is an odd arm monster, that can be easily killed with a melee attack. Then there's the humanoid-shaped spitter monster and a more ferocious doggie thing as well as a mammoth monster that seems like a fusion of several cadavers. While they are interesting concepts, there's very little variation in them and the encounters soon turn boring, especially after you figure out the best ways of killing them.

I don't know what went wrong in the development of The Sinking City. Perhaps these underlying issues are what caused the issues between Nacon and Frogwares or if these are direct issues caused by Nacon wanting the game to stores no matter what the state of it was or if Frogwares just ran over budget and couldn't finish the game in the state it should have been. And like I said, I don't know if the version Frogwares is selling on other platforms is any better or if it's the same. 

It's a shame really, as The Sinking City had the potential of being one of the best Lovecraft-inspired games. But as it stands, it's more like an interesting glance at what could have been. Technically it is a game you can play from start to finish if you can accept the flaws it has, but that's exactly what you have to do: overlook a lot of bad design on the way.