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Frogwares' The Sinking City - that other Cthulhu game

Infinitron

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[/spoilers]
 
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The Sinking City

Platform: Windows PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

Rating Category:

Content Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Suggestive Themes, Violence

Rating Summary: This is a role-playing adventure game in which players assume the role of a private investigator trying to solve a mystery in the 1920s. From a third-person perspective, players search for clues among crime scenes (murders), interrogate suspects, and engage in firefights with various characters/creatures. Players use pistols, machine guns, and rifles to shoot human enemies and creatures (e.g., ghoulish entities, tentacled monsters). Players also have the ability to shoot random pedestrians in the city, though there is no reward for such action. Combat and crime-scene sequences are accompanied by frequent splashes and stains of blood; a handful of scenes depict human body parts and/or entrails. The game contains some suggestive material: a brief image of a man peeping into a room while making suggestive comments (e.g., “Come on, honey, get undressed. Don't keep daddy waiting.”); in-game text also contains suggestive references (e.g., “Rumors are their boss, Brutus, defiled several women…” and “Now neither the devil nor filthy men may touch her, for I have smitten her sinful flesh...”).
 
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The Sinking City Hands-on Preview – Cray-fish Donovan

Bawston… Bhawstuhn… Boston. God knows how you pronounce it, I say Boston. Why the talk about Boston? Well, that’s where the always-awesome Ray Donovan is from but also where Charles Reed, the grizzled Bostonian detective and the protagonist of The Sinking City is from. He hasn’t had to travel far from home either, now solving mysteries, fighting seafood and getting the living hell creeped out of him in the fictional city of Oakmont, Massachusetts (I just had to Google how to spell that, I’ve also been pronouncing it wrong my entire life).

Frogwares Interactive, developers of The Sinking City have a specialisation in creating detective games. They’ve been doing it for a while now, with the Sherlock Holmes series. While there were certainly times where Mr. Holmes could be facing off against some strange and evil foes, here in The Sinking City you’ll find Charles (and yourself) facing against the much more weird and supernatural. Why has Charles even found himself in Oakmont? He’s had a few nightmares about a city being flooded, about horrible Lovecraftian entities tormenting the world. As any normal person would do, he’s gone to the location of these nightmares.

During my hands-on with The Sinking City at a recent event held by publisher BigBen Interactive, I didn’t actually get to see the intro of the game. This was my own fault really, I saw the game was free and jumped right on it. This is something I’ve been interested in from the first time I heard about it. I love horror games or just any game that has that psychological edge to it. Something to put me off guard.

There certainly is something about this that gets you in that frame of mind. As soon as I picked up the controls it struck me just how dank the game intentionally is. Or should that be damp? The city is flooded and, I was shown later, that even Charles had to arrive by rowboat. This is a city that you’re free to explore at will, moving between the downtrodden to the seemingly safe aristocracy. Or not quite. The son of the local bigwig has been murdered. Or has he? Honestly, I don’t know, I was a little perplexed because of the fact I jumped right on essentially after the actual intro.

Still, this did let me go right in and explore the actual city and main gameplay elements, one of which is essentially exploring the city. Charles, being a detective, likes to follow clues to work out mysteries. Where exactly is the broken mirror linked to the murder of this poor soul? We know from one clue that it was last seen in the house of Fnor’shoggon’oth, naturally to find out where shoggy lives, we’ll head to the town hall and look through the town records.

I’m not actually joking here. Well, I am about the names, but not the gameplay. From what I saw and was told about puzzles you solve later in the game, you actually get to do some of the legwork yourself, thinking about things logically and piecing things together for yourself to find that next clue. The game does, of course, have some systems in place to help you along. Two such systems are detective vision as well as Charles’ very own mind palace. Actually getting into a position to use them may not always be the best for you though.

Detective Vision is directly enhanced by your sanity or lack of it. It seems that the further into madness Charles falls, the better his detective skills are, letting him spot more and more clues, even working out the past instinctively. I imagine this is essentially how Opium worked for Sherlock Holmes, helping his brain cross that threshold, letting him see what ordinary folks can’t. Only, the line between the ordinary and supernatural is already blurred here in The Sinking City. As is the line between right and wrong.

These clues you’ve found, both of your own volition and due to your increasing insanity, can then be combined in the aforementioned mind palace. Will the conclusion you reach be correct? Have you found every aspect you need to find? There’s a decent amount of depth, twists and turns to be found. Not only that, but your conclusions also determine the progression of the story and seemingly how the world reacts towards you. If they have a go at you, don’t take it to heart, the people here are cruel.

The inhabitants of Oakmont are quite varied, to say the least. This is a place where things have taken a change from the normal, both on the human and inhuman side. If it wasn’t made clear from one of the earlier screenshots, you’ll encounter quite a few inhabitants that aren’t entirely human. The ones I’m aware of are fish-men and ape-men. Then you have the humans. On either side, you’ll encounter the unsavoury, from secret cults to the blatant segmentation and outright racism. It all adds to the world that Frogwares are trying to draw you into.

I can’t say you could completely blame the people for being self-centred either. Oakmont is very sparse on resources, seemingly cut off from the rest of the world. It’s that bad that the city has gone true post-apocalyptic, using bullets as currency like in the Russian Metro. Don’t forget you’ll need some to fight off the eldritch monstrosities you’re likely to face along the way, though you can scavenge for items and make your own bullets and equipment to help you along.

If there’s one thing to be said about The Sinking City, if it wasn’t already made abundantly clear from my previous words, the setting, themes and the fact that Charles Reed is essentially the most tired, grizzliest and most unhappy person alive, it’s not a happy game. This is made all the more clear by a brilliantly grim and gritty aesthetic, a city where the infected roam the streets, people are at risk from being attacked by a Lobster Thermidor at any moment and you are most assuredly losing your sanity.

Contrary to my near-constant moaning about Ubisoft games, I’m a fan of open-world (or open-city) games. Though I’m a fan when the areas you can explore feel like they have a purpose, where a game doesn’t just have space just for the sake of being bigger. The Sinking City feels like that sort of game, where you have to navigate through side streets, above and below water and altogether just trying to find your way through a dangerous place while helping whomever you can, while there are many areas that expand the story and directly link to the many mysteries of Oakmont.

Can I out and out say The Sinking City will be good or great? No, I can’t. Do I want to play more, experience more of the oppressive atmosphere and environments, all while trying to retain my sanity and actually have to solve some puzzles using my own brain? You bet your deep-fried arse I do. Coming in just one month, The Sinking City will be coming to the PC, PS4 and Xbox One on the 27th of June, with the PC version being an Epic Games Store timed exclusive for one year.

https://wccftech.com/sinking-city-preview/
 

Infinitron

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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...ity-is-built-to-make-you-notice-your-journey/

How The Sinking City is built to make you notice your journey

90


I sometimes announce, to rooms at large, that I wished Assassin’s Creed Odyssey wouldn’t tell me what to do as much, and let me just explore. Imagine my shock, therefore, at the reveal of The Sinking City, a Lovecraftian detective game releasing just the other side of E3, promising “zero hand holding”. No objective markers on the map, and no trails on the street to follow – just your own wits.

“In The Sinking City we have a map, and every street has a name,” said Waël Amr, the CEO of developers Frogwares. “The evidences tell you that the cross road on this street and this street — you have to physically go there, and you have to find the house, the place, the person that you’re looking for there.”

As detective Charles W. Reed, you’re supposed to be able to take your time and look at the fictional city of Oakmont, Massachusetts, at your leisure. And with place names rather than quest markers to work with, yo’ll have to really get to know the place. Amr mentions the idea of “dwelling” in the city, having emotions attached to it. He asks me where I live in real life, and if I have favourite places there. Places that, when I walk through them and see them, recall feelings. “This is not something which is proposed today in most games,” he said. “Zelda does that. Zelda gives you the feeling of the place, of the genius loci.”



A genius loci was the protecting spirit of a place in Ancient Rome. Today it means something similar, although the word “spirit” is less literal. It’s the unique atmosphere of a place: its layers of history, its locality, its usage, and its people. Amr used the term, as well as others from architecture and urbanism, a lot, and referred to The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild a couple of times.

“When I made the first presentation of The Sinking City back in 2016, all the people that sell games and don’t play them told me ‘It’s impossible’,” he said. But then a year later, Breath Of The Wild came out, giving everyone an open world but without dozens of markers to aim for. “After that we didn’t have to convince people that free investigation is something that is actually doable.”

Frogwares is the studio behind the Sherlock Holmes games, the most recent of which was Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter. I liked it because (a) I like detectives (b) its particular incarnation of Watson looked like the hot, probably bisexual barista who flirts with you in your local artisanal coffee shop and (c) it didn’t always tell you what the answers were. Your options weren’t clearly delineated between correct things to do and bad, wrong things to do. “After this, we said ‘Okay, but what is the part of detective work that we couldn’t explore in the linear adventure?’ – and it’s the way that you have to actively think where you have to go,” Amr explained.

In The Sinking City you, the player, have to decide what to do next, every time. To achieve that, Frogwares had to change “everything” at the studio. In the end they spent two years developing tools, and only a year on principal production of the game. “I’m very happy with the result,” Amr said, adding that they didn’t crunch, or work evenings or weekends. “The team grew, it’s a better atmosphere, a better culture, a better understanding.”

Frogwares also worked with architects, and Amr himself studied architecture for several months in order to be able to implement it properly. His team did studies on coastal cities and port organisation, on how cities in the US developed from the 17th century onwards, and on how main streets, side streets and arterial roads all connect. And although Oakmont is placed in Massachusetts, it looks more like a medieval European city — it’s closest model in the States is Boston, which has a city centre that’s a bit more wiggly and strange than the usual grid system. Amr got very animated when describing said system.

Its nature, he said, comes from a combination of things: the introduction of railroads allowing people to travel to new cities easily, mass immigration due to events like the famine in Ireland, and sudden baby booms. All these things contributed to the need for new districts to be built — and quickly — rather than growing up slowly over time. In this period of accelerated growth, land was given out on a lottery system, in easy square parcels.



“It’s very boring to move yourself!” argued Amr of cities with grid layouts. “‘It’s two blocks further’, [you say to yourself], and you end up not taking care of the journey. You’re not interested in the journey, you’re interested only in the destination.” In a European city, by contrast, Amr said directions were more a case of “go straight on here, then take the second right, and you’ll come to a big red building…” and so on.

Americans, he said, have a tendency to shift their destination-focused mentality into the games they make, while Europeans — by and large — “will be more interested in the journey, because in any city you have a flavour.” Consequently Oakmont, which to my eyes looks like London does on a wet, Wednesday afternoon when I’m in a bad mood, only has one grid-based area on its map.

Again and again, Amr went back not to architecture, but to feelings. To the emotions associated with a place being more important than the final destination, and to the importance of the journey itself [maybe the real horror was the friends we made along the way? – Ed]. He said that because games today can provoke a wider and deeper range of emotions than ever before, players are naturally demanding it from them. “What I know is that our work is based on emotion,” he said. “Today even in the way that we produce games, we are interested more in the emotional intelligence of people doing them.”

Amr thinks Frogwares’ gambit has worked, noting that after about 10 hours, players start knowing streets and places in Oakmont by their names, as intended. But he also acknowledges the potentially difficult contradiction at The Sinking City’s heart: it is a game with a story – which means it’s in some way linear – but it removes the hand-holding we expect from a linear experience. Reconciling that conflict is a tough one, and as a player I worry it risks leaving people feeling too adrift, finding things too hard. I myself have a habit of being paralysed by choice, but I still love the idea of an opportunity to actually reason things out for myself.



“I’d really had enough of this tendency of the industry to say games are for children,” concludes Amr, rejecting the idea of an “infantilisation” of the target audience in order to be sure of engaging them. He believes this mindset comes from “people that don’t even play games”, and compares it to a person who’s never played golf becoming a golf coach on the basis that golf is “just a stick and a ball.”

“It’s a very deep medium, an interesting and deep medium, and it’s obviously not treated as such, even by the investors that are looking at it.” Amr said that larger studios are now looking at what Frogwares are doing, and asking themselves why they can’t do it too. “The answer is that there is a kind of self-censorship, about not going too far. I think it’s a complete mistake.”

All this would, of course, double handily as an inbuilt excuse should the game underperform. If people don’t like The Sinking City, it could be argued it’s because they don’t get it, or because the industry isn’t ready, and so on and so forth. And while Amr is confident that people will like it, I get the sense he’ll be more frustrated than a developer usually is if they don’t. “I will try to demonstrate that what I do is a rightful course. I might be completely wrong as well,” he said. But he was laughing quite happily when he said it.
 

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Very encouraging article.
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: this is a game intended for smart people, observant people, contemplative people. Not all games are for kids. Looking forward to giving this a real chance.
 
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There was a question about inspirations. From an old interview:

PSLS: Lovecraft was influenced by the detective stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Is Lovecraft the only influence the game has, or is he one of many?

Frogwares: Lovecraft is of course the biggest one, for sure, but the team also studied the works of his followers, August Derleth, Brian Lumley etc. We also looked at the authors Lovecraft himself drew inspiration from, like Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers and others.

And since we are creating a video game, we also dissected the original 2005 Call of Cthulhu Dark: Corners of the Earth game, the Silent Hill games, LA Noire, The Last of Us, maybe a bit of The Witcher as well as movies like In the Mouth of Madness etc.

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:love:
 

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