Frogwares' The Sinking City - that other Cthulhu game

[toro]

People are already streaming this.

Edit:

Pre-purchase now to receive Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter game as a free download, the Chicago Organ Grinder DLC, 1 extra skill point and a 48H early access to The Sinking City!

Style or power? Now you can have both with the Chicago Organ Grinder, the favourite weapon of 1920s gangsters.

Day 1 DLC

The Sinking City - Worshippers of the Necronomicon

Keep the adventure going with this pack of 3 brand-new quests in the oppressive and fantastic world of The Sinking City.

I'm not sure I will buy this game after all.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Isnt this epic store only

 

[randir14]

Is this actually based on the Cthulhu mythos or just inspired by it? I thought the latter, but now I see references to Cthulhu and the Necronomicon.

 

[Zombra]

Is this actually based on the Cthulhu mythos or just inspired by it? I thought the latter, but now I see references to Cthulhu and the Necromonicon.

Both. It is set in the world of Lovecraft's elder gods etc. but not necessarily about them.

 

[Infinitron]

This was meant to be an official Chaosium Call of Cthulhu game before Frogwares for some reason got dumped and replaced by Cyanide. They decided to keep on making the game anyway. Lovecraft's writings are in the public domain so they didn't have to change anything except for the title.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

This was meant to be an official Chaosium Call of Cthulhu game before Frogwares for some reason got dumped and replaced by Cyanide. They decided to keep on making the game anyway. Lovecraft's writings are in the public domain so they didn't have to change anything except for the title.

This isn't true. Lovecraft died without any close relatives, the copyright went to distant relatives who didn't even understand what it was. The copyright status of all post-1923 Lovecraft work is in dispute.

Also, Chaosium is notoriously shitty about this -- they've attempted to lay claim to anything mentioning "Call of Cthulhu" or using the Elder God sign. Yeah, seriously.
Also, you have to be careful about using stuff that's part of the mythos but not written by Lovecraft himself.

 

[Hellion]

There are all sorts of direct references to Cthulhu, Dagon, Shub Niggurath, R'lyeh, Innsmouth etc in the game, you see Yellow Signs on walls, as well as the typical "scientists going mad" and "evil cultists" and "things coming from the sea" subplots that are prevalent in the Mythos. Such Mythos elements are central to the game's atmosphere in general, even though the subject of its actual main plot is not referenced in any other existing works of fiction.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Quests as day 1 dlc? Fuck these guys.

 

[The Decline]

Also, you have to be careful about using stuff that's part of the mythos but not written by Lovecraft himself.

That stuff is all shit anyway, right?

 

[Life of the Party]

There are all sorts of direct references to Cthulhu, Dagon, Shub Niggurath, R'lyeh, Innsmouth etc in the game, you see Yellow Signs on walls, as well as the typical "scientists going mad" and "evil cultists" and "things coming from the sea" subplots that are prevalent in the Mythos. Such Mythos elements are central to the game's atmosphere in general, even though the subject of its actual main plot is not referenced in any other existing works of fiction.

Did you find a Hyborian artefact or two?

 

[Hellion]

Hyborian references would probably be too esoteric for the average player to grasp. But you do collect several pieces of the weird gold jewelry Obed Marsh acquired while trading with the fishfolk during his travels.

 

[Hellion]

Review embargo lifted!

https://ragequit.gr/reviews/item/the-sinking-city-english-review-pc/

(if you get a 503 error hit refresh till the page loads, it's a result of heavy traffic combined with some php conflicts after the recent Wordpress update)

PS. For your eyes only, a video with the game's 3 endings. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSx8d9y6Ngc

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...tre-whodunit-unable-to-fulfil-lofty-ambitions

The Sinking City review - a lacklustre whodunit unable to fulfil lofty ambitions

Frogware's most ambitious title to date sees it take on the Cthulu mythos, but unfortunately it makes for one of its most flawed games too.

The Sinking City is Frogwares' latest, and it's the team behind The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes series - a series that's been running since 2002 - most ambitious title to date. It tries to apply the dev's brand of detective gameplay to a sprawling open world setting, for one, making it the longest Frogwares game so far, while this time out it tackle another beloved piece of literature. And the Cthulhu mythos is important to many people because it represents fear itself.

That inexplicable, creeping fear of a monster of godlike proportions has lessened over the years, however, with Cthulhu's rise as a pop culture icon. If you're not familiar with the story itself, you likely at least know the basics, and given that familiarity you feel that Frogwares could have invested in an interesting interpretation of the source material or captured the atmosphere that is all-important to Lovecraft lore.

What you get, though, is another Frogwares detective game, albeit a damp one.

It starts with your character, Charles Reed, arriving in Oakmont, Massachusetts. An ex-army diver and private eye, you've been plagued by visions that led you to the town which has fallen victim to a terrible flood. With the flood came the madness, and a few monsters for good measure. Oakmont is a sinister place, where everyone either wants something from you or wants you to leave them alone. Random acts of violence, disappearances and theft regularly take place, and so you're drafted into solving these cases in exchange for hints towards solving your real goal, finding the source of your nightmares and hopefully stopping them.

Your motorboat isn't called Cyclops for nothing.

Solving the lengthy mysteries that drag you from one end of town to another follows a reliable pattern: first you locate a crime scene using vague directions. Once you've arrived you look at everything there is to look at, including picking up items and turning them over until you spot something out of the ordinary. Once you've found everything noteworthy you reconstruct the crime's modus operandi in a manner that strongly reminded me Detroit: Become Human. With every scene you visit a piece of the puzzle emerges, pushing you towards solving an overarching question, for example what happened to an important informant, and in your mind palace you can make deductions as to what it all means.

Sometimes, in order to find new leads to go on, you have to talk to witnesses or comb through official records in various places such as the town hall or the police station, where you find the right document based on evidence recorded in your casebook. There's been a promise of "absolutely no hand holding", but of course that isn't very player friendly, which is why there's always optional hand holding - via the difficulty menu for the detective portions you can decide how many hints and helpful symbols you'll be shown. Either way, there's still enough for you to figure out on your own.

It's a satisfying loop, but not one that stays engaging over The Sinking City's lengthy runtime. It's fascinating to see cases sprawl simply because you need to find so many sources and solve problems for so many people before they grudgingly come out with the next scrap of information. But it's a very casual adventure for something that had the potential to be so tense. It's relaxing to solve a case here and there, but there's no gripping narrative that propels you forward. The cases themselves aren't even particularly interesting, likely a consequence of the source material which makes it all too easy to find supernatural explanations for whatever has been going on. Additionally, Reed can see demons using his mind's eye, which function as nothing else than a deus ex machina, pointers to a piece of evidence you otherwise couldn't have found.

Something's wreaking havoc with their bodies.

In previous Frogwares titles your deductions could lead to interesting interpretations and ultimately different outcomes for your suspects. The Sinking City reduces this to binary choices between A, guilty/bad person and B not guilty/arsehole but still okay.

A warning ahead of the title screen about The Sinking City depicting the cultural friction and prejudices of prohibition-era America builds a sense of anticipation, though ultimately for naught. It's a tall order - Frogwares chose a time period with the potential for so much conflict worthy of comment, already successfully addressed L.A. Noire, for example. Lovecraft's work itself deserves to be re-examined in light of his strong white supremacist mindset, but there are simply no characters that exceed their function as quest givers or conversations that give a lift to the very barebones narrative. Frogwares is good at a very specific thing, which is building micro-narratives that support its detective mechanics, but I feel that with this source material, that particular approach constitutes a missed opportunity.

You fight monsters, but they are far from being horrors from the deep. Everyone in Oakmont treats them like mild annoyances to navigate around, and it's exactly what I did as a player, too. There's a handful of types and you shoot at them and that's about it. The animation quality in The Sinking City simply isn't good enough to support combat. Your melee attacks have an incredibly wide arc, and aiming with any weapon is a very janky affair. Controlling your character feels like moving through molasses, something exacerbated in the game's underwater sequences. It's frustrating because you simply don't have the precision you need to dodge underwater geysers, for example, or to efficiently deal with fast-moving fiends. Classic elements like a skill tree and a crafting screen are there, but neither skills, weapons nor resource management are balanced well enough to be fun. This isn't where The Sinking City's strengths lie, though, which is perhaps why the game advises you that "fleeing is often the better option".

The interiors offer nice details amongst all the grey.

The Sinking City also isn't scary. It's not even mildly creepy. I think a Cthulhu game should be at least a bit scary, and you can't just add a few flickering lights and a bit of fog. Giving madness a measurable form by tracking it through a bar that reduces whenever you look at something a bit disgusting isn't scary, and it's even less scary when all madness means is a few flickering images superimposed onto the screen for a second, followed by monsters that appear out of nowhere to take an inch off your health.

It's a small shame, and this is far from Frogwares' finest. The Sinking City fails on a technical and narrative level, leaving you with an experience that's well short of its potential despite its clever detective gameplay.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-sinking-city-review/

THE SINKING CITY REVIEW
A detective game with a Lovecraftian twist.

Plagued by nightmarish visions of a drowned city and a colossal tentacled beast, private detective Charles Reed travels to the waterlogged town of Oakmont to find answers. Unnatural storms have been relentlessly battering this once thriving fishing community, cutting it off from the mainland, flooding parts of it, and leaving the rest sodden and dilapidated. And to make matters worse, the eccentric locals are deeply suspicious of outsiders. But with the source of, and potential solution to, these harrowing visions lurking somewhere in the city, Reed has no choice but to get his feet wet.

The Sinking City is a third-person detective adventure set in a fictional version of 1920s New England, inspired by the works of influential (and, yes, controversial) horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Divers uncover an ancient cavern hidden beneath Oakmont filled with otherworldly statues of cosmic demons, and are driven mad by the discovery—a madness that begins to spread through the city and awakens strange, violent creatures the locals call wylebeasts. The game is divided between solving crimes and shooting monsters, although the gulf in quality between each flavour of play is pretty wide.

Ukrainian developer Frogwares has been making Sherlock Holmes games for over a decade now, including 2014's magnificent Crimes and Punishments. As such, The Sinking City is decent detective game—particularly in its use of the blatantly Sherlock-inspired Mind Palace system. As you explore a crime scene you collect clues that, while useless on their own, can be connected in the Mind Palace to open up new lines of investigation. And you have to make these connections yourself, without any hand-holding or hints, which makes a successful deduction especially satisfying.

But while Sherlock Holmes has to rely entirely on his intelligence and intuition to solve a mystery, Reed has a supernatural advantage. In certain locations a glowing blue portal will open up, through which he can witness whichever crime transpired there. These vignettes come in the form of shimmering silhouettes of the people involved and fragments of speech. Reed must then construct a narrative, figuring out the order these echoes of the past occurred in, which will usually result in a new clue appearing in the Mind Palace.

My biggest issue with The Sinking City, at least as a detective game, is that the cases aren't that interesting. One of the greatest strengths of Frogwares' Sherlock games is encountering a confounding mystery—say, a murder occurring in a room locked from the inside—and being overcome with a desire to solve it. But I rarely felt that compulsion here, and the solutions to many of the cases lacked a satisfying "Aha!' moment—the punchline that should round off any good detective story. In leaving Holmes behind, the developer's knack for writing a solid mystery seems to have suffered. Reed is also a completely charmless protagonist, with none of Holmes' wit, quirks, or nuance. He's the worst kind of grim, gravel-voiced private dick stereotype and I really struggled to love him.

As for the over-the-shoulder gun combat, it's perfectly functional, but feels like a box being ticked rather than a vital part of the game. Bullets being Oakmont's primary form of currency (it's a long story) adds an interesting element of ammo conservation to each wylebeast encounter. But mostly I was just eager for the shooting to stop so I could resume being a detective. There's a simple crafting system in there too, letting you make health kits, ammo, and other useful items from scrap gathered in the world. But, like the combat, this is all rather rote. I feel like The Sinking City would be a better, more consistent game if it focused purely on the detecting aspect.

The Sinking City's dreary setting is also hard to love. It's an open world game, letting you freely explore the streets of Oakmont. And while I love having to follow directions and pay attention to street names to find important locations, this bleak, muddy, perpetually rain-soaked city is a thoroughly depressing space to exist in. There's some nice world-building, including districts that have been almost completely submerged, with only the tops of lamp posts poking out of the murky water. But overall the city feels disappointingly lifeless, with robotic NPCs wandering aimlessly, repetitive scenery, and a forgettable, droning soundtrack adding to the sense of gloom.

There's a good, but not great, detective game lurking here—albeit one that doesn't quite stack up with the best of Frogwares' Sherlock series. But as a package, it doesn't quite work. The open world isn't interesting enough to compel you to explore it; the combat is basic and uninspiring; and the writing and construction of the mysteries are generally quite poor. If you were looking for a unique or surprising take on Lovecraft's particular brand of horror, you won't find it here. There are some moments of quality hands-on detecting to enjoy in The Sinking City. You'll just have to decide if you can be bothered picking through the seaweed and fish guts to find them.

THE VERDICT
66

THE SINKING CITY
An occasionally entertaining detective game blighted by poor writing, rote combat, and a dreary open world.

 

[Hellion]

Rock-Paper-Shotgun's review points out, among other things, that this game is "whitewashing the KKK" because it doesn't actually portray them as "being visibly racist towards other ethnicities, other than Innsmouthers"

 

[Fedora Master]

So exactly like that other Cthulhu walking sim I already forgot the name of.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Rock-Paper-Shotgun's review points out, among other things, that this game is "whitewashing the KKK" because it doesn't actually portray them as "being visibly racist towards other ethnicities, other than Innsmouthers"

GODDAMN FUCKING FISHMEN, WHY DON'T YOU JUST GO BACK TO THE ATLANTIC WHERE YOUR KIND FUCKING BELONGS?

 

[toro]

The handling of this game release really pisses me off.

Postpone the game on Steam just to announce it as an EPIC exclusivity.
Day 1 DLC + 1 skill point bonus for preorders.
Pre-orders have a 48-hour early access to the game.
On top of this shit the game seems to be in a bad technical shape.

What are they thinking?

Edit: torrent is available. 1st game I pirate in years. arr! arr!

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[JDR13]

Are we ever going to get a truly great Lovecraft game?

 

[HoboForEternity]

Are we ever going to get a truly great Lovecraft game?

lo and behold:

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...vailable-on-steam.107676/page-33#post-6186199

fuck all these decline harbringers and epic shills

long live true incline

https://store.steampowered.com/app/779290/Stygian_Reign_of_the_Old_Ones/

 

[randir14]

Maybe my opinion will change with more play time, but so far I think the game is okay. It kind of feels like a third person Dark Corners of the Earth but with a bigger focus on the investigative stuff. Some of the graphics are surprisingly amateurish like the textures on character models.

 

[luj1]

Are we ever going to get a truly great Lovecraft game?

Dark Corners of the Earth

EDIT: Not related to Cthulhu Mythos but evokes quite a Lovecraftian atmosphere - Clive Barker's Undying

 

[Zombra]

Some very nice gameplay options here.

We'll see if turning all this off makes the game intolerable to play ... wish me luck.

EDIT: Streaming right now for an hour or so. Twitch link in my sig.

 

[Rahdulan]

Is it truly incline or will it simply make playing the game a chore because it was designed with said "features" in mind, though?