Frogwares' The Sinking City - that other Cthulhu game

[troupeg]

PLEASE BE THE GAME CALL OF CTHULHU SHOULD HAVE BEEN!

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[troupeg]

I had a feeling it would be delayed, due to the no news for over a month. Still makes me sad

 

[Burning Bridges]

must not be a bad thing if a RPG gets delayed close to release

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[LESS T_T]

Promise of "no hand holding" and investigation system that makes you think:



http://www.gamasutra.com/view/press...ys_screw_that_to_conventional_game_design.php

An investigation system that says “screw that” to conventional game design

2019-02-28: Kiev, Ukraine | Frogwares, the team behind The Sinking City - the upcoming story-rich, free investigation horror game set in a heavily inspired H.P Lovecraft universe - have released a new trailer.

The video highlights the inner-workings of the game’s unique investigation system and how it forces players to truly think, deduct and make their own (possibly the wrong) conclusions rather than just follow convenient waypoint markers.

The investigation system in The Sinking City is built around one core principle - NO HAND HOLDING.

There are no objectives on the map or straightforward quests. No magic waypoint markers automatically telling you where to go or search. Playing as the troubled detective Charles W. Reed, you will need to piece together the mystery yourself finding clues, locations and suspects using cunning and the few tools at hand.

Spot obscure details on the evidence with the help of your “Mind’s Eye”. Reimagine the events that took place on a crime scene with “Retrocognition”. Follow “The Omens” to reveal what’s unseen to an ordinary detective. Utilize “Archives” within the City Hall, Police Station, Library and other facilities to piece together the troubled history of Oakmont, and finally - cross-reference all known facts within your “Mind Palace” to come to your conclusion.

ABOUT THE SINKING CITY: The Sinking City is story-rich, free investigation game set in a twisted H.P Lovecraft inspired universe. Step into Oakmont, Massachusetts – a place suffering decay and rot from unprecedented supernatural floods that slowly envelope the city and the minds of its inhabitants.

This is the world in which your character, private investigator Charles W. Reed, finds himself in. While slowly going insane from your own demons, you will need to use your detective skills to reveal the truth behind the unfathomable powers gripping you, the city, and its deranged citizens.

The Sinking City is currently in production. Coming to PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in, 2019.

 

[Zombra]

Looks like that video and article got redacted, LESS T_T. Thanks for the quote though, this all sounds very exciting. I'm sure this is not all a hoax on your part to lure me into some sort of deadly trap ... is 7:00 tomorrow still good for you by the way?

 

[LESS T_T]

is 7:00 tomorrow still good for you by the way?

No, it's now 9AM, March 1st UTC. Come here. You'll get the package then.

 

[toro]

Actually this getting delayed with 2 months is quite alright considering that Sekiro will be released on 22 of March.

 

[Beowulf]

Promise of "no hand holding" and investigation system that makes you think:

An investigation system that says “screw that” to conventional game design

2019-02-28: Kiev, Ukraine | Frogwares, the team behind The Sinking City - the upcoming story-rich, free investigation horror game set in a heavily inspired H.P Lovecraft universe - have released a new trailer.

The video highlights the inner-workings of the game’s unique investigation system and how it forces players to truly think, deduct and make their own (possibly the wrong) conclusions rather than just follow convenient waypoint markers.

The investigation system in The Sinking City is built around one core principle - NO HAND HOLDING.

There are no objectives on the map or straightforward quests. No magic waypoint markers automatically telling you where to go or search. Playing as the troubled detective Charles W. Reed, you will need to piece together the mystery yourself finding clues, locations and suspects using cunning and the few tools at hand.

Spot obscure details on the evidence with the help of your “Mind’s Eye”. Reimagine the events that took place on a crime scene with “Retrocognition”. Follow “The Omens” to reveal what’s unseen to an ordinary detective. Utilize “Archives” within the City Hall, Police Station, Library and other facilities to piece together the troubled history of Oakmont, and finally - cross-reference all known facts within your “Mind Palace” to come to your conclusion.

ABOUT THE SINKING CITY: The Sinking City is story-rich, free investigation game set in a twisted H.P Lovecraft inspired universe. Step into Oakmont, Massachusetts – a place suffering decay and rot from unprecedented supernatural floods that slowly envelope the city and the minds of its inhabitants.

This is the world in which your character, private investigator Charles W. Reed, finds himself in. While slowly going insane from your own demons, you will need to use your detective skills to reveal the truth behind the unfathomable powers gripping you, the city, and its deranged citizens.

The Sinking City is currently in production. Coming to PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in, 2019.

Well, the example investigation that they showed in one of the previous videos was on par wit Witcher 3 investigation, id you turned off the minimap helpers.
Rather straightfoward and looking around the house was "aided" (guided) by "detective sense", or whatever it's called.

If you can find clues, without them neede to be highlighted first by those senses will be a step up from W3, but it still won't make the investigation more interesting.
In the best case that was only a simplistic exmaple from the prepared vertical slice, and they will be able to work in a part of their experience in Sherlock Holmes games.

I'd like to see that in action before the premiere, though.

 

[LESS T_T]

is 7:00 tomorrow still good for you by the way?

No, it's now 9AM, March 1st UTC. Come here. You'll get the package then.

Well I guess you got your package early. There's still a channel does not honor the embargo:

 

[LESS T_T]

Now it's official, no need to check out other shady channels:

The video plunges the player straight into the game’s mysterious universe: Charles Reed, the detective, is scouring the streets of Oakmont and investigating the cause of the supernatural elements and madness that are devastating the town.

As Charles, the players will be completely on their own in their investigation, helped only by their observational skills and their trusty notebook. They’ll need to explore crime scenes, collect information, and question the inhabitants without any hints or assistance. While some challenges might be easily resolved, others will require using Reed’s unique abilities, such as Retrocognition, which allows him to replay past scenes.

In order to succeed in their investigation, the player will need to collect clues, figure out what they have in common, and try to back up their theories using one of the game’s essential tools called the Mind Palace. While it will let the player submit their hypotheses about potentially guilty parties, it will never tell them whether they’re on the right track. The player will have to accept the consequences of their choices.

 

[Zombra]

Very excited.

 

[toro]

Now it's official, no need to check out other shady channels:

The video plunges the player straight into the game’s mysterious universe: Charles Reed, the detective, is scouring the streets of Oakmont and investigating the cause of the supernatural elements and madness that are devastating the town.

As Charles, the players will be completely on their own in their investigation, helped only by their observational skills and their trusty notebook. They’ll need to explore crime scenes, collect information, and question the inhabitants without any hints or assistance. While some challenges might be easily resolved, others will require using Reed’s unique abilities, such as Retrocognition, which allows him to replay past scenes.

In order to succeed in their investigation, the player will need to collect clues, figure out what they have in common, and try to back up their theories using one of the game’s essential tools called the Mind Palace. While it will let the player submit their hypotheses about potentially guilty parties, it will never tell them whether they’re on the right track. The player will have to accept the consequences of their choices.

Ok. This shit just won my full attention.

 

[vota DC]

Cool.
By the way
Disco Elysium---->Thought Cabinet
Sinking City------->Mind Palace

That explained why both games are delayed.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[fantadomat]

 

[Life of the Party]

The Sinking City First-Look Preview: A Town Gone Mad

Insane in the membrane.

What’s most striking about The Sinking City, Frogwares' upcoming psychological detective thriller (coming out June 27, 2019), is its fictional Massachusetts town of Oakmont. It’s dripping and damp, misty and filthy. Men are losing their minds on the pier, in the dark bars, and abandoned houses. It’s a world ravaged by the Great War and its fallout, and creeping tentacled Lovecraftian horror that lurks.

You move through it as Charles Reed, a war veteran turned private eye trying to find a cure for his burgeoning insanity. As his mind begins to close in on him, it feels like Oakmont does too. The Sinking City is both a literal and figurative title: it’s surrounded by water and is slowly sinking (into madness).

Frogwares is aiming to make Oakmont unified in its weirdness. Its locals have their own regional dialect, and some of its inhabitants are Dr. Moreau-kissed monstrosities, at war with one another through generations. “From the very beginning,” Lead Narrative Designer Sergey Ten told me, “we thought about the city as not just appearing in space, in a vacuum, we thought it as a part of a bigger whole. As a part of U.S. history, and as a part of its own history. So, we have a timeline for the city, built from the day of its foundation, which is about 200 years.”

At a glance, I was impressed with the sordid detail here. Wading through the guts of an octopus, or being startled by a crab that has apparently swallowed a cat, emphasizes that sense of psychotic unreality. Bizarre creatures creep around in broad daylight; there’s a sort of Silent Hill forthrightness to them that I enjoyed.

Reed’s goal here is to figure out why he’s going mad, but make a buck - or a bullet, as is the regional currency - on the way. The Sinking City is a detective game, so working crime scenes and collecting clues is paramount, but it’s also supernatural, and Reed has a ‘retrocognition’ ability to reconstruct scenes in a dreamlike state and determine the order they played out. If you’ve played Cyanide’s equally Lovecraftian Call of Cthulu, or Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human, that mechanic will be familiar.

Building on that, Reed has a ‘Mind’s Eye’ ability that allows him to reveal images of the past through objects scattered throughout the world. Notice some distortion vibrating from a pocket watch? It might reveal a portal to crucial information.

Once you’ve determined the order in which a crime has played out, you can access what The Sinking City has dubbed Reed’s ‘’Mind Palace’, where you can combine relevant clues to formulate a solution. Deductions can variate based on your own sense of morality, however. Is this guy a cold-blooded murderer, or did he kill under the influence of psychosis? It’s up to you to make the call, which leads to different outcomes.

The Sinking City promises a level of explorative freedom within a genre that can traditionally be a little didactic. There are no map markers or objectives, everything is stripped back in order to encourage a sense of making it up as you go along. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to enemies, either; sometimes you’ll be attacked by a lurking horror in a completely non-descript room.

Frogwares wants to make sure such encounters are actually frightening, so resources, including bullets, are scarce. More often than not you’ll be crafting your own ammo, and even then it’s a single bullet on the fly. To up the ante, as Reed encounters these monsters his ‘insanity meter’ slowly gets chipped away at and his vision will blur; escaping to reality is more often than not a safer bet than using your gun.

At the end of my demo, I asked Ten why Lovecraftian horror appealed to him in particular. Reed’s fate seems spelled out in stone, so what is the appeal of that helplessness in a genre steeped in power fantasy? It’s the insignificance in the face of the universe, he tells me, which appeals. “That's something that we wanted to grasp in our game. That's something that I deeply love about our game, and deeply love about this, you know, this Lovecraftian atmosphere. It reminds you of who you are as a person in this big universe in some way. Of course, it's not everything there is and we also want to feel hope, we also want to feel significant. But sometimes, you know, it's a humbling experience.”

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/03/07/the-sinking-city-first-look-preview-a-town-gone-mad

 

[troupeg]

Man I like how the townspeople look. That guy literally looks like a malformed fish and it's really unsettling.

 

[Infinitron]

June 27th.

 

[Burning Bridges]

It looks promising but I am very sceptical about the whole outsourcing-to-cheap-Ukraine aspect.

 

[Wunderbar]

It looks promising but I am very sceptical about the whole outsourcing-to-cheap-Ukraine aspect.

outsourcing? It was a Frogwares project from the start.

 

[troupeg]

oh thank god. they realized "hey lets NOT release this the same timeframe as From Software and Ubisoft's game"

 

[Morgoth]

After the terrible Vampyr and Cyanide's Cthulhu, I think this should finally deliver. Unless my optimism is all an illusion.

 

[Burning Bridges]

It looks promising but I am very sceptical about the whole outsourcing-to-cheap-Ukraine aspect.

outsourcing? It was a Frogwares project from the start.

ok, and you are right. I didn't realize the company has been Ukrainian from the start-