Frogwares' The Sinking City - that other Cthulhu game

[Burning Bridges]

The game will come with a standard $60 price tag but we don’t think it will have any issues being considered a value. The developers said there was easily 30 hours of content.

The Sinking City has a lot to offer and I will eagerly be awaiting the June 2019 release date.

Shilling on the next level

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-sinking...s-sherlock-fan-fiction-i-didnt-know-i-needed/

The Sinking City is the Lovecraft meets Sherlock fan fiction I didn't know I needed
Weird, warped, and wetter than an otter's pocket.

The sinister pull of anything and everything Lovecraftian means fans have to put up with a lot: Terrible film adaptations, a bit of historical racism, and in more recent years, games desperate to bottle a bit of the dark ichor for themselves. The Sinking City is the latest, an open-world, action detective game where PI Charles W. Reed tries to discover the origins of flooded city Oakmont's ruin, and perhaps his own encroaching madness.

The studio behind it is Frogwares, best known for the Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and to some extent this is just that same investigative gameplay—rifling through newspapers, reconstructing events, chatting to unfriendly locals—in a rubbery Halloween mask. It's a great-looking mask, though.

Sinking City prides itself on not bossing you about too much, dropping you off in Oakmont and leaving it up to you to talk to the inhabitants, pick up cases and figure out what's going on among the rotting fish parts and soggy streets. Of course upon arrival you find that the only way out of the port is closed, and you're only going to get through if you find out where the offspring of a local dignitary has disappeared to. Funny that.

Elementary my dear whitebait
And so we're off, conducting an investigation that will feel incredibly familiar to anyone who played Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter or Crimes and Punishments. Chatting with Oakmont residents will open up new dialogue options, and heading to new locations will let you hunt for clues. All that information goes into the Mind Palace in one of your menus, where you can match up information to build a bigger picture of what happened.

You can also go into a reconstruction mode where you have to put past events—represented as sort of ghostly vapor people—into the right order. Less excitingly you can also head to the local newspaper to get a look at the archives, using dates and details to dig out a much-needed address or name. The address is worth scribbling down on some real paper. You have a map, but there are none of those helpful automatic markers standard in open world games. Apparently to get a real PI experience you have to hate convenience in all its forms.

What did take me by surprise—dock three points from my Lovecrafty fan account—was that Sinking City actually let me have a little adventure on the ocean floor. My search for a missing man led me to follow in the footsteps of a marine expedition. I found myself underwater in ye old bulky diving equipment, following the dull glow of ye olde lamps. (Everything in this city is olde).

It was a novelty and hinted at darker, deeper mysteries to be delved later on in the story. It's impossible not to compare Sinking City with Call of Cthulhu, which was a more linear, slightly more B-movie adventure. While they share a lot—a troubled PI, reconstruction sections, fish guts—Sinking City so far looks like a far more satisfying and lovingly designed bit of fan fiction.

Fishy but make it fashion
I only got to play through the first two missions, but it was enough to know that Sinking City had nailed the strange, alien aesthetic of Lovecraftian horror, even if it didn't feel like it was going to break any new adventure game ground. One of the first people you meet is a member of a powerful local family, and descended from a line of ape-human hybrids. Even if his demeanor and dialogue are your classic pompous arse, his character design is just simian enough to be unnerving.

That race is bested only in the beauty pageant by their rivals, the fish-human hybrids, who have these formless but unsettling features, huge flat eyes, and the melted look of a favorite monster toys left leaning up against a hot radiator.

The city of Oakmont itself is like a poor man's Venice, ruined buildings slumping into the water. Roads have given way to channels that have to be negotiated by boat, a mixture of your classic open world streets where buildings either scream "ignore me I'm just set dressing" or "I am very important narratively." I had a few random encounters with small, cannon fodder-style monsters in a ruined house, and a nice tension between running and using precious bullets—which are also the game's currency—to take them out.

I was itching to get out there and see just how many secrets and side missions there were to play with, because there's nothing worse than a pretty ghost town.

By the end of the demo I was ready to grow some gills and dive back in, ready to once again sigh and mentally repress knowledge of Lovecraft's problematic beliefs, and to help an NPC find their lost son/wedding ring/copy of the necronomicon. Sure, this steals a lot from Sherlock Holmes, but at least it does it well, and Arthur Conan Doyle and Lovecraft pair as well as a fine Sauvignon and Cthulhu calamari.

 

[fantadomat]

Meh,who cares? It is an EPIC sellout,should go and suck their nuts.

 

[Terenty]

Its good my old friend torrent doesnt care for Steam or Epic

 

[Infinitron]

Very extensive preview:

Spoiler

 

[Burning Bridges]

Too bad no one will play it.

 

[fantadomat]

Too bad no one will buy it.

Fix it for you mate.

 

[Burning Bridges]

No one "buys" anything.

A friend of mine installed the epic launcher once and the next day there was a bus witch Chinese at his house and they knew the names of all his friends and family. Pure coincidence of course.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Alienman]

Why did it have to go to Epic... WHY?

 

[Morgoth]

Why did it have to go to Epic... WHY?

Cuz Gabe wouldn't leave some cake for them?

 

[Kem0sabe]

No one would buy it in pc anyways. It's still coming out on consoles, that's where the sales are.

 

[Life of the Party]

Spoiler

‘The Sinking City’ Gameplay: How To Solve A Lovecraftian Murder

The Sinking City is an ambitious new adventure game from developer Frogwares, inspired by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. We recently sat down to play the first two missions.

Private eye Charles Reed awakens aboard the steamship Charon from terrible dreams of falling into a tentacled maw. You’ve arrived at Oakmont, an isolated Massachusetts town inundated with monstrosities after a supernatural event locals call the Flood. Soon after disembarking, you’ll solve a murder that not only implicates two formidable local families—the ape-faced Throgmortons and fish-faced Innsmouthers—but might also be the harbinger for an even darker fate facing the town.

In a gameplay demo covering the first two mysteries in The Sinking City, we questioned suspects, put together clues, recreated crime scenes, conducted archival research, lied to protect a killer driven by supernatural compulsions, motorboated around the flooded back alleys of Oakmont, crafted new ammo to shoot at spindly creatures and donned a deep sea diving suit to visit an underwater shrine to a tentacle-bearded Great Old One (you know who).

Lovecraft readers will recognize pieces of “Dagon,” “The Temple,” “The Horror at Red Hook” and “The Call of Cthulhu” in early missions, but it will be interesting to see just how deep The Sinking City plumbs Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Reed’s bad dreams point to the author’s Dream Cycle, which includes Great Ones and Outer Gods like Nyarlathotep, but it’s unclear how much later mysteries in The Sinking City will also fold in plot points from more unconnected stories like “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Rats in the Walls” or “The Outsider” (basis for Castle Freak).

The biggest influence looks to be “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the only Lovecraft novella published as a book during his life (most were serialized in magazines like Astounding Stories). In it, a young antiquarian visits the “rumour-shadowed” town of Innsmouth, which is populated by Dagon-worshipping fish-people. The narrator’s first impression of Innsmouth describes The Sinking City’s invented town of Oakmont just as well:

The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ‘widow’s walks.’ These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition … Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.”

The Sinking City is mostly successful in adapting Cthulhu Mythos to a video game, creating scenarios that convincingly craft a world from the sum total of Lovecraft’s paranoia and dread. It succeeds, at least in the early game, at bringing social cohesion to its squabbling clans of animal-human hybrids, underworld factions and cultists, portraying their conflicting interests and power-plays as a believable consequence of the supernatural pressures weighing upon Oakmont.

Lovecraft’s racism is a common caveat in contemporary discussions of his work, so rather than endorse, for example, Lovecraft’s revulsion at the fish-mouth Innsmouthers (The Shadow Over Innsmouth explicitly voices “race prejudice” against the Innsmouthers, comparing them to the “queer kinds of people” coming to America from Africa and Asia), The Sinking City implants Lovecraft’s prejudices into opposing factions. No longer are the ape-like Throgmortons a symbol of miscegenated degeneracy, as in the Lovecraft story “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” but instead a faction wielding its own prejudices and subject to the prejudices of others.

It may not drip with quite the same dread, but The Sinking City does a thoughtful job of capturing Lovecraft in more modern idioms, rather than performing the pale mummery found far too often in tributes looking for nothing beyond tentacles and Roaring Twenties cosplay. The Sinking City is resolutely Lovecraftian—anyone tired of the Cthulhu Mythos won’t find a radically revisionist or new take—but it does it better than any game since Eternal Darkness came out for the GameCube in 2002. But how does The Sinking City actually play?

As an open-world environment, Oakmont is well detailed and somewhat dense. The overworld map is divided into neighborhoods, which are dotted with buildings you’ll visit, public squares packed with oddball locals and abandoned areas infested with pale, long-limbed monsters and shambling inside-out corpses. From your hotel room, you can change into one of 12 different outfits (and there may be more than that), with names like “Newcomer,” “Man of Science,” “Fisherman,” “Plague Doctor,” “Cultist” and something called “Vyshyvanka.” The graphics are resolutely good enough, much like other mid-scale independent games developed with the Unreal Engine 4, including last year’s Call of Cthulhu. But in a sea of mega-budget, open-world games, The Sinking City can feel distinctly also-ran. Where The Sinking City stands out is in how Reed interacts with Oakmont and its many mysteries.

Laid atop the open world of The Sinking City is an array of mechanics, some innovative, some routine. With the exception of investigations, including the Main Case and Side Cases logged in your pause menu Casebook, much in The Sinking City will feel familiar. Crafting, skill leveling and inventory management is all standard stuff, with little elaboration to get in the way of quick in-game actions.

But when investigating a crime scene, The Sinking City takes a different approach, to surprising effect. Your first Case is provided by family patriarch Albert Throgmorton, who wants you to find his son, recently returned from a cthonic expedition and somehow connected to a gruesome murder. Each step in the investigation involves its own mechanic.

You begin by talking to everybody at the scene and examining the various items spread about the environment. Then examine the room and the objects in it again, this time with your “Mind’s Eye,” an eldritch sense power that allows you to see supernatural forces and visions of events tied to specific items. But the crime scene itself isn’t always enough. Perhaps a letter found at the scene will send you to the newspaper archives or hospital records to search for corroborating documents.

Each one of these steps has its own associated mechanics. For example, searching newspaper archives requires that you know enough to sync up three different search parameters to narrow your inquiries. Using your retrocognition, you can cross a temporal portal to a spectral recreation of the events, which then requires numbering the various scenes in the order they occurred. No one mechanic is remarkably astounding or innovative, but they aggregate into a satisfying whole, kind of like the dice rolls, card flips and other minor mechanics that comprise a complex board game. Out of these simple components, a robust interactivity emerges.

Any one of these actions could produce a clue, which is the basic currency of crime-solving in The Sinking City. Clues like “Albert fled when wounded” or “Lewis shot without warning” appear in your Mind Palace, where you can make causal connections between them to combine individual clues into deductions. Find enough evidence to produce enough clues to generate enough deductions and you solve the case. But with multiple deductions, multiple conclusions can be developed, such as believing an Innsmouther committed a murder out of prejudice, rather than due to the occult influence of an unholy relic whispering inside their head.

The by-now ubiquitous “moral choices” these various deductions surface aren’t too compelling in the early game. Much of the individual investigatory mechanics are also simplistic early on—it was trivially easy, for example, to reconstruct the order of events in the first two investigations. But there’s certainly the foundation for engrossing and intricate cases to come.

The systems of investigation are so central to The Sinking City, that anyone looking for satisfaction in other areas will likely be disappointed. Elements like the game’s sporadic gunplay are best seen as minor features—another snackable mechanic among many. At least in the handful of early encounters, against minor grotesques, there wasn’t much to raise the heart rates of FPS fans. The Sinking City is more of an adventure experience than horror or action, with a focus on investigating the otherworldly over creeping about or taking hordes of monsters head-on.

This heavy focus on investigation extends into how Reed interacts with the open world. Rather than a compass arrow constantly pointing to your next objective, you must find your own way through The Sinking City. Map markers are sometimes attached to clues, but there’s little hand holding. This can lead to minor annoyances, like missing a key piece of evidence at a crime scene and running around for ten minutes, unsure what to do next. But just as often a character will tell you to visit a location, offering only an intersection, leaving it up to you to go into the map, mark it and find your way through the tangled streets of Oakmont to your destination—a satisfying, almost tactile, interaction unlike typical open-world gameplay.

Having experienced only the first two hours or so of The Sinking City, its ambition is obvious, even if it’s not yet clear how much the game will live up to it. The core investigatory gameplay is solid, but will the cases offered up in The Sinking City take full advantage of its abundant possibilities? We’ll investigate for ourselves when The Sinking City comes out for PS4, Xbox and PC on June 27.

https://www.newsweek.com/sinking-city-gameplay-ps4-demo-lovecraft-1394064

 

[Burning Bridges]

In before the whole team gets laid off because of "bad sales".

 

[GandGolf]

Spoiler

‘The Sinking City’ Gameplay: How To Solve A Lovecraftian Murder

The Sinking City is an ambitious new adventure game from developer Frogwares, inspired by the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. We recently sat down to play the first two missions.

Private eye Charles Reed awakens aboard the steamship Charon from terrible dreams of falling into a tentacled maw. You’ve arrived at Oakmont, an isolated Massachusetts town inundated with monstrosities after a supernatural event locals call the Flood. Soon after disembarking, you’ll solve a murder that not only implicates two formidable local families—the ape-faced Throgmortons and fish-faced Innsmouthers—but might also be the harbinger for an even darker fate facing the town.

In a gameplay demo covering the first two mysteries in The Sinking City, we questioned suspects, put together clues, recreated crime scenes, conducted archival research, lied to protect a killer driven by supernatural compulsions, motorboated around the flooded back alleys of Oakmont, crafted new ammo to shoot at spindly creatures and donned a deep sea diving suit to visit an underwater shrine to a tentacle-bearded Great Old One (you know who).

Lovecraft readers will recognize pieces of “Dagon,” “The Temple,” “The Horror at Red Hook” and “The Call of Cthulhu” in early missions, but it will be interesting to see just how deep The Sinking City plumbs Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Reed’s bad dreams point to the author’s Dream Cycle, which includes Great Ones and Outer Gods like Nyarlathotep, but it’s unclear how much later mysteries in The Sinking City will also fold in plot points from more unconnected stories like “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Rats in the Walls” or “The Outsider” (basis for Castle Freak).

The biggest influence looks to be “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the only Lovecraft novella published as a book during his life (most were serialized in magazines like Astounding Stories). In it, a young antiquarian visits the “rumour-shadowed” town of Innsmouth, which is populated by Dagon-worshipping fish-people. The narrator’s first impression of Innsmouth describes The Sinking City’s invented town of Oakmont just as well:

The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed ‘widow’s walks.’ These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition … Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.”

The Sinking City is mostly successful in adapting Cthulhu Mythos to a video game, creating scenarios that convincingly craft a world from the sum total of Lovecraft’s paranoia and dread. It succeeds, at least in the early game, at bringing social cohesion to its squabbling clans of animal-human hybrids, underworld factions and cultists, portraying their conflicting interests and power-plays as a believable consequence of the supernatural pressures weighing upon Oakmont.

Lovecraft’s racism is a common caveat in contemporary discussions of his work, so rather than endorse, for example, Lovecraft’s revulsion at the fish-mouth Innsmouthers (The Shadow Over Innsmouth explicitly voices “race prejudice” against the Innsmouthers, comparing them to the “queer kinds of people” coming to America from Africa and Asia), The Sinking City implants Lovecraft’s prejudices into opposing factions. No longer are the ape-like Throgmortons a symbol of miscegenated degeneracy, as in the Lovecraft story “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” but instead a faction wielding its own prejudices and subject to the prejudices of others.

It may not drip with quite the same dread, but The Sinking City does a thoughtful job of capturing Lovecraft in more modern idioms, rather than performing the pale mummery found far too often in tributes looking for nothing beyond tentacles and Roaring Twenties cosplay. The Sinking City is resolutely Lovecraftian—anyone tired of the Cthulhu Mythos won’t find a radically revisionist or new take—but it does it better than any game since Eternal Darkness came out for the GameCube in 2002. But how does The Sinking City actually play?

As an open-world environment, Oakmont is well detailed and somewhat dense. The overworld map is divided into neighborhoods, which are dotted with buildings you’ll visit, public squares packed with oddball locals and abandoned areas infested with pale, long-limbed monsters and shambling inside-out corpses. From your hotel room, you can change into one of 12 different outfits (and there may be more than that), with names like “Newcomer,” “Man of Science,” “Fisherman,” “Plague Doctor,” “Cultist” and something called “Vyshyvanka.” The graphics are resolutely good enough, much like other mid-scale independent games developed with the Unreal Engine 4, including last year’s Call of Cthulhu. But in a sea of mega-budget, open-world games, The Sinking City can feel distinctly also-ran. Where The Sinking City stands out is in how Reed interacts with Oakmont and its many mysteries.

Laid atop the open world of The Sinking City is an array of mechanics, some innovative, some routine. With the exception of investigations, including the Main Case and Side Cases logged in your pause menu Casebook, much in The Sinking City will feel familiar. Crafting, skill leveling and inventory management is all standard stuff, with little elaboration to get in the way of quick in-game actions.

But when investigating a crime scene, The Sinking City takes a different approach, to surprising effect. Your first Case is provided by family patriarch Albert Throgmorton, who wants you to find his son, recently returned from a cthonic expedition and somehow connected to a gruesome murder. Each step in the investigation involves its own mechanic.

You begin by talking to everybody at the scene and examining the various items spread about the environment. Then examine the room and the objects in it again, this time with your “Mind’s Eye,” an eldritch sense power that allows you to see supernatural forces and visions of events tied to specific items. But the crime scene itself isn’t always enough. Perhaps a letter found at the scene will send you to the newspaper archives or hospital records to search for corroborating documents.

Each one of these steps has its own associated mechanics. For example, searching newspaper archives requires that you know enough to sync up three different search parameters to narrow your inquiries. Using your retrocognition, you can cross a temporal portal to a spectral recreation of the events, which then requires numbering the various scenes in the order they occurred. No one mechanic is remarkably astounding or innovative, but they aggregate into a satisfying whole, kind of like the dice rolls, card flips and other minor mechanics that comprise a complex board game. Out of these simple components, a robust interactivity emerges.

Any one of these actions could produce a clue, which is the basic currency of crime-solving in The Sinking City. Clues like “Albert fled when wounded” or “Lewis shot without warning” appear in your Mind Palace, where you can make causal connections between them to combine individual clues into deductions. Find enough evidence to produce enough clues to generate enough deductions and you solve the case. But with multiple deductions, multiple conclusions can be developed, such as believing an Innsmouther committed a murder out of prejudice, rather than due to the occult influence of an unholy relic whispering inside their head.

The by-now ubiquitous “moral choices” these various deductions surface aren’t too compelling in the early game. Much of the individual investigatory mechanics are also simplistic early on—it was trivially easy, for example, to reconstruct the order of events in the first two investigations. But there’s certainly the foundation for engrossing and intricate cases to come.

The systems of investigation are so central to The Sinking City, that anyone looking for satisfaction in other areas will likely be disappointed. Elements like the game’s sporadic gunplay are best seen as minor features—another snackable mechanic among many. At least in the handful of early encounters, against minor grotesques, there wasn’t much to raise the heart rates of FPS fans. The Sinking City is more of an adventure experience than horror or action, with a focus on investigating the otherworldly over creeping about or taking hordes of monsters head-on.

This heavy focus on investigation extends into how Reed interacts with the open world. Rather than a compass arrow constantly pointing to your next objective, you must find your own way through The Sinking City. Map markers are sometimes attached to clues, but there’s little hand holding. This can lead to minor annoyances, like missing a key piece of evidence at a crime scene and running around for ten minutes, unsure what to do next. But just as often a character will tell you to visit a location, offering only an intersection, leaving it up to you to go into the map, mark it and find your way through the tangled streets of Oakmont to your destination—a satisfying, almost tactile, interaction unlike typical open-world gameplay.

Having experienced only the first two hours or so of The Sinking City, its ambition is obvious, even if it’s not yet clear how much the game will live up to it. The core investigatory gameplay is solid, but will the cases offered up in The Sinking City take full advantage of its abundant possibilities? We’ll investigate for ourselves when The Sinking City comes out for PS4, Xbox and PC on June 27.

https://www.newsweek.com/sinking-city-gameplay-ps4-demo-lovecraft-1394064

Rather surprising that they made it into a major publication like Newsweek.

 

[Zombra]

For anyone interested in the game but not reading all the articles so far: the first couple of cases are out in a gameplay demo for journos, and at least one preview has posted a substantial story spoiler I wish I hadn't read. For those of us who enjoy the surprise of discovering things for ourselves it's time to tune out on media coverage.

 

[Life of the Party]

The Sinking City actually makes me feel like I'm in a strange new world by making background NPCs do the weirdest things

NPCs aren’t just bystanders in The Sinking City, a detective RPG set in a cursed city

I get distracted easily. Really easily, in fact. So it’ll come as no surprise that I spent a good ten minutes stalking NPCs in Frogware’s The Sinking City, a detective game set in a flooded town named Oakmont where half-human creatures live alongside humans as they live their ordinary lives. Because in The Sinking City, the NPCs do so much in the background that I actually feel like I’m walking through a living, breathing world. I don’t even mean NPCs featured in quests - these are anonymous bystanders and nameless extras found in bars, streets, and shops, going about Oakmont as if it’s perfectly normal to pass half-eaten sharks and twisted coral clinging to the sides of buildings.

Outsider isn’t an insult, but a fact

During my time with The Sinking City I saw NPCs (*deep breath*) vomiting, brawling, fishing, begging, lying down in the streets (either that or they’re very dead), scavenging, fighting while they’re scavenging, beating each other up, kicking broken-down cars, despondently sitting in broken-down cars, warming their hands around flaming oil barrels, roasting fish above flaming oil barrels, carrying delicate little parcels, selling fish, preaching, praying while walking, waiting for a shoe shine customer, trying to get clients to come back to their boudoir, and crying. That last one is fair enough, as Oakmont is literally a damned place.

It’s not just what they do that makes the city feel like it’s thriving in a twisted kind of way. Creepy is the norm in Oakmont, and it really shows in how these NPCs are dressed: striding down streets are Innsmouthers with their half-fish faces or cultists with skin masks, strange staffs, and suspiciously red body paint. And yet no one gives them a second glance. Worshipping the Lovecraftian elder gods is integral to Oakmont’s identity, so they mingle with ordinary-looking civilians instead of lurking underground like you might ordinarily expect, and it doesn’t take long for it to become obvious that you’re the weird one for thinking they’re strange or even threatening. At first, hearing people call you an Outsider is an insult, but seeing these NPCs go about their business really makes you feel like you just don’t belong.

Red Dead and Skyrim influences

All of these unique little habits that the NPCs have sell you on the idea that, even though the city has been flooded by some supernatural force and the deep-sea divers are all going mad, they have their own little lives to be getting along with. Some of those lives are hard, they force people to scavenge from broken crates strewn throughout the streets, while others can walk home on the posher side of town carrying a tidily-wrapped parcel without a care in the world.

Seeing both kinds of people will give you serious Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption 2 vibes, as each game had their own little world going on in the background: farmers toil in the fields, people beg on the side of country roads, and each day people can be found hawking their wares in the market. Unfortunately, there’s not quite the same level of sophisticated NPC interaction in The Sinking City as there is in Red Dead Redemption 2, as they won’t cower if you aim a gun at them, or even let you stop and chat a while. Mind you, part of you could be generous and interpret their reticence to talk as being a consequence of their frankly dismal mood because they’re living in a half-flooded city where people are so terrified that they trade in bullets instead of money. Calling that place home would make me pretty messed-up too.

Apart from those that will give you quests, NPCs in The Sinking City aren’t the main focus of the game by any means. Yet having them busying around in the background as you try to find your way around Oakmont makes the game feel alive, and most definitely semi-cursed. Their mixture of erratic and reasonable behaviour proves just how deep the Lovecraftian corruption has wormed into Oakmont, and when The Sinking City comes out on June 27, you’ll get the chance to try and figure out how to make those strange NPCs’ lives a little better.

https://www.gamesradar.com/the-sink...aking-background-npcs-do-the-weirdest-things/

 

[agris]

I'm not going to try and convince anyone, but that process analysis is naive to say the least, there is very little of concern there. Up to you to decide what you're comfortable with installing, but I'd suggest reading further.

Understanding that a lot of what was in the meme was routine, well, routines, I would also like to know more specifics.

Or put another way: I understand when complexity is spun to make something appear a certain way. I know enough about windows as an environment to know there is a lot of complexity, but not enough to know if the meme contains regular 'best practices' or is indeed capturing behavior that is troubling, for a game delivery client.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[toro]

I feel like this game has a huge potential but at the same time my intuition is telling me that they will find a way to fuck it up.

 

[Morgoth]

Looking more and more interesting.

Steam page says it's coming 2020. Weird, I thought it was coming out very soonish. Must have been an illusion...

 

[Abu Antar]

Looking more and more interesting.

Steam page says it's coming 2020. Weird, I thought it was coming out very soonish. Must have been an illusion...

https://techraptor.net/content/the-sinking-city-epic-game-store-exclusive

 

[Life of the Party]

I feel like this game has a huge potential but at the same time my intuition is telling me that they have found a way to fuck it up.

The only thing to be worried about is the difficulty of investigations since we live in an era when video games tend to play themselves.

On another note:

And I feel like this game cannot get released soon enough. Question, is the C’thulu mythos the only one of Lovecraft’s lore that’s being used? Or are there other stories of his that you drew inspiration from, because this is giving me ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ vibes.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Looks absolutely terrible... an entire dialogue sequence with only a single binary choice? This shit is worse than Fallout 4 dialogue. Also the shooting looks like an afterthought.

 

[Life of the Party]