Frogwares' The Sinking City - that other Cthulhu game

[Zombra]

this game has shit lip syncing

wait thats just the interview

 

[Life of the Party]

The Sinking City: Sherlock Holmes Meets Cthulhu, Puts Your Detective Skills to the Test - E3 2019

Elementary, mglw'nafh hh' ahor.

The Sinking City has one of the coolest settings of any game I've played in a while. You take the role of a private investigator in the 1920s who's come to the coastal city of Oakmont, Massachusetts, where something dark and strange is afoot. Water levels are rising, flooding many of the city's streets, leaving citizens (and you) to navigate them by boat. Worse, Lovecraftian horrors are emerging from the depths and killing people on land. It's up to you to discover what's going on and try to stop it. Along the way, you'll have plenty of other murders and mysteries to solve.

In my hands-on demo at E3 2019, the investigator had an appointment to meet a man at a theater. When I arrived, I found a police barricade blocking the entrance. "I'll have to find another way in," my character said to himself, because that's how video game characters give hints to players. This would turn out to be one of the more obvious nudges I encountered. For the most part, The Sinking City trusts you to figure things out for yourself.

I headed toward an alleyway on the side of the building, but as I turned the corner, I saw three hideous creatures, crouched on all fours, waiting in the dark. They jumped into action when they saw me, opening their mouths so wide it looked like their heads were splitting in half as they attacked. Ah yes, these were the sanity-testing horrors I'd heard about.

I pulled out a shotgun and killed them, but not before they did some damage. To heal up, I injected the contents of a syringe into my left arm. All better.

Now about that meeting.

I entered the theater through a door in the alleyway, but what I found inside was a crime scene. The man I'd come to meet was slumped in a chair on the stage, with bullet holes in his torso. I approached and investigated his body. "Three in the gut and one in the heart," my character muttered. "Quick death."

The police had already come and gone. They'd marked the evidence scattered around: a hat on the floor, a phone coated in blood that was still wet. As I looked at each clue, a ghostly snippet of what had happened played out before me. Once I fully investigated the scene, I had to number the evidence to put the crime in chronological order.

Here's what happened: two men sat on the stage, attempting a seance. A gunman entered the theater, fired shots killing one of them, and fled, dropping his hat as he ran off. Finally, the other man rushed to the phone and called the police.

Investigating the crime scene was enjoyable, but I've done similar things in many other games. What made The Sinking City stand out -- in addition to its intriguing, Cthulhu-inspired setting -- was that after exiting the theater, I was left with little guidance about how to solve the murder. No new objective popped up on the screen. No waypoint appeared on the map to direct me where to go. I could sift through the clues in my casebook, but I'd have to find the relevant details and make the connections myself. The open world awaited.

After playing so many games that tell you exactly what to do every step of the way, I found this deeply refreshing. Here's a detective game that lets you do detective work.

If you get stumped, the developers say, you can work on side quests until you uncover a new thread. Apparently each mystery has several pathways to the solution, and you'll find hints if you look in the right places.

That The Sinking City is a game about investigation should come as no surprise, seeing as it's from Frogworks, the makers of the recent Sherlock Holmes games. This is their most ambitious effort to date, with its sizable open world, monstrous creatures, lengthy main story, and side quests you can tackle in any order, at any time.

I only played about 30 minutes of the game, but it had me intrigued to see more. If it sounds like your kind of thing, you don't have to wait long to get your hands on it: The Sinking City comes out on PS4, Xbox One, and PC on June 27, with a Switch version to follow.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/0...uts-your-detective-skills-to-the-test-e3-2019

 

[Hellion]

Received a super-early review code for this and am currently playing it. It is a peculiar blend, to be sure, combining adventure-like crime scene investigations with open-world roaming, sidequests and XP/Skill systems.

I'm still near the beginning, but it certainly is enjoyable - more enjoyable than last year's Call of Cthulhu game by Cyanide, at any rate, even though they are different kinds of games I guess. It remains to be seen if it will manage to surpass Dark Corners of the Earth.

 

[Alienman]

Interesting, please do more impressions when you come further into the game.

 

[Hellion]

The fish canning factory belonging to the dreaded Marsh family from Innsmouth has a fish kissing a moustached man as its logo. Rather fitting.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[toro]

...

Please post more impressions without spoiling the game.

 

[Hellion]

Ok, the basic gameplay loop seems to be like this:

-Receive quest that requires you to visit X number of locations.

-Pinpoint each location on your map using descriptions from your Clues menu (eg "The Restaurant is at the corner of Marsh street and Oldchurch street").

-Travel to these areas on foot or by boat and locate the actual places. Then search the places for whatever is required of you by interacting with hotspots (some plainly obvious, some not so much) and collecting more clues, sometimes fighting the occasional monster or human enemy along the way. Repeat this for as many locations as are required by each quest.

-Some clues require "Reseaching" in order to produce more concrete Clues so, depending to the nature of the info you want, you travel to the Library/Hospital/Police Station/Newspaper and use their archives by selecting up to 3 desired criteria. Eg your clue says that a suspect had surgery a few months ago, so you go to the Hospital archives, select "Patient Files", "Surgery" and "Recent" and if your criteria are correct you receive another clue with the suspect's current address (if you select the wrong criteria you just try again until you get it right) which you pinpoint on your map etc etc.

-Along the quests, some clues appear on your "Mind Palace" similarly to what happened in the previous Sherlock Holmes titles by Frogwares, and combining these clues produces "Deductions", which are essentially the basic points of your current quest and assist you in proceeding (eg combining "The Esoteric Order of Dagon distributes free fish to the poor" and "the suspect attempted to poison the EOD's fish supplies" produces the deduction "The suspect wants to harm the EOD's reputation".

-At their final phase, most quests' Deductions lead to 2 possible outcomes, so you have a choice on how to proceed - for example, you can select to bring the suspect to justice or warn him and let him go because he only acted in order to harm the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Then you visit the final location and act according to the path you want. There's no obviously "right" or "wrong" path per se, and each path leads to different results which are not plainly obvious at first, but I guess the results of your choices during the Main Quest will somehow come into play later and possibly affect the ending.

Some other points about the game:

-You can essentially gather enough XP to unlock all available Skills in the game, so there's no "specialization" factor or anything like that.
-Obviously, a non-combat approach is not possible and you'll have to fight, a lot.
-Combat is really action-y, so no cover mechanisms or anything like that.
-The entire town was procedurally generated (with manual assets being placed at some critical locations), so sometimes you'll visit different houses that end up having the exact same general layout (but different quest-critical items and available clues, obviously).
-Spotted some really "gamey" instances, for example at some point you locate a super-heavy diving suit and you just click on it and pick it up like it's nothing, and then travel to a location off the coast and use it to dive. Just thought I'd point it out, in case someone looks for "realism" in this game.

I'll pass on my final conclusions after I've finished the game, just to see how the plot escalates.

 

[Life of the Party]

What's the difficulty like?

 

[JDR13]

It remains to be seen if it will manage to surpass Dark Corners of the Earth.

Not setting a very high bar are we?

 

[Hellion]

Finished it a few hours ago. It turns out that your overall choices in the main quest affect some rather minor aspects of the world, like who will give you the next quest in the main questline (the quest remains the same, only the questgiver changes) or which person shows up during some cutscenes. Other than that, its available finales are essentially presented just like in Deus Ex: Human Revolution: no matter what you've done in the game, you reach a final area and select one of three endings. Which are pretty underwhelming, too - short videos of about 30 seconds each and then credits roll.

I'll probably end up uploading an English version of my future review as well, since there's plenty of time till the game's official release.

What's the difficulty like?

There are 2 separate difficulty settings for "Investigation" and "Combat", and each has Easy-Medium-Hard levels. Investigation difficulty determines how helpful the clues you receive are (on "Easy" all plot-critical clues you discover have a small icon next to them which pretty much tells you how to proceed with them, on Normal important clues are marked but without telling you how exactly to pursue them, and on Hard all clues are presented the same and you don't get any indication as to which are plot-critical or what to do with them). Combat difficulty, of course, affects how tough enemies are as well as your overall Sanity resistance.

Playing on Normal, I found the game pretty easy tbh. There aren't any real "puzzles" to solve other than selecting the proper criteria when researching the archives, and the only times I struggled was when I couldn't find all the hotspots/clues in some locations. Playing on Hard would probably make things more challenging, I guess.

Not setting a very high bar are we?

Well, DCotE is widely considered by many people the best "modern" Lovecraftian game since the days of Shadow of the Comet, so a comparison is only natural no matter how one subjectively perceives its overall quality.

In the end, Sinking City is probably a better game in regards to its gameplay, but DCotE's story and atmosphere are presented in a more impressive way - of course, it hardly is an original story since it copies stuff off of the most famous Cthulhu tales, but anyway.

 

[JDR13]

I was hoping for something much more polished by comparison. DCotE was sort of clunky and dated-looking even at release. I still enjoyed the experience well enough, but it certainly wasn't the Lovecraft masterpiece I'm still waiting for when it comes to games.

 

[Wunderbar]

I was hoping for something much more polished by comparison. DCotE was sort of clunky and dated-looking even at release. I still enjoyed the experience well enough, but it certainly wasn't the Lovecraft masterpiece I'm still waiting for when it comes to games.

clunkiness and dated visuals are the least of DCotE problems.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[toro]

Looks so-and-so but I'm still interested.

The Witcher sense mechanic is retarded and it will always be retarded but the rest of mechanics are quite good.

It really depends on how the rest of the quests are implemented. I see potential for this game.

 

[Abu Antar]

I actually think that this looks fairly cool. Also, it sounds like the voice actor for Michael Thorton from Alpha Protocol is also voicing the main character in this game.

 

[Hellion]

I uploaded a short (and Unlisted, for now, so don't share it anywhere else plox) gameplay video to accompany my future review.




The video was captured using all the proper 1080p HD settings, but for some reason Youtube plainly refuses to upload and display it as proper HD so there's some loss in quality. I might edit it a bit more and reupload it tomorrow.

Review embargo expires on the 25th.

 

[Abu Antar]

I uploaded a short (and Unlisted, for now, so don't share it anywhere else plox) gameplay video to accompany my future review.




The video was captured using all the proper 1080p HD settings, but for some reason Youtube plainly refuses to upload and display it as proper HD so there's some loss in quality. I might edit it a bit more and reupload it tomorrow.

Review embargo expires on the 25th.

Uploaded to every social media I am registered to. Contacted devs and publishers. Specifically pointed out who the original source is.

Are there many combat encounters? I sure hope not.

 

[Hellion]

Are there many combat encounters? I sure hope not.

Yeah, there are. Apart from the "Infested Areas" scattered around the city where monsters constantly spawn and respawn (you mostly visit such areas in order to scavenge crafting mats or because a house critical to some open investigation is located in them), you'll pretty much have to fight at least some monsters in the majority of locations you investigate. Nothing extreme, though - 3 or 4 monsters per location, max.

"Boss Fights" such as the one in the video are pretty rare. This might actually be the only one of two in the game.

 

[Alienman]

How long is the game Hellion ?

 

[Hellion]

Epic Store Launcher doesn't keep track of your "time played", but I started playing on the 14th and finished it on the 17th so a rough estimate would be somewhere around 20-30 hours depending on the difficulty level and on whether one wishes to solve every possible case in the game. On a speedrun, it's probably possible to finish it in less than 20 hours.

 

[Infinitron]

Let's see if anybody can solve this:

New The Sinking City Video Is A Warning Vision - But You Have To Solve A Mystery to See It.

​

"So, Mr. Reed. Sit back and take a deep breath. Tell me - do you really want to know the truth? If so, like Ceaser, look at what you see, move forwards, count to 5, and say what is revealed....But be wary of what might happen next."

21-06-2019 | Kiev, Ukraine - Frogwares, the studio behind the upcoming Lovecraft-inspired investigation game The Sinking City, has released a dream-like video that’s supposed to be a warning of what lies ahead. The catch? You have to solve a mystery on their Facebook page first to see it.

To see the warning and to test your detective skills, visit The Sinking City’s Facebook page, see their post from June 21st, and enter only the solution in the comments. If you did it right, you should receive a private message from the page with an ominous warning - and a link to the vision. What does the vision say? It’s hard to make out. But it suggests that the player should watch out for certain locations in the game.

Facebook page post here:
https://www.facebook.com/TheSinkingCityGame/photos/a.257509654662578/681979595548913/?type=3&theater

 

[Hellion]

Typing "CTHULHU" in the comments section sends you a message with a link to this video:

 

[Life of the Party]

First few seconds:

 

[Ebonsword]

First few seconds:

Seeing Cthulhu on the toilet is a different kind of horror than I was expecting.