When I first heard about The Sinking City, I was intrigued by its HP Lovecraft inspired aura. The idea of playing as a private eye who comes to a strange city to investigate paranormal hysteria just sounded really cool, and it is. A supernatural flood has taken the city of Oakmont and made it almost impossible to travel to, much less live in, yet, we find our protagonist arriving on a rainy night. He was led by strange visions that called him here, visions of darkness and unbelievable monsters. You aren’t the only one to have suffered from these, though. Many Oakmont residents have shared the same visions, and you leave the comfort of Boston to get to the bottom of what’s going on.
I knew The Sinking City was ambitious, potentially more ambitious than develop Bigben Interactive could manage. I figured it was a solid ‘AA’ caliber game. It doesn’t have the budget and probably not quite the talent and likely not the dev time to be the next major third person adventure game, but Bigben put a lot of work into adding gameplay features and building a large city for you to explore. While your main goal is clear, there are a variety of side cases that open up that have you running around all four corners of the rather-large city of Oakmont and within its boroughs. You can travel by foot or by boat, and as you find telephone booths in each locale you can begin to fast travel between them. Variety between the areas is not very distinct, but that’s kind of understandable given the tremendous, and ongoing, amount of flooding that’s been occurring here.
From the outset, you’re presented with a murder case to solve for the head of one of Oakmont’s grand families. His son went missing, and the police haven’t been able to help. As an outsider, you’re already dismissed by most, in fact, the game makes it a point to keep nearly every NPC silent because Oakmonters don’t talk to outsiders (and there are some posters reminding everyone of this). Anyway, this opening set piece gives you a chance to learn about the game’s variety of mechanics, including the Mind’s Eye and Mind Palace. The Mind’s Eye is a supernatural sense that you can use by pressing down on the d-pad, it helps you reveal more truth about certain areas or objects. Clues you discover in the Mind’s Eye and in conversation go into the Mind Palace where you have snippets of notes and you pair them up to make deductions to lead you to an ultimate picture of what happened, therefore solving the mystery. Note that there are different conclusions you can come to depending on how much evidence you collect. Wisely, the game makes it clear when you have collected all evidence in a given area.
These mechanics, like everything in The Sinking City, are done functionally well enough, but leave a lot of headroom for improvement. Combat, especially, is probably the biggest headache with the experience. Sometimes you will fight other citizens of Oakmont, although this seemed fairly random. Literally, there were times when I would be walking around and a random NPC would start shooting at me. Typically though, you will be fighting monsters. Some areas are marked as infested and contain more monsters than the norm, but these same areas are also where you’re going to find most objectives and items that you need to craft (more on that soon). That said, combat is not polished. You can swing a shovel exactly one way, which is not only unnatural, but inefficient. Bullets often do little harm to enemies, but traps and explosives work well but can be cumbersome to prep and use. The delay on switching and using medkits and the sanity-restoring kits is intentional I presume, but you can’t expect to use those in the middle of a fight, you’ll die trying.
The game encourages you to run away from most encounters, and this is often good advice. Sometimes, enemies, especially the larger tank variety, will pursue you but get stopped by a door and clip into, but not through, it. While they’re stuck, they’re easy targets; clearly the developers didn’t intend for it to be that way, perhaps they could patch that. Dying in battle is a nuisance not only for the lengthy load times, but the spawn point is often quite a bit away from where you were, so you have to travel back to the fight zone and try it all over again. Even the manual saves don’t help with this as you’re simply dropped right back in the same “safe area” as opposed to where you, you know, actually saved at.
While combat is a significant part of the game, it’s not the majority. Solving crimes by finding clues, using the Mind Eye and Palace, and talking with NPCs is another major portion of the gameplay. There is also crafting, but like the Mind Palace, there’s not a lot of actual intentional gameplay here. By that I mean, with Mind Palace, you take snippets of notes and try to match them up to make a greater point, but this is just a matter of tapping X to find the combinations. With crafting, you find random things, often with the help of the Mind’s Eye (to see specially marked barrels, cabinets, boxes, etc) and and then, within the pause menu, you can instantly create medkits, sanity kits, firebombs, bullets, traps, and so forth. The further you go in the game, the more stuff you can make. Arbitrary limits are placed on how much of each kind of item you can carry, but the limits are reasonable, and expandable, depending on how you spend your Knowledge Points to upgrade your character. Upgrades can help you with combat, crafting, exploration, and so forth. Knowledge Points are earned via XP which you get from defeating enemies, discovering new areas, and solving cases.
As far as presentation goes, The Sinking City won’t blow you away, but it does well enough. Voice-acting is alright, graphically it’s alright, and the sounds are, you guessed it, alright. It’s nothing super good, nor super bad, but it’s sufficient. Some animations are cheesy, like when you dock your boat by pressing X at the prompt, and you’re instantly out of the boat and on the dock, skipping all motion in between. The variety of interiors of structures is at times low as well, and you’ll get a sense of deja vu at times. But overall, The Sinking City does a pretty good job with its presentation.
Despite all of its various shortcomings, The Sinking City still gets a lot right, and it kept me coming back. I became determined to solve the cases, discover the hidden areas of Oakmont, unlock the additional in-game costumes, and just explore. Even though the gameplay stumbles often, for me there was still enough here in terms of story and content, to keep going, and I enjoyed myself more oft than not. Ultimately, I think that with some patching, The Sinking City could really be a stand out title, easily one of or the best AA games this year. But as it plays now, The Sinking City is fairly rough around the edges and might will test your patience and sense of leniency for its shortcomings.
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