Frogwares, mainly known from their fantastic Sherlock Holmes series, has taken the detective game formula they’ve refined throughout the years and added a bit of horror to it with their latest game The Sinking City.
The Sinking City
Developer: Frogwares
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Taking place in the 1920s, you control Charles Reed, a private detective suffering from hellish visions that seem to also be plaguing the town of Oakmont, Massachusetts. The town has recently been hit by a supernatural flood that brought creatures, bouts of hysteria, and a mysterious cult that’s popping up all around town. Your goal is to try to solve the mystery of this mass hysteria and hopefully not lose your mind in the process. If you couldn’t tell already, the game wears its influences proudly on its sleeve, with the game absolutely reeking of Lovecraft’s flair. It’s great to play a game that just gets that vibe and runs with it since this aesthetic is butchered more often than it’s not. The city of Oakmont itself is a wonderfully dreary place with the nearly constant rain and the denizens shuffling their way around town. Being flooded, this means you’ll have to travel by boat through some roads, offering chances to explore abandoned homes for crafting resources on your way to your next mission. Now while the world is meticulously designed and crowds litter every street, there’s a sense of lifelessness as you can’t really interact with most denizens besides a select few. If you see someone getting jumped in a back alley, there’s nothing you can really do to intervene and there aren’t many NPCs to speak with. As someone who wanted to completely dive into this world, it’s a bit disappointing when you can’t.
Coming off of their Sherlock Holmes games, Frogwares continues to stick with what they know by crafting a detective story that has you going to various locations to gather clues and piece together a mystery. You’ll enter a location, poke around every corner looking for objects to interact with that could add key evidence to your inventory, and (because the Sherlock influence is strong here) add it to your mind palace where you’ll link together the relevant information to form conclusions to the case you’re working on. Coming to the end of an investigation isn’t always so clear cut however since you might be presented with multiple ways to play things out. A very early murder you’ll investigate ends by revealing the murderer possibly only committed the crime because he was infected with hysteria, and with that information, you have to decide if you should turn him in regardless. What I appreciated most from this system is being able to completely play both sides by blackmailing the suspect for a reward for your silence, then going behind their back to turn them in for another reward. Not many games allow you to be this big of a jerk and it’s always fun when you get to properly play the jaded, worn-weary detective.
The city isn’t the only supernatural entity around, with Charles Reed having his own gifts that help in his investigations. Once you piece together enough clues you’ll be able to see various events of the crime take place through smoky silhouettes and you’ve got to figure out in which order they happened. Using your ‘spooky detective vision’ will also allow you to view any supernatural elements in the area such as a magical wall that was put up. These moments, while pretty straightforward and simple, add to the ambiance of the world and it’s just fun getting to play around in this element.
The main hook of the game, however, is the absolute lack of handholding. You’ll never be given a marker on your map to follow or told exactly where a person is. Instead, you might be given vague directions like “on the west intersection between Ward street and Salvation avenue.” It’s then your job to go into your map, find those two roads and place a marker in the general location of where you think you should go then head over and find the place. It’s not difficult, and I never once had an issue finding a spot, but it again adds to this “stranger in a strange land” element.
My only issue with this system, however, is how you can only view one marker on your map at a time. So if I place some markers for a few side cases down, then go and add one for my main case, the previous two I put down will disappear. To make them show back up I have to go to the casebook menu, select the side case, and then make it take me back to the map page where they’ll show back up but now the main case marker is gone. It’s incredibly frustrating, especially when you’ve got various cases going on at the same time and are having to constantly jump between menus to see where everything is. It’s mind-boggling how this got through into the final product.
In addition to the lack of map markers, you’ll also need to do ‘research’ into some cases by perusing the archives of various establishments like the hospital or asylum. For example, if you’re searching for a suspect who’s committed a pattern of crimes you might want to go to the police department and put in a search for someone who’s committed multiple robberies in the same part of town and maybe uses a knife a lot. Put in the right string of questions and you’ll be rewarded with the next lead in your case. There’s no way to make a wrong answer here either, as any incorrect inputs will give you nothing and finding the right combination of questions to ask the archives is as simple as going over your evidence.
Now just because you’re running around gathering clues and hitting up the library doesn’t mean you won’t ever get into any scuffles, as you have a gun and a shovel to protect yourself against any creatures that come your way. It continues to be evident that combat isn’t Frogwares’s forte as it’s passable, but never feels great when you’re in it. Aiming feels a bit sludgy and enemies come off more like bullet sponges than anything else which is frustrating in a game that so heavily limits your resources. The game only allows you to hold maybe two dozen bullets per gun and its mechanics seem at odds with how the game wants you to play things. You’re told that combat doesn’t have to be an option, that running is almost always the best choice, but it’s near impossible to explore a building for clues when you’ve got monsters sprinting for you in a small home. But then you engage with the creatures and you realize you have little to no bullets for the encounter because they take so many shots. Then, assuming you hoard your precious bullets, the game decides to dole them out as mission rewards and since you’re full you frustratingly lose out on your reward. The game can’t seem to be able to decide whether it wants you to be in an action game that requires having all these resources, or in a tense survival game, but it’s going to cripple you until it decides which.
On top of all this is a skill point system where you’ll earn XP for killing things or solving mysteries that can then be used to purchase skills from three separate trees: combat, vigor, and mind. The skills here have varying degrees of usefulness, the majority being pretty forgettable to the point where when I’d earn a skill point I wasn’t exactly rushing to cash it in which again adds to the flip-flopping tone of the game’s combat mechanics.
The Final Word
The Sinking City has its rough spots, but a good Lovecraft inspired game is hard to come by and Frogwares managed to craft a story that’s interesting enough to scratch that itch.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 4 out of 5 – Good
