This is probably going to sound weird coming from a writer, but I’m not a big reader. I don’t not read – I’m often picking slowly away at some book or another – but I don’t do read all that much. However, I have read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve got a big hardcover anthology book that I used to read at a local board game cafe in my loneliest days. I don’t think I’ve read it cover to cover, but I have read through a lot of his more highest-profile stuff.

I’m not particularly familiar with Frogwares’ older stuff. I haven’t read any Sherlock Holmes, and the games don’t seem like a good place to start, but they certainly got me with Sinking City. Lovecraft has had a shaky relationship with video games. Well, no, that’s not true. If you consider the games he’s influenced, he’s probably up there with Tolkien in terms of raw presence. Also, he’s dead, so technically, he has no relationship with video games at all. He probably wouldn’t like them. Also, I imagine he’d be chronically and have questionable opinions on immigration, among other hot-button topics.

What were we talking about? Right, most video games that are based directly on his work are shaky. To be fair, he’s such a good read because of what’s left between the lines. His meandering prose is always full of holes that give you glimpses of madness, but madness doesn’t translate well into video games. But The Sinking City comes close.

THE GHOST-EATER

You play as Charles Reed, a war veteran turned private eye who’s not only suffering from PTSD, but also horrific visions of terrible monstrosities and a city underwater. I wonder which one is worse. The visions are actually a widespread infliction, which leads him to the city of Oakmont seeking answers.

Oakmont is the best character in the game. It’s a city in Massachusetts that has suffered a catastrophic flood that has left much of its infrastructure in shambles. More importantly, it’s where the surviving population of Innsmouth migrated to after the raids at the end of Shadow Over Innsmouth. As a nice touch, you’re told that Oakmont doesn’t show up on any map of the area, which complicated federal aid. Like, that right there is the sort of thing Lovecraft would write: it leaves a lot of possible explanations, and none of them make sense.

Upon reaching Oakmont, Reed immediately shows you the ropes when it comes to detective work. In order to get the information you need, you’ll have to do a lot of favours, and the first one is to find an ape-man’s missing ape-son. Yeah, you immediately get involved in a race war between fish fuckers and ape fuckers, and I’m not even exaggerating.

Apparently, Reed has magical murder-solving powers that you learn about. It’s so fucked up. You go around gathering evidence, and then you enter an investigation hole to magically piece together the scene. It’s so pointless, and I don’t think Lovecraft ever gave his protagonists super-powers, so we’ve lost some ground here.

THE DUNWICH HORROR

Sinking City is an open-world game, and like everything it does, it is so close to greatness. Oakmont is the most depressing place imaginable. It really captures the bleak inhumanity of the opioid crisis, but I don’t think that was the point. People fight and talk to themselves in the street, and normal-looking people look like they’re in a pretty heavy state of denial. The streets are chaotic, with some being completely collapsed and underwater where you need to navigate them by using a magic boat. It’s broken up into districts, with each of them presenting a different flavor.

It’s impressively big, but The Sinking City is a mid-budget game, and it shows in the way that a lot of stuff repeats itself. Especially interiors. There’s, like, ten different interiors and they’re copy-pasted everywhere with the furniture moved around. It works okay, but it’s extremely noticeable.

What sucks about it is that a bunch of the side-quests just require you to wander about and find items scattered around. The city deserves more. It deserves a reason to get intimate with the streets, not just fast-travel around to touch base and run.

It does serve the detective work pretty well, at least at first. It feels like you need to use your brain to some extent to figure out where to go. However, as you progress, you’ll no doubt realize that the game provides you more information than it lets on which reduces the possibilities and choice. And then it becomes less detective-y and more just using your decoder ring to figure out the episode’s secret password.

Actually, I think there are different investigation difficulty levels, and I can’t remember which one I picked. But just given how information is presented, I think there are only so many ways it can reduce its telegraphing.

Even if it made you use your whole brain, parts of it won’t let you. Some cases require you to go through the paces in order, even if you can discern where it’s going in advance. There was one where a church was mentioned, and there are only two churches in Oakmont: an old church and a new one. So, I could tell just from the dialogue and a flashback which church it was. It felt like a solid lead, but when I went there, nothing happened. I had to stop and look at what the game wanted me to do so I could go step by step to gather a bunch of unnecessary clues. And then, when I returned to the church, the setpiece there had magically appeared, allowing me to progress onward. It sucks. It feels artificial.

FROM BEYOND

The combat in the game is a small bugbear. There are monsters; the Wylebeasts, that you fight rather frequently. They literally infest some parts of town. Killing them kind of just feels like pointless busywork. I’m not saying The Sinking City shouldn’t have monsters – Lovecraft could get pretty descriptive of them – or that it shouldn’t have combat. It would just have been better handled in a more thoughtful way.

Spoiler alert: There’s a part in the game where Reed is framed for murder, and it’s like, do you know how many motherfuckers I’ve buried? Why are you drawing the line at this one, dude? I once killed a guy just because he used a password involving dog abuse, and that sort of thing just brings out my face-killing instinct.

It also brings in scrounging and crafting, and I’m just so sick of this being in everything. I do find it very funny that you make anti-psychotic medicine by combining a coil spring with alcohol. It turns into this little spring, so it seems the cure for insanity is to inject ethanol directly into your bloodstream. Which, I mean, yeah, that would certainly stop those visions. Along with everything else.

Speaking of which, I wish someone would come up with a new way of depicting madness then just having it as a separate health bar. Insanity is a breakdown of a person’s perception of reality, it’s not blurry vision with super-imposed monsters and a drunken camera. The Sinking City does it better than some by adding imaginary monsters that attack you. You can get rid of them by stabbing yourself with a whiskey tube, which I guess is neat. But, really, read The Dreams in the Witch House with a high fever like I did, and you’ll never enjoy insanity effects again.

THE RATS IN THE WALLS

Hold on, I haven’t even talked about the underwater sections yet. Yeah, you go diving in this old free-diving suit that I don’t think ever really existed. As in, it has oxygen tanks rather than having air pumped from the surface, which I don’t think was a thing in the ‘20s. Anyway, the diving sections don’t suck on their own, it’s just that they happen too frequently.

The first time you go down, it’s kind of terrifying because you’re in a big, heavy tin can. You see massive squid-things swimming around, and it’s very isolating. But after, like, five times doing these sequences, they just become routine. Every so often it’s time to give yourself the bends, and you’ve seen it all before.

I get that this is mid-budget, and Frogwares probably wanted to get a lot of bang for its buck, but simply reusing things isn’t the way to do it. It’s less effective every time you go to the well, but worse than that, it cheapens the overall experience. Most people aren’t going to remember the first time they dove into the depths, and it was scary; they’re going to remember there were diving sections that they did a lot, and they were kind of boring. Shorter horror is more effective for this reason. You need to hit the player over the head with a bat and leave while they’re still collecting their marbles.

THE LAST TEST

Open-world horror can work, but you’d need to be really creative to surprise at every turn, and The Sinking City comes so close to pulling it off. Some of the quests manage to get spooky tales in and present interesting characters, but then it throws some monsters at you and makes you search the same warehouses repeatedly to find investigation holes. I believe the problem is that it tries too hard to pack in recognizable mechanics from mainstream games, and that’s a pointless waste. You can’t scare me with a crafting system, so drop it.

Despite everything that The Sinking City gets wrong, it gets a hell of a lot right. The over-arching narrative is kind of bland, but the minute-to-minute writing is well-executed. Oakmont sucks in all the right ways, and you can see the insanity in the eyes of even the most lucid individuals still trapped inside. There are some branching player decisions thrown in, and some of them actually succeed in being morally grey. Also, it lets you shoot some Ku Klux Klan dudes in the face, and that just feels so amazing.

So, ugh, I guess I give The Sinking City a tentative recommendation. Even though it’s needlessly bloated, it’s rarely painful to play. It’s more that the extra fat softens what could have been an impressive physique. I like the game for the most part, but that’s all clouded by disappointment. It could have been great, but the way it reaches for a mainstream audience is just insanity.

6/10

This review was conducted on a PS5 using a digital version of the game. It was paid for by the author.