The Sinking City

My wife and I finished playing The Sinking City on switch a couple of weeks ago, and I have some thoughts. We 100%'d it (as much as possible - I'll explain later what that means), so I'll be going into some detail here!

Warning: Some spoilers ahead! Spoiler averse people should just skip to the end for a microsummary

We've played a few other Frogwares games, specifically 3 different Sherlock Holmes games. We treat them as a sort of pass-the-controller co-op experience, and they've been very enjoyable this way. In fact, I'd say it's one of the most consistent things in our video game history - every few years, it's time to play another Frogwares game! 

So obviously, we clearly enjoy them. But also, they are Frogwares games. That means they're kind of janky, kind of annoying at times, and occasionally very obtuse. It's one of those things that you Just Get Used To. Generally speaking, the writing and uniqueness of the scenarios makes up for the weirdness of the games.

This is a Frogwares game in every aspect - good writing, good voice acting, pretty janky, kind of hard to recommend. But it hits a very specific note for me, since it's a very direct HP Lovecraft homage rather than being simply a detective story. 

The main character is Charles Reed (don't call him Charlie), a detective from Boston who has been drawn to Oakmont Massachusetts by strange dreams and a series of disappearances. Oakmont isn't found on any map and, recently, it's been isolated even further from the outside world by a huge flood that has made most of the streets unusable except by boat. 

It's a pretty nasty place. 

The game itself is kind of a detective game, kind of a survival horror game. Generally, the flow is to get to a location, clear it of enemies (if there are any), then look for clues. Once all the clues are found, Charles goes into a sort of hallucinatory state where he views pieces of the past and assembles them into the right order to determine what the heck happened. This usually points to the next location. 

There are some pitstops along the way, including researching in various archives, infested zones full of enemies, and a load of sidequests. It's also important to keep an eye on resources such as ammo and health kits, and craft new ones when necessary. 

It's also sort of an open world game, which means wandering about and getting into trouble at times. But usually it just means having to walk a long way to get somewhere, and finding all of the quick travel spots as early as possible. Given that fighting enemies is almost always a drain on resources (even if there are nearby supply caches), it's best to beeline from point to point rather than get distracted.

If it sounds repetitive, that's because it is. It's actually very repetitive. The clue-finding segments are pretty much just vacuuming up everything that has a white dot on it, the hallucinations of the past are extremely easy to line up in the right order, and resource management becomes almost trivial if one pays attention to it. The combat is pretty bad, but luckily playing it on easy minimizes the amount of resources used and time spent on it.

So why the heck did we 100% this game? Well, it turns out that good writing and good atmosphere can carry a pretty mediocre game a looooong way. 

The game is split up into a number of main cases, each of which follows a murder, disappearance, strange event, or a goal that Charlie personally has. These cases are fantastic short stories, each giving a deeper insight into the town of Oakmont, its residents, its weirdo politics, and more. 

For example, the first story has you finding the son of a local aristocrat. The local aristocrat just so happens to look tremendously like a gorilla and a human had a baby - this is never fully explained, but is a very clear reference to Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family by Lovecraft (which isn't a very good story and is pretty racist). The son ends up being dead - he lost his mind on an expedition arranged by his own father to investigate the sudden flood, and was murdered by one of his crewmates. 

And it's actually pretty sad!! Like, don't get me wrong - aristocrats suck shit, this guy especially. But to see his grief at having gotten his own (and only) son killed is actually very striking. 

And it gets weirder! You continue working for this man and after finishing a few more missions, you end up in his mansion. And in the center of the main room, totally uncommented upon, is a life-sized recreation of his dead son lying on the table. Made of cake. 

And people are eating the cake.

And nobody talks about it. 

It rules! 

And almost all of the main cases and side cases are like this. The side cases in particular are basically lovecraftian microfiction told through notes and flashbacks.

Like the guy who hears a voice coming from his drain, calling him down, so he chops himself into pieces and shoves them all down the drain one by one. You find legs and arms but very conspicuously, no head. 

Or the restaurant owner who is clearly cutting up poor people and feeding them to the rich. He finds a strange creature in his basement and starts treating it like a diner, feeding it people until eventually it binds all the corpses together into a super monster and eats him instead.

It rules! 

It's also got a very clear undertone of class consciousness and anti-racism in it - see above, and also all the KKK dudes I shot dead. There's also a huge tension between the Oakmont folks and the "Innsmouthers", people who basically look like half-fish. It's clear that people are discrimninating against them, and multiple times throughout the story you get the chance to help them out, cover for them, and generally be Not A Dick.

I also love how despite everything going on (monsters, floods, murder, mysterious rocks suddenly appearing, contagious madness, etc.), the citizens continue living their lives to the best of their ability. The newspaper keeps printing, people wander the streets playing harmonica, the librarian (whose mouth is sewn shut (don't ask)) keeps...librarying, the cops keep being assholes in league with the KKK...life goes on. It's such a great answer to the question of "if so much bad shit happens, why don't you just move?" Well, I built a a whole dang life here! I'm gonna keep living it until I physically cannot.

It's also quite funny at times - Reed has a very, very dry sense of humor, and while he's not totally immune to the goings on around him, he certainly takes it all with a grain of salt. And if you complete certain side quests, you can get some wacky costumes, like this:

Overall, the game is unabashedly weird and part of the reason I think it works pretty well is because the structure of the game is actually quite boring. That boring, repetitive undertone (which probably unintentional) actually makes the weird stuff more striking. It's a neat contrast and, while I don't think it was totally successful, is pretty unique in video games. 

The Sinking City is not a masterpiece by any means. In fact, there's an entire questline that simply never showed up in our playthrough - and it's not one of those things you can miss. It just never triggered. The framerate is often very bad on Switch as well, and it can be pretty ugly to look at. And I cannot stress how repetitive it is to actually play - I spent most of my time trying to find ways to speed things up.

But by god, I was absolutely willing to see this game to the end, and I rarely do this. And the end is, honestly, a bit of a let down - but the "filler" that exists in-between is the real star of the show. I'm tremendously glad we did all the side quests in particular because a lot of those micro-stories are really going to stick with me.

Weirdly, I find myself looking at these pictures and missing Oakmont. It's a nasty, frustrating, sticky, muddy place full of gross monsters and weirdos who want me dead. And where else in the world would I rather be? 

Is this a game I'd recommend to most people? Probably not. If you're the kind of person who likes a Frogwares game though, and any of the above sounds cool/interesting/weird, I think it's worth a shot. I will absolutely remember this game fondly as a unique, strange, occasionally unsettling experience.

P.S. If you do want to play this game on PC, don't get it on Steam!! Frogwares got screwed by their publisher. Buy it on Gamesplanet instead. All the console stores are fine though.