Sinking Island

Very good, old-fashioned style criminal game from classic author - Benoit Sokal. Multilevel intrigue gives chance to explore the story from few points of view and sometimes you're stucked untill you find some small piece of trop.

Gameplay is clear and classic for point and click type of games, but don't forget to save regularly - game had got some bugs like Norm few times left the view, camera didn't follow - so i stayed not able to do anything but load previous save; few times he disappeared and still was able to take actions like talking with people (only quotes: "Sorry I am distracted...") and again i had to load previous save.

I don't quite agree with game explanation of the crime, for me some aspects are unreasonal, but still.

Despite this, game gave me few hours of nice playing and that's what matters :)

I would love to give this a thumbs up, but it's just not good enough on so many levels. It would be a mixed rating, but Steam only allows positive or negative reviews ... Positive about this game is the case you try to solve, the location, the amount of interactions with objects you have (not too many), the game-play itself (solving mandates, comparing evidence), the graphics and the music and voice actors (although the mouths of the characters were not moving when speaking).

And now the negative things: Usually I love having many places to explore in such a game, but here it gets too annoying because you are stuck in one building with god-knows-how many floors and you basically spend most of the game just walking in between the floors, searching for people to ask the same questions. At one point, I was just following a walkthrough, so I quickly knew where to go. But even then, some interactions don't make a lot of sense, if you do them in another order or, the classic, missed one object and can't move on altough you know everything there is to know. If there were some quick-travel options to specific places, it would have been less annoying and waste less time.

Pros:
- classic Syberia-style Sokal game;
- nice whodunnit plot;
- overall not the worst way to spend your time if you're into mystery/crime games.

Cons:
- classic Syberia-style pixel hunting;
- dated and therefore, em, not the best-looking character models (and the lip sync in Steam version is broken);
- some wtf stereotyping (slutty Slav, beautiful mute savage);
- if you know Italian, you'll probably be constantly annoyed by the awful mispronunciation of "Battaglieri" (if you know French, then "Hubert de Nolent" might also irk you, but I don't, so it wasn't so bad for me).

Overall — well, I knew what I was signing up for when I decided to play an old Sokal game, and because of that I'm not disappointed. It has aged worse than Syberia, though.

Here's the guide that helped me fix the lip sync: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=866909648

Another puzzle/adventure game I enjoyed. Lots of talking to other people needed, you have to keep going back to people after speaking to someone as new lines of questioning come up, and you have to do a lot of walking around the hotel to get to them.

Another tedious game from Benoit Sokal (of Kate Wallllker fame). I know I'm in the minority, but after recently replaying Syberia 1 and 2, I found them boring this time around. I know I know! Just being honest. The idea of chasing around an emotionally empty woman who is chasing around a dimwitted manchild who is chasing around a mammoth just doesn't tickle my fancy anymore. But I do recognize the game's value in the world of adventure gaming. That said, as an avid adventure gamer, this one looked interesting. And the story IS interesting at times, though long stretches of nothingness and redundant dialogue shot that to pieces. There are some bizarre overlaps with Syberia in little ways. For some reason Sokal always has native people calling non-natives by their full names. Hello KateWalker. Hello JackNorm. Why? No native person in this century is doing that! This guy has watched too many spaghetti westerns I think. I guess Sokal is somehow fascinated with the clash of cultures between natives and evil corporate capitalists destroying their environment and way of life. Unfortunately, it does seem this storyline is a bit dated. Seems like most natives would be happy not to have to whittle a harpoon to get dinner. But I digress.

First of all, the translations are HORRIBLE. I have no idea why the actors (American all of them) didn't speak up in the voice recording booth. You want me to say WHAT? Who talks like that? No one! The evidence you collect is also poorly translated. It made me wonder if the writing could even be understood in the original French. That's how cumbersome it was. I lost count of how many times I shouted at the screen, "what the hell are you TALKING ABOUT?" It made deciphering the meaning of evidence and interviews very difficult at times. This is a detective story that needs a detective to figure out what people are saying.

Direct quotes include "rocking the dinosaur boat to avoid bad surprises," Jones didn't support him after seeing him come out as major in his Harvard promotion." Seriously, WHAT?! American markets are extremely lucrative. The least they could have done was go beyond Google translate and actually hire someone to translate this properly. The game is unintelligible!

In addition to the lack of coherence in dialogue, you also have some kind of time limit thing going on in the game. You spend most of the game asking the same questions over and over but getting different answers if the game has decided enough time has passed. It's not some interrogation technique type thing. It's just the way the game is set up. From the beginning you ask everyone if they have ever seen the victim wearing a gold chain. They all say the have no information on the chain or whether he was wearing it even though every photo of the victim shows him wearing the chain. Later, after you've solved a few objectives, they all agree that it absolutely was his chain. It makes no sense! Then you keep asking the same people the same questions over and over and even they start to get annoyed like why do you keep asking me this? It's just laziness. The developers didn't want to take the time to tailor the questions for specific characters so they have our hero asking everyone everything. It's tedious and there's no way to skip certain lines in a dialogue section. You either skip all of it or none of it. When are these gamemakers ever going to realize that most adventure gamers aren't interested in listening to the same long drawn out questions asked over and over with no way to skip them?

The characters are universally unlikable and some are downright offensive in their lack of charisma. How many times can we listen to our hero detective ask people in a lame attempt at humor, "so what's on the menu tonight? A tower in the middle of an island? That's madness!" Madness? I can think of a lot of things a tower on an island is, but madness isn't one of them. It's tedious to the extreme. So are the long periods of running at a very slow pace to get from one side of the island to the other. You have a hotel tower as your main setting and the vast majority of the place is non-interactive. It's only there as window dressing. The hotel has 22 floors and only maybe 5 or 6 are actually usable. Even those only have one or two hotspots in them. Wouldn't be so bad if the place wasn't so huge. You have tons of pointless lounges and stairwells and tables and chairs that are good for absolutely nothing. There is no map and no way to speed things up. Some games will let you double click to get somewhere faster. Not Mr Sokal and his arrogant artistic design team. (I spent hours drawing this and by God, they're going to look at every inch of it!) And just for the hell of it, they decided to slow down getting from one place to another toward the end of the game. They break the elevators so we have to run up and down several flights of stairs to question people. Not even funny. This game quickly becomes more of a hidden object game than any kind of puzzle game of skill just because there's so little to interact with. Its like a giant version of Where's Waldo, but less of a payoff.

Another stupid thing that is actually pretty funny is that the same questions are asked of everyone regardless if they make sense. Our hero asks everyone if they know anything about medicine because he needs to find out the cause of death and he apparently doesn't want to wait for the medical examiner. "Do you know anything about medicine? Um no, I told you I was an architect. Then you can't help me, he says angrily." I don't know if it's just lazy game design or they were trying to throw in red herrings. After the 10th time of people saying no to our questions, you get the feeling you are being taken for a ride. It reminded me of Broken Sword where George would show everyone things in his inventory. "Hey what do you think of my screwdriver? Ever seen one like this before?" In that case it was funny and was meant to be. In this case, it's boring and tiresome. You keep hearing the same questions over and over asked the exact same way regardless if they make sense or not. You will have someone tell a long story about a guy named Paul and then our hero's next question will be, "do you know someone named Paul?" It's like, how lazy can you be Benoit?

And the voice acting is atrocious. The lead actor is the worst because he doesn't seem to realize that he's meant to sound human, not like he's auditioning for Moviefone. He is the worst and the game feels long because of him. Get the hook!

None of the characters move their mouths when they talk. They are all ventriloquists. However, they all gesticulate wildly with their arms whether they're talking or not. It's actually pretty funny. Just standing there gesturing crazily as you stare out the window. The guy used in the picture for the game looks absolutely nothing like anyone that's actually in the game. And then there's our murder victim: Walter Jones. First of all, he looks like a low rent mobster's sidekick you would see in a Broken Sword type game. Morbidly obese with a sullen sneer and always wearing sunglasses and a gold chain. He literally looks like a cartoony Sopranos reject, and not even a main character either. Just some forgettable slug who grunts unintelligibly and is waiting to be told who to beat up next.

Bottom line: there's far too much running around and doubling and tripling back, far too much pixel hunting in vast landscapes that are way too bleak and drab. At first it's exciting because you think, wow this game is huge. So much to explore! But you are quickly brought back down to Earth with a resounding thud when you realize that about 95% of it is just window dressing that is basically a giant painting you are running through on your way to go interview another character again for the 20th time. If this game is cheap, I mean somewhere in the $0.99 range, go for it. If not, skip it.

As an avid fan of point-and-click and detective style games, I loved this game! Playing it was incredibly entertaining and satisfying. You play a police inspector who is sent to a remote island to solve the murder of a money-hungry, ruthless mogul. Your job is to question all of the island's inhabitants, explore various locations, and find clues that will help you deduce the murderer's identity, means, and motive.

The game's best feature is a system which allows you, as the player, to take all the clues (including testimonies, documents, pictures, prints, and materials) and correctly put them together to answer essential questions that will help you solve the case. The game can move at a rather slow pace, especially if you've missed something important which forces you to retrace your steps through various locations. But I never found myself to actually be stuck. I didn't mind going back and re-exploring rooms or talking to the same people again. In fact, oftentimes I would stumble upon the smallest clue that would lead me to new conversation paths with the characters, so every time I had to retrace my steps, I was always learning something new that brought me one step closer to solving the mystery.

This game is not for everyone. It does not hold your hand. It requires patience and diligence. But most old-school adventure gamers will love this style of gameplay. There are two different options to choose from for play style: a "timed" playthrough (where you race against the clock and/or annoy suspects so they won't be willing to help you) and an "adventure" playthrough (you have all the time in the world and can endlessly question your suspects). I recommend the latter for a much more fun and thorough experience.

I bought Sinking Island in late 2020 more or less on a whim, without doing any research on it and without knowing what to expect. This year, I have played and enjoyed the much more well-known Syberia series, but was a little skeptical here due to the mixed reviews and the 2007 release date.

I am happy to report that I loved this game. In fact, I ended up staying up until about 4:30 AM on a Saturday night to play it, and I plowed through the entire thing from start to finish in a single sitting. I was not expecting it to get so hooked; I booted it up around 7:30 thinking "hmm, let me dip into this for an hour or so to see what this is about", and I didn't get up again until the credits had rolled.

Sinking Island is a pure detective game with a mystery that could be taken out of an Agatha Christie novel. You play as a police detective who visits a remote tropical island where an obese octogenarian billionaire businessman has been building a massive and ostentatious luxury hotel - the very same businessman whose corpse has just been discovered rotting at the bottom of a rocky seaside cliff. There are ten suspects on the island - a shifty lawyer, a young architect, the deceased's three adult grandchildren and their significant others, and two local natives, and the rest of the game is spent wandering around, asking questions, finding clues, and trying to figure out whodunit. Meanwhile, a growing monsoon rages outside, and the slowly rising water level threatens to destroy the island and everything on it.

Sinking Island uses a fairly unique system for your investigation. You do have a regular inventory, and you will run across a handful of basic inventory puzzles as you play through the game. Everything else - clues you pick up, any important testimony, any photos you take, goes into an "evidence" inventory. Your AI assistant will ask you a question, like "Who was present at the scene of the crime?", and there will be a progress bar for the question. When you collect enough evidence to fill the bar, you must select all evidence you have found that answers the question, and the investigation will proceed. When you answer all nine main questions, you will have found your culprit.

If you are unfamiliar with B. Sokal, this game's creator, it is hard to describe the lovely, lonely atmosphere that defines his games. In Sinking Island, we begin our investigation on a large island. Hotspots are sparse, and there are dozens of screens that serve no gameplay function other than to look nice and add to the atmosphere. The art is extremely memorable, both outside, with richly detailed palm trees whipping against a rainy red sky as a Gothic skyscraper of a hotel rises in the background, and inside, with dim lighting and slowly cracking walls and floors casting a pallor on the empty gilded corridors.

Sinking island isn't a perfect game, and there are some negatives. There is a lot of running back and forth and backtracking. I don't mind this too much, and I think this is partly by design, as this same trick is used in all of the Syberia games, and it does help in evoking a certain feel to the gameplay. Also, I will add, that as the story progresses and as the water level rises, the areas you have available to you will shrink considerably as your investigation centers on smaller and smaller areas.

There's a few minor technical issues; in the build I played, there was no lip sync during the interrogations. I believe there may be a fix for this on the forums, but it did not bother me. I also saw people complaining about a bug that turns off the game after one hour which has since been fixed; I did not experience that issue.

Additionally, there are a few missteps that I think might put people off their investigations. First, there is a major difficulty spike just after the first tutorial - the first major question the game asks you to tackle is one of the most complicated in the whole game. I advise sticking through that, as the game gets a lot easier once that is out of the way - except for a handful of truly obscene pixel hunts which could derail your investigation. I did 95% of the game on my own, but did dip into a walkthrough a few times to help me locate an object I had just plain missed.

Overall, however, I would advise you to consider picking this one up if you are on the fence, and giving it a shot. It frequently goes on sale at a deep discount, and it is one of the most pleasant gaming surprises I have had in quite a while.

Once again, we need a new choice for reviews. Thumbs up, thumbs down, and eh. You play as Jack Norm, an inspector called in to investigate the death of Walter Jones. Preliminary analysis shows that Mr. Jones may have died from a accidental fall, but if that were true, there wouldn't be a game about it, would there?

Pros:
Simple controls
Descent graphics (for the day)
Voice acting of okay
Good animations
A Non-linear feel
Large cast of suspects

Cons:
Pixel hunting
Too many interruptions
Too much walking back and forth
Repetitive dialog
Characters don't move their mouths when speaking
You don't get to name the murderer
Pixel hunting

Did I mention pixel hunting? Good God, this game takes pixel hunting to a new level and I despise pixel hunting. Especially with a third person view and fixed scenery. You have to be very careful to go over every inch of screen every time you enter a scene, whether or not you've been there before because there is a time or two where someone has hidden or dropped something. The bad thing is, you have no idea if there's anything new.

Other than the pixel hunting, another thing that really irritated me is at some points in the game, your character's wife will call and she sounds like a hen on crack. When this happens, and it will more than once, Jack will go to his room to finish the call. What the hell for? Now you have to back track to where you were before, adding to the back and forth bullsh*t. If it's not Jack's annoying wife, it's his stomach. You have to eat at regular intervals, once again, adding to the back and forth bullsh*t. Why not make it realistic and have him take a crap too?

If you take away the enormous amounts of pixel hunting and the hen on crack, this is a decent game. Most (although not all) of the clues make sense, a mystery unfolds as you play the game, and you have a large cast of suspects that have a motive for doing the old guy in. Although I'll have to confess, I was a little disappointed in the ending. I was expecting to name the murderer from a list of likely suspects but alas, the game does it for you.

At the time of the review, Sinking Island was selling for $7.99. This game will take you awhile to finish this game but it's an older game released in 2007. I got it one sale for $2 so it was well worth it despite all of the damn pixel hunting.

It's a shame. This game has so much going for it!

First, the art design is brilliant. Palm trees wave lazily in the breeze. The art deco hotel is stylish, sprawling, and gorgeous. Characters are distinctive without being cartoonish. The island is huge, and despite an oversized and largely empty environment, the lush atmosphere makes wandering around a pleasure.

Second, the story is interesting and well constructed. There are ten major characters to interact with, all well differentiated with clear motivations and relationships. (I find that whodunits sometimes suffer from "list of names syndrome", where it's hard to remember who everybody is. Not here.) The immediate interpretation of events becomes less clear as new evidence emerges. Everyone has sensible things to say when asked about their perspectives ... but who is lying?

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the detective mechanics are excellent. Physical clues, documents, and important conversational topics are all stored in a "thought cabinet", and must be assembled correctly to unlock a dozen major conceptual "puzzle pieces" over the course of the game to solve the mystery. I was really looking forward to this.

Sounds great, right?

Sadly, the wonderful game content is trapped behind the absolute worst possible example of old school point and click design. Gathering clues and even navigating the environment requires bottom of the barrel "pixel hunting" with no visual cues.

Let me say that again. You are expected to click on things you cannot see.

Paths to other areas exist where no path is visually evident. Some doors only exist off-camera, requiring nonsensical clicks for the main character to see what is in front of his face. Vital clues are hidden under blank patches of sand. You are required to comb your mouse cursor over every millimeter of screen space over literally dozens of empty rooms. On top of this, interactive areas are maddeningly small. Even areas I thought I checked turned out to have tiny pixels I missed by not zeroing in closely enough on a space with absolutely no visual interest. It took a walkthrough to find three or four of these literally invisible hotspots before I decided there was no longer any point in trying.

Horribly, all it would take to make this game near-perfect would be a hotkey to highlight interactive spots, as many adventure games have nowadays. Countless hours of meaningless mouse cursor combing could be done away with; clues and portals would be findable and the player could get back to the business of making sense of the intriguing mystery surrounding a tyrant's death. Instead, the challenge here is an excruciating test of patience in finding the game at all.

The game is frustrating.

You are in a huge mansion with a beach on the front and there is no fast travel, there is no map that you can see where you are. You have to walk everywhere, and it is incredibly slow. Most of the time you have no clue what you are looking for, who you need to talk to or where you need to go. You just have to guess and walk all around the mansion hoping you come across someone (people also change locations in the mansion occasionally so it makes it more frustrating). Camera angles change all the time and make you lose your way. One minute you see your character from the right side then from the back etc (some games make this in the right way btw). Just because you do not see where you go, I discovered a balcony after 4 hours of play, it was so ridiculously placed.

Mouths do not move. Like it's been made in 1998, not in 2007.

Dialogues are all the same. You ask the same questions literally word by word to everyone and there is no skip button. Incredibly boring.

Like those are not enough, at the beginning of the Day 3 my character disappeared. Yes, it vanished from the screen. I can talk to people who are in the same place with me right now but I can't move to another place. I restarted the day, loaded from a different slot but it didn't reappear again. At the end of 8 hours of strugglling I can't even finish the game.

They did absolutely nothing to make things easier for the gamers. If you don't know how videogames work, just don't develop them.

Do not buy this, it is not worth neither your money nor your time.

Edit: After many trials I managed to fix the bug by chance.

Interesting characters/suspects, cool art deco tower and gorgeous landscapes/scenery, a fitting noir soundtrack, and a very good case to solve with twists and turns to keep you engaged in the narrative and motivated to find the murderer. The lead detective was a phenomenally friendly and likable dude. I really enjoyed that you could hear the opinions of each person on almost every little piece of evidence or query. I also really loved the whole concept of "timing" the investigation. It really brings a realistic edge to the case, pushing you to work fast and get things done right. As a massive point & click mystery game buff, this was a refreshing thing to experience.

Getting around and understanding the PPA interface can be hard to get down at first, but be patient with it -- the story is totally worth your labored efforts.

PS - The mouths aren't animated due to some Steam issue, and that really bothered me (the staring eyes were too haunting, hahah). Fortunately, a kind fellow shared the missing .dll file on the guides section for the game. I downloaded this and it worked seamlessly!

ALSO! If you right click, you can skip the dialogue with any character. It will still catalogue your conversations in the PPA. I don't think it works on the cutscenes or calls that Jack gets, though.

I am drawn to any game that boasts a noir-style detective narrative, and when I saw that Benoit Sokal was the one behind the beautiful Art Deco environment, I just knew this game couldn’t fail. But…it did. In Sokal’s defense, the backgrounds are gorgeous and the story—even the dialogue—is everything you’d expect from a crime novel. But what made Syberia so special for me was the enchanting atmosphere and memorable characters. Sinking Island, unfortunately, had neither. It had matured to a gritty crime drama with a gilded backdrop, but lacked the depth, charm, and humor of Sokal’s first games such that you are left with mundane narrative and cold, disorienting environments.

While beautiful, the Art Deco building seemed somehow out of place, and, despite the daunting number of scenes you had to walk through over and over and over, there was just one building and it all looked pretty much the same. Beautiful! But monotonous. The transitions themselves were also confusing and tedious (and glitchy). To be honest, I really came to hate the building and all the stairs that had to be climbed so that, unlike other games, I wasn’t excited about entering new rooms. Rather, I was relieved when the number of environs started shrinking.

Others have mentioned that the mouths of the characters don’t move. You get used to it, I suppose, but it does feel very strange when most of the game (if you aren’t trekking across the beach again) is staring at people’s faces. The characters themselves are almost entirely unlikable.

The most novel and fascinating aspect of the game is the clue collection device. It did make cross-referencing notes extremely convenient, but even it seemed like a good idea that didn’t quite go far enough. A true murder board could have had a character relationship tree and a timeline to fill in. A map would have been nice too. I ended up referencing my hand-written notes far more often. But that was how much of the game felt: someone had a great idea and a great story, but the programmers just couldn’t pull it off, so the environs feel wasteful, the characters feel bland, and the progression is unmotivating.

I hate to be so critical of a game I really intended to love, but I do kind of feel that if you just download some backgrounds you’ll be getting the best part of the game.

Recommended for fans of the genre. Not for the typical gamer.

This is a murder mystery game. The story is quite good, and the solution is revealed step by step. You won't guess it right away.

Positive points:
+ Good story. Actually quite sophisticated and nuanced
+ Everything is voice acted, and the voice acting is pretty good
+ Different and unique kind of game. You won't find something exactly like this
+ Great mood due to artistic visuals and music
+ Cool game mechanic where you have to put together clues to solve subplots
+ I really like the end sequence where the crime is being wrapped up

Negative points:
- You walk around a lot. Some people will hate that
- You basically ask every single witness/suspect about every single thing you discover. Some people will also hate that
- A bit old, so it doesn't look like a really cool modern 3D game. Some people will also hate that.
- One or two times I simply couldn't find a missing clue because I had to notice a very small clickable area somewhere

But if you are OK with the negative points and really just want a great crime story, this might be a game for you.
It took me 10 hours to complete. I think I was a little bit fast, but I would say the game will take 8-14 hours for most players.

As a detective game, it fails in the most important aspect of that genre: Logic and puzzle solving. This review is a long rant just about that, nothing else.

At first, I very much liked that you can ask anybody about almost anything, and gathering much information even before you know you need it. However, this leads to some problems, because - given that design - the dialogues, and their logging as usable hints, and their value as hints have to be thoroughly checked for consistency to avoid the following situations:

- You can get the same story from several different people, however the games wants you to pick a specific statement of a certain witness as the relevant cue in the formal puzzle soving part, though multiple ones are logically valid. That means, you either have to check every possible combination of cues hoping its the ones the game expects, or look it up in a walkthrough. Even sometimes the information you get told isnt logged / available as cue for the formal puzzle solving part though it is identical to what other witnesses said. An exact copy but cant be used as such. That means, valid information cannot be used, because the game does not accept them all, just a special subset and number of them. Seems to me like the programmers / designers filled holes in the dialogues by other dialogues, making them copies but not acepting these copies as valid in the puzzle solving. I have made the exact answer to some puzzles, but using some of the other redundant cues and not the ones which are (invisibly) formally defined as the vital ones.

- Filling dialogue holes with valid information leads to an even stronger problem: Sometimes it is the less informing cue you have to choose in the puzzle solving part. For example, for a certain puzzle, two statements were given by the same person [maybe its due to a translation mistake in the german version, however, I translate back into Englisch, but dont know what the exact english phrasing in the game is] :
1. Generally, he wears his necklace at all times.
2. I remember him wearing his necklace that evening.
So which one is the more informative if you need to know if he was wearing his necklace on that evening? Well, according to the game you have to choose the less specific version 1 to solve the puzzle... seems like the dialogue hole unfortunately wasn't filled with something irrelevant, but with something more relevant than what they thought it should be.

- Sometimes, these presumbly filled dialogues lead to situations where a witness / suspect contradicts himself very bizarre. Again, it is about the necklace again, an happened within seconds in the same interrogation:
Q: Did you remember him wearing the necklace that evening? A: No.
Q: What happened to the necklace? A: I took it from his neck that evening.
Alright, have fun now with figuring out how to solve a puzzle with this. In that subpuzzle, you have to pick that he took the necklace from him, along with several other persons that told you that he is normally wearing his necklace (but only the general phrase, not the specific one for that evening which one of them gives).
So, to "solve" the puzzle, you have to ignore that suspect x cannot remember if he was wearing the necklace as well as that he remembers taking it from his neck, and you choose the latter option (taking it from him), and you have to additionally add as cue his fingerprint on the necklace (which would be alone enough to answer the question the puzlle wants you to solve).

- To make this all worse, there is bar that tells you if you have all the information needed. However, it isnt correct. I had a full bar, meaning I should have all information, and was trying out all the possible combination in the hope to find the one that the game expects from me. After having fiddled a long time, I gave up and looked it up in a walkthrough. Guess what: I was still missing a cue. Thank you very, you fucking game, you are telling me that I have all the cues I need, but you won't let me solve the puzzle because I am missing a cue. Perfect. You took the piss out of me another time.

Concluding, there is both reduncacy as well as contradiction in what you are told (resulting from presumaby filled dialogue holes and dirty programming), but absolutely no exchangeable cues, no mercy, no nothing when you have to choose the one and only exact hints to solve the puzzle part. All of the hints are identical screws, but only some of them fit. The game wants you to be exakt when it itself is fuzzy as hell.

Great design idea, but pretty much messed up by quick and dirty writing of the dialogues.

If you are an old school adventurer (like me) you will like this game. Not only has it got good voice acting and actual dialogue that isnt vulgare or cheezy (like many games are turning today) but it also has got superb artstyle, made by Benoit Sokal. We all know what that means, right? Yes, the legendary artist behind Syberia 1 and 2, Paradise ++

It's a different game.. and is not for someone who is impatient seeking realtime action and used to hack and slash..
This game is for people who like to click about and follow a story and admire the art, sipping to ones hot drink in peace and without fear of a jumpscare around the corners.

This is my second time I buy it. I bought it many years ago too. -This time I buy it for collecting reason. (and of course I will play it again). It is hard to get nice old games like this...


-Oldschool game collector, fan of B. Sokal.

There were parts of this game that were really great: artwork, multiple twisting stories, characters with flaws. But there was so much that made the game difficult to stick with. The mouths that didn't move during questioning wouldn't seem like a big deal, but it gets really annoying. The English voice actors seemed pretty good, but they were definately reading an awkwardly translated script verbatim, very odd sounding. That damn clue/solution/mandate system...so painful. Also, there were a couple of rooms/areas that were extremely difficult to find, and I don't think they were meant to be. I would give the game a 6 out of 10, but I can't say I would recommend it.

[NOTE: Don't be mislead by the amount of time Steam says that I spent playing this game...I work long hours and often fell asleep with it running. There's no telling how long it *actually* took me to finish.]

THIS was a good detective game. Very involved, complex, but not to the point of confusing.

I loved that the characters each had unique, developing personalities and opinions on freakin everything. And the player character, Inspector Jack Norm, was refreshingly friendly and spirited, instead of the smug, jumping-to-accusations sort of detective that are so common in pop culture these days.

Only real annoyance in the game: getting around.
Moving about the island and the tower seems to take forever as the player has to click across one screen after another to get anywhere. You've got to have a little bit of patience for that.

Fortunatley, the detailed scenery is non-stop breathtaking, so even that isn't so bad.
(Kudos to the talented artists and designers behind the game. You guys really did your homework with all that Art-Deco architecture.)

In short: Great mystery game. Buy it, savor it. Look everywhere, touch everything, talk to everyone. Twice.

....The ending cracked me up though.
"What's going on, Norm?"
*turns around*
Oh hey huge sudden group of people.

I liked this game very much. As usual, Benoît Sokal's backgrounds are breathtaking and the scenario complicated (in the good sense). If you don't mind walking back and fro among the island, then in the gigantic hotel looking for clues, this is for you. The story is quite detective-style, a lot like the Sherlock Holmes games, with the same qualities and the same flaws.

Unfortunately, in this kind of game, I find the conclusive clues very subjective: you might think that a broken chain is a proof but the game decides that it's the picture of the missing link that is decisive. So succeeding to the next chapter is, sometimes, pure hell (excuse my french). One might prefer to look at a walkthrough instead of constantly changing your conclusions, blindly, hoping for the best.

Beside that little inconvenient, the game is still quite addicting, with no bugs at all, and I got the chance to buy it at 2,19 CND$.

I recommend it highly.

Sinking Island gets the mechanics of a detective story right, offering you a fairly robust set of investigative tools which allow you to piece together clues and keep track of suspects with a great deal of freedom, but it botches the one thing that ANY whodunnit requires: a good mystery. The writing in Sinking Island is abysmal, poorly translated from its native language which robs it of any nuance and delivered stiffly by actors who don't even attempt to make it sound natural. What's the point of playing an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery when the writing and acting isn't being competently presented in the slightest?

I bought this game after the 1 hour bug had been fixed, and everything else seems to work as it should.
As a fan of this type of adventure game, I thoroughly enjoyed playing sinking island. The scenery is beautiful and the storyline kept me interested right until the end. The use of a special police computer system, used to track where suspects are on the island and collect evidence among other things, was an interesting idea and set the game apart from similar games in the genre.
I only encountered two points in this game which detracted from the enjoyment. The first was that none of the characters are programmed to move their lips when speaking. This leads to a quite comical scenario involving audio playing over an animation of the characters gesturing wildly, which can be a little distracting.
The second point I disliked was the phone you carry with you, which rings at seemingly random moments, causing you to go back to your room and have a conversation. Moments of frustration happened at times, as I was just about to solve a puzzle and -ring ring- got teleported six floors below to listen to a phone call and then walk all the way back up.
Despite a couple of problems however, this was an overall enjoyable game and well worth the money.

This game is, in my opinion, extremely underrated. The atmosphere is absolutely amazing and playing it can feel oddly like taking an actual vacation. The story is solid. Making progress in a few of the later "key question" resolutions is the most troubling point worth mentioning -- one of these in particular requires an extremely counterintuitive selection of evidence to move the story forward. However, this comes late enough in the game that only players who are enjoying themselves enough to forgive it are likely to hit it in the first place.

It must be mentioned that this exact version, newly released on Steam, seems to suffer from some puzzling new bugs. The most problematic (the one hour crash) seems to have been fixed, which is great. However, lip syncing still seems to be conspicuously absent. I have an older version of the game installed on my PC simultaneous with the new Steam version, and the older version manages both of these points just fine. I'm unclear on how or why these things ended up broken. Assuming they're all fixed as quickly as the first bug was, this game will be perfect for fans of the adventure game genre.