The Sinking City

It's a nice game, not amazing but it has some good ideas and quests. The gameplay becomes a bit repetitive at times and the characters aren't the most complex, although the branching story is interesting enough to keep you engaged.

Its entertaining, slightly difficult due to the limited resources, but easy enough to where you can still focus on the story.

The Sinking City is the only functional game I gave up on without completing in 2024. The game is somewhat lengthy and it rarely felt like I was making progress even when completing story missions. The 3rd person combat is very bad and over the course of the game I found it easier in most situations to just run away. When it comes to detective work, The Sinking City doesn’t completely hold your hand. However, it does frequently make do busy work like going to the library often to research’s information you found at a location. At the end of day, The Sinking City doesn’t really give enough entertainment back to be worth the 20ish hour time investment.

The Sinking City:

Yes and I’ll play it again lol. Love the vibe of this game. The plot is good, spooky creatures, and decent combat.

Played this on Epic when it got first released. Even though it has some repetitive content from time to time, this is a pretty good adaptation of Lovecraft's work.

I found this very immersive and, until about the 16-hour mark, pretty scary too! I really enjoy Lovecraft-y things and I feel that this did a pretty decent job of bringing that feeling.

So this game, This is definitely a game. jump to the bottom of this if you want a synopsis.

Its very hard to describe sinking city because it honestly feels like a fever dream at some points and i can't for the life of me rap my head around it all. So maybe i should start with the basics and work my way through it all.

the graphics in this game aren't bad but definitely janky at certain points. I've seen alot of people say its punching above its belt line for a double AA game but to be honest its not that good considering it came out in 2019. I'm not saying they're bad but don't listen to people who try and make it a selling point.

The game play itself is nice if not a little simple. very rarely will you have any difficulty with a puzzle or a sequence. the real difficulty comes from trying to get 100% on a crime scene, which is more annoying then fun especially when your searching for something that does nothing. Though the mechanics never got tiring and i always got excited when they were used. When it came to combat and travel, ehhhhhh it can be alot better.

this game is not a horror game in the slightest, its much more of an adventure rpg where you go around solving mysteries and shooting monsters. the guns are nice and they really sound like they can pack a punch which is always fun. I never ran out of ammo at any point in this game so you'll always be using them. The upgrades leave alot to be desired but your melee is a mighty shovel and thats hard to pass up. as for the enemies, they leave a bit to be desired. there are 4 main enemy types and each has 3 different variations. so you're going to be fighting alot of the same thing over and over and over and over again. they aren't very challenging either some just take a few bullets more than the rest, which is fine because you will never run out of ammo.

Travel begins really slow, especially when you have to navigate the flooded districts in the beginning of the game. but the more you explore the more you fast travel from place to place which really speeds the game up. then it kind of suffers from its fast travel, objectives are usually right next to the way points so you can really zip around and miss the things in the city. its also really disoreintating sometimes. but overall i give it a pass. though im still annoyed there is an entire section of the city you just can't access, it looks like it was meant to be a region but they lost the time to do it.

so mechanically its servicible, its nothing i would rant and rave about but it works well enough that you can push through it without alot of resistance.

Now the story.

I won't spoil it but lets just say its a little difficult to understand whats actually happening. If you are someone who plays RPG games and you get upset when the game makes a really dumb situation for the sake of adding more drama to plot so it feels heightened, you are not going to like some of this story. there were a number of times the game forces you to choose between two options that are both just terrible. in fact you wish someone there had a brain cell to realise how bad the decisions are. but it doesn't matter too much because your choices do not affect the world around you. which is another major downside.

though to its credit as weird and as wacky as it is, the story is a perfect representation of lovecraft's works. just remember though lovecraft's work isn't actually very good.

the story works well enough and is super interesting and engaging, to the point where i will even say if you don't know much about the Cthulu mythos or lovecraft's work i still recommend it. its interesting and engaging and you always want to see where it leads. fair warning though it leads down a rather disappointing road.

so final thoughts. do i recommend this game? yeah, i'd say so but only when it was on sale, it is not worth the full price. it took me about 30 hours to complete including all the side quests. the story is pretty good and the game play doesn't hinder it too much to make it a hassle to complete. I bought it for like 11 bucks and it constantly goes on sale, so its well worth it in my opinion. overall 6.5/10 great if you're bored looking for something different to play

Wonderful Lovecraftian romp, thoroughly enjoyed both gameplay and aesthetics. the artbook expanded on the environment.

A very surprising game. Great story and characters. You can almost smell the city through the visuals. Thumbs up.

Before I played this game I had no boobs and a flat butt. Now I've got a fat pair of cheeks and big ol' double D's. Thanks, Frogwares! Also, the game was fun.

You can really feel the stench of rotting fish and the cold and wet of the atmosphere. This game captures the Lovecraft feel!

I liked like it a lot more than I expected. Unique interesting story line. Good dynamics play.

The game is awesome and emersive; they capture the feel of H.P. Lovecraft's books. The game mechanics are good and easy to use. I recommend this to whoever likes H.P. Lovecraft's books.

One of the best Mystery games i played since Call of Cthulhu.
I really enjoyed the atmosphere of it, and the music is peaceful yet terrifying.
10/10 I definitely recommend this game to all Mystery Lovers!

First of all, I mostly enjoyed my time with this game. It's a very fun setting to explore and the writing and voice acting is quite good for the most part. There's also very few bugs, and any glitches are pretty minimal which is rare for an openworld game.
The detective investigation mechanics took a bit getting used to, especially the one where you go to different archives to look up people, locations etc based on keywords in documents you find which at least on medium difficulty aren't highlighted in any way making you have to actually use your brain, but once it clicked I really liked them.

But let's complain a bit.

The first thing to know when buying this is that you do not want the DLC, some of them are basically just pay to win stuff for a singleplayer game, so you're basically paying for cheat codes.
The two that adds in more quests are just kind of lazy with several of the new side-quests just being long fetch-quests. Yes, the writing is good as always, but the time you spend fetching all that stuff for the little extra fleshing out of the lore really isn't worth it.

Like I said, the world is great... in a depressing post-apocalyptic kind of way. Makes you just want to run around and explore... DON'T! This is not a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game, you wont find any exciting stuff while randomly going around. Quests can not be started out of order etc.
Most houses will just be empty and not populated by anything lore/story related until you not only have the right quest going, but have the correct clues for your character to want to go to that location.

So you should pretty much play the game as a linear questing game, not as a sandbox, because it isn't despite its open map.

Another big complaint is the indoor settings, the outdoors are lovingly handcrafted and stuff doesn't ever really repeat. But when you go indoors, even inside key locations, it's all just cut and paste. I think there's maybe ten if not even less indoor layouts. Sure they'll be slightly redecorated from spot to spot, but it gets real samey after a while.
"Let's see what's in here, ah layout number 4, the one with a wooden boat working as a ramp between the main and upper floors."

There's also quite a few anachronisms in the writing. Like for example a person being a voice acting for movies... in 1922...

After a little bit the combat gets really easy. There's not many enemy types and even though some can kick your ass real quick if you let them, they don't really pose much of a threat if you have ammo, and while you can't carry much and have to craft it yourself, only a few hours in you realise that's not really a problem because crafting materials is plentiful and half the enemy types can easily be beaten with your shovel once you level that skill up.

Yes, it's a very negative review but I did enjoy the game, just think I'd enjoyed it even more if some tweaks had been made and I hadn't engaged in all those DLC side-quests.

It a decent enough timesink if you get it on sale. Bonus points for using visual effects nauseating enough to force me to make me take painkillers in real life to play the game.

its a love letter to anyone who loves the Lovecraft mythos. From the deep ones to the cults. Even the side missions.

An extremely fun detective game inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. You'll have to use your brain a bit and look at your map and casebook a lot. The combat leaves much to be desired but it's problems only make the game creepier, much like the first Resident Evil Game.

the 7 hours I put into the game I have genuinely made very little to almost no progress and I still have little to almost no resources because all the enemies are fucking bullet sponges, it's also generally just a huge waste of time because there's not much going on in between stuff the only things you can do is either loot the same looking buildings over and over again because all the buildings practically look the same and the Interiors are practically the same on top of that you could kill everything in the area you'll be running back and suddenly there's five on you and if you don't run you're practically dead because enemies can like three shot you in this game even on normal and it's freaking wild how early on they introduce a really strong enemy that can eat two grenades two Molotov an entire clip from a basic pistol and a full clip from a magnum and it barely dies, like don't get me wrong I like the atmosphere and everything but the game is boring and a big waste of time

Would recommend this game if you are really into the Lovecraft lore. I don't know how others may have experienced it but personally this was a treat both in lore and in the puzzles of the game. The gameplay was a cherry on top. Enjoyed every minute of it as a big Lovecraftian fan!

Why did they put combat in a detective game?

People who plays detective games are looking for puzzles and murder mysteries. Combat only distract the players because they have to manage their health and ammo. Deaths will also set players back from progressing the story.

The first hour of this game, before the game introduces the combat system, is amazing. But the combat is just frustrating and unnecessary.

The Sinking City is a pretty-okay detective game, and a pretty 'meh' Lovecraft story.

It's one of those games whose big perk is being a peek into a genre that doesn't get a lot of attention otherwise; altogether, it's well made enough for what it's trying to do, but the problem is that it doesn't seem like it tries to do much at all. If you want a game that's got an LA Noire thing going on with a Lovecraft setting, go for it. If that kind of detective gameplay isn't something you're into, probably best to avoid it - and if you want to try a detective game, just play LA Noire, because this one doesn't do that type of game justice, really.

Story: Pretty straightforward Lovecraft story - madness, murder, malaise. Keeping most of this to myself because spoilers and because I didn't have much interest in finishing the game. Not a lot of connection with the characters, which makes everything and anything that happens pretty unimpactful.

Combat: Bad. Just, genuinely, pretty bad. In a game about intrigue and the horror of the unseen monsters that tear at the threads of society just beyond its fringes, this game has way too many dang 'shoot me!' monsters in it - monsters which soak up bullets, occasionally hit like a truck, but mostly have really cheeseable mechanics and tedious encounters.

Mechanics: Barebones, but serviceable. However, the game shows its hand too early and immediately dumps some spooky supernatural vision powers on you, which sort of dampens the idea that these powers are something unique or even all that interesting; like, yeah, obviously next to nobody else can do this, but you're given these powers right off the cuff and there's no time for the player to adjust to a sense of normalcy before being doused in insane, supernatural visions...that they can control at any time, and which don't seem to have any negative impact on the player character at all. Same goes for the monsters, too- there's no period of calm before you're immediately dealing with the prospect of taking out a bunch of very obviously horrible unearthly monsters.

Altogether, though- look at other reviews. Check out some gameplay videos. If the game really appeals to you, go for it- but I wouldn't.

The Sinking City is a decent adaptation of Lovecraft’s work, meshing dark themes with a variety of great investigations that culminate into tricky decisions. If the combat was less clunky and the world more polished, it would have beckoned all to its desolate shore.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3366171479

I'm on the final mission of this game after not playing for about two weeks and decided to not finish. This game has a lot of good things to offer: good atmosphere, scary monsters, and definitely has direct ties to Lovecraftian horror. My issue with this game is it's just a lot of running around and trying to find things, but if that's your thing, than this game would be for you. I also didn't love how loot was structured. It either felt like I had way to little to be able to do side missions or was given way more than I would be able to carry.

The Sinking City is the platonic ideal of a AA game: an incredibly ambitious project that punches way above its class and does so quite successfully, but that also feels limited at every turn by its technical and financial constraints, a game smack dab in between the Sherlock Holmes graphical adventures Frogwares had developed up to this point, and a third person shooter with RPG elements, whose enjoyment of will squarely depend on your capacity to keep the forest in focus instead of the janky ass trees that form it.

The game follows the path of Charles Reed, a private investigator who arrives at the city of Oakmont following strange dreams and visions that seem to drive people towards it. Over the course of this investigation, our detective will delve deep into the multiple happenings into this city, battle eldritch horrors beyond comprehension, and resist the madness emanating from its citizens. Why is everyone acting so crazy? What lurks below the city? And why the hell does this town have so many goddamn men's clothing stores?!

tSC is divided into several cases and side quests consisting of a rather straightforward loop: Find clues, find the location these clues point towards, arrive at location, put a cap on some Deep One ass, put everything together, and advance to the next case; all the while navigating the open world-ish city of Oakmont, exploring its fog-ridden streets against a rather limited selection of enemies during combat sections featuring music that is between ethereal and industrial. Yes, this is pretty much Silent Hill 2 At Home with an investigation-oriented gimmick, and trust me when I say this without an inkling of negativity.

The art style is, frankly, quite impressive. While most of it comes from the technical prowess of UE4 like lighting, physics and volumetric fog, the characters and scenery also feature really great looking assets, and this is one of those games that you will just gawk at while going through it. Boats and fish corpses litter the semi flooded streets, people wander the street muttering to themselves and acting crazy, and hey, I'd also be a little nutty if my entire town had only 4 faces to share between all its inhabitants.

Staying true to its source material, Oakmont is a seemingly organic location, but once you start paying attention, its veneer will slowly crack, showing its true, janky self. First of all, the city has not been affected by a flood, but a goddamn Kaiju attack. Cthulhu himself has risen up from the depths and dragged his scaly ballsack all across this city: it's littered by boats straight up yeeted into buildings, cars appear to have suffered horrific accidents in places where they could have never even managed to get up to speed even if they tried, and calling the state of its buildings "squalid" would be making them a kindness. It looks positively post-apocalyptic, and while it's super cool to navigate a location that gives out the feeling of dilapidated, unsettling and hostile that one imagines when reading a Lovecraft book, it's... a bit too much.

Like, at first it will feel creepy and unsettling, but quickly you will realize that no, it's just that the level designer went a little too overboard with the ambiance to the point of caricature. The bartender at the Under the Keel inn will stay there buffing the one spot in his counter, while the floor under him is chock full of seaweed. You'll see people sweeping the floor, in a rainstorm, next to a pile of rotting, half eaten fish. The people in Oakmont might be a touch off the rocker, but I'm sure they at least grasped the essentials of sanitation, or at least they'd keep enough of their sense of smell. It's these incongruous details that will keep breaking the otherwise great immersion, and you will soon be able to see the reason: tSC is a painting made with only half a palette of colors. It's a massive city created on limited assets, and as a result, you're going to see a lot of copy-and-paste design that not only looks off place, but also quite repetitive after a short time.

There's only a handful of interior location plans, shamelessly reused over, and over, and over throughout the investigations. Even major locations like the Throgmorton manor will be reused multiple times, and in most of those locations you will expect to fight the same 3-4 monsters in several waves and configurations.

Combat in tSC will start feeling clunky and dangerous, but soon you will realize you can just peace out of most combat encounters. At the start you will only have a melee attack and a pistol to your name, but as you complete investigations and level up, you will obtain new weapons and improve Charles' abilities, gradually becoming a force to be reckoned with. Fights can easily be cheesed by kiting enemies or stunlocking them, and your main hampering is the very limited ammo count per weapon; but at the same time you can just craft ammo and supplies mid fight. The combat is nothing to write home about and it's quite limited and repetitive, but it's never not satisfying to blast a bunch of Chtonians to kingdom come. Keeping an eye out for lootables is also very important to stay topped on materials, but I rarely felt like I was so short that I had to deliberately go out of my way to scavenge more.

Having said this, you might wonder what the point is in making a massive city if most of it is going to be copy-paste buildings and repetitive combat encounters, right? Credit where credit is due, the streets themselves do feel quite organic and lived-in, but most importantly, unlike games with a purely decorative open world like Cyberpunk or LA Noire, the core of the game's cases will consist on opening your map and manually locating where you must go next. I'd hesitate to call it a "minigame", but it is a little problem solving exercise that you will have to do for practically every objective, multiple times per case. Thankfully you will unlock quick travel points as you explore the city, and navigating it never felt tedious or stretched out for me. Much like the combat, both consulting the corresponding archives to figure out where to go next and actually getting there felt quite satisfying to pull out, despite how straightforward this loop is. The game also features a few gimmicks like visions where you have to put a series of embarrassingly obvious events in order, or dispelling illusory walls with your "inner eye", which are probably the more annoying and dragged out moments in the game, but overall, it wasn't too terrible.

Look, there's something that has to be appreciated about a game that knows its limits and tries to make the best of it. During my playthrough I never encountered any game breaking bugs, or collision issues, only a couple of times enemies spawned either below the floor or above the ceiling, and none of it was game breaking, or resulted in unwinnable situations. It's a game that maybe does 4-5 things, but it makes damn sure it does them well, even throwing little gimmicky flourishes like underwater sections, or letting you travel the debris-chocked flooded streets with a surprisingly solid feeling motorboat. It really feels like Frogwares only delivered the quantity they were confident to deliver with quality, which is something rare to encounter in the current gaming landscape. A bold leap from their previous work, and a landing they could hardly have stuck better, given the circumstances.

The Sinking City is a very solid game that tries to do the best with what it can, and that has the right amount of focus on the right places to deliver a mostly alright experience, As long as you are within this wavelength, that will provide 30-ish quite entertaining hours of content, and while I would not buy this game at full price, I would absolutely recommend experiencing if you can snag it at a 30-50% discount.

7/10.

It took me a few attempts to get into this game, but once I was into it I couldn't get enough of it. The atmosphere of it all, the setting, the aesthetics, everything about it, really appealed to me. It was what drew me in and got me to buy the game in the first place. The city and it's surroundings feels wrong, in the best possible way. It feels like people shouldn't be there, yet they are, and just as stuck as you are, willingly or not.

The story was decent enough to keep me engaged and had enough branches that I'd consider another play through, or two, just to experience new things. The missions and side missions are not always straight forward, but the mechanics of being a psychic detective are utilised well enough that nothing is really too difficult to figure out. Some of the side missions are pretty obscure and I wouldn't have found them without either randomly bumping into the things or looking up a guide for the game.

Combat wasn't a challenge for me. I pretty much only used melee combat and avoided guns.

Overall I'd recommend it if one enjoys eurojank of the good variety. After all, not all eurojank is created equal. I'd compare this type of eurojank to Spiders games, and boy do I ever love Spiders games.

Great game. Story and atmosphere are really well done and I enjoyed the detective work, even if it got a bit repetitive. Graphics range from serviceable to excellent. The combat is pretty basic, but does it's job. I like that most of the encounters are overwhelming to begin with and there's a sense of accomplishment once you get good enough gear to tackle the harder ones. Speaking of combat, some more enemy variety would have been nice, but maybe it's consistent with Lovecraft's writing, I don't know. My only criticism is that the open world could have been a bit more interactive. All up a fun game, especially if you're looking for something a bit weird.

A lot of great lovecraftian stories for you to analyze and use your detective abilities in. Sure, the open world is boring, especially while travelling around from one crime scene to another, but when you get there it is fun. The game really could have used greater enemy variety and more than just one boss. But I really enjoyed piecing together the evidence. The game does not give you any pointers, you have to figure out where to go next by reading clues and archives, which is something you dont see much these days.

Nice atmospheric game. Lovecraftian tale, cant go wrong.

I love this game. It's so engaging. Yeah, at some points it might look repetitive, due to the reuse of assets and some mechanics, but the storytelling makes it feel like watching a movie or Netflix series. I definitely recommend this game.

at first it was a good game and it was really fun to solve cases but after spending some time in the map you'll be exhausted from playing it and you just want to end it.
the story line was good BTW
if you like solving puzzles and investigating it is a good game

Cthulhu has finally awakened forty years after Metallica has called it! The game is solid on its own, but if you enjoy the works of Lovecraft then you are going to enjoy it so much more. The references to the lovecraftian lore enrich the already compelling story line, giving it an extra dimension, allowing any true connoisseur, ponderer of the dark reaches of the universe, the mind and possibly not-so benevolent course of creation to have a thirst for knowledge of the possibilities of the unspeakable, and unknown, quenched.
Good puzzles, meaningful choices in dialogues and somewhat challenging combat included.
As for the horror part - the game isn't really that scary once you get a decent amount of bullets.
Also, not very replayeable.

I would recommend this if you like cryptic, open-world, puzzle solving games. I like the it, but for me, I found it very confusing. It's very big map and the navigating is annoying, but I loved I could put markers on my map, even though I wasn't sure what I was suppose to be doing at those locations. I went to couple different ones, but didn't seem to make any progress at all, even after killing monster and checking everything I could.

I do recommend this, even though at times it felt like it was lagging behind in terms of "fun".

Pros:
Lovecraft art style. So good. This and the main story are what keeps the game going.
Main story. If you know or have played other Lovecraft inspired games, you know what to expect. But there is a reason why people like these.

Cons:
Clunky combat. Third person shooter, without a dodge or parry mechanic, leaving you basically shooting at stuff that shoots back at you and might come to melee you as well. You can only aim and shoot and it "feels" dated. HAVING SAID THAT, I played on a controller and it was perfectly fine.
Side quests take you to, in most instances, reused assets, in a way that once you did a couple you already know where to go, because the "triggers" are in most instances in the exact same place

Overall, I recommend it if you are a Lovecraft fun or want to look for an interesting investigation adventure. At least on a sale.

Way too much walking between objectives but otherwise a decent HP-inspired game. Had travel been compressed it would have been more like CoC, but as it stands this is a little less enjoyable. Solid endings though!

While it suffers from janky animations, occasional stutters, and a repetitiveness in gameplay, this is still a pretty good detective story. The Lovecraftian elements mixed with 1920s American culture make for a really solid combination. The world design is cool, but it's barely interactive, with a lot of repeating NPCs and interiors. Combat is alright, though the enemy encounters does get repetitive, and sometimes they get stuck in the roof of buildings. It's an imperfect game, but it's still enjoyable especially if you're fond of a detective story with Lovecraftian elements. I’d recommend this game, but only when it's on sale.

Only if you love Lovecraft, don't have high standards, and get it on sale.

This game has problems. Seriously...

CONTROLS SUCK: Sidestepping triggers walking. LMB is interaction button. You need to hold LMB down for some time instead of just click-interact. Overall, controls suck.

MAP: is too big and too empty. This game suffers for trying to be what I consider an AC/Deus Ex hybrid: A game that could work as level-based episodic story, set in an open world where there's nothing to do except driving a boat.

The idea and story are good however. Plus, I love Lovecraft, so this one was a nobrainer for me. Still, hope the sequel is much better.

Edit: If you like supernatural detective angle, I suggest you get Murdered: Soul Suspect instead. It's a much better game in every aspect except Lovecraft

TLDR: Actually pretty good, but doesn’t respect your time and filled with frustrating mechanics.

General Thoughts/Overview:
The Sinking City (TSC) is a good game with good ideas that you get frustrated and bored with really fast because it also happens to be designed to be incredibly frustrating and annoying to play.

We are Charles Reed, hardboiled detective with visions of the supernatural. We’ve been drawn to the recently flooded City of Oakmount, to find both the numerous missing people drawn there, and also the source of our visions. Can we unravel the mysterious source, and save our self, the city, and even the world? Or will we end up just another lost soul, swallowed by the rising waters?

Pros:

• Fantastic atmosphere. Oakmount really sells the feeling of a half flooded city. At first glance it looks wonderful and if it had had a little less asset reuse it could have felt the part the whole way through.
  
• The audio. Excellent at building tension and getting the old heart going, combined with decent ambience, it complements the art to lend an eerie feel to the game.
  
• Mostly well thought out and well written. I was always interested to see where quests were leading and wondering how they tied into the world.
  

• TSC doesn’t respect your time. You need to mark almost all way-points yourself. Now, I enjoyed this the first time… But some quests give ten places at once, some go through many locations, all with an extremely limited fast travel system, and a map which only shows the points for your currently selected quest… meaning you have to quest cycle, each time you add a new point, making a mental note to do anything you pass… This map organisation must have taken up a solid hour of my time. If not for free, a skill point cost to automate this could have helped.
  
• This limited fast travel was a killer. Quests can be so far from way-points it felt like they were put there out of spite. I’d have loved it if there were some small unique interactions here and there throughout the city to see as we moved. Results of quests/side quests, unique dialogue or scenes as the story progressed, maybe even foreshadowing... The world, however, felt like they just focused on basic designs then copy pasted to fill miles of corridor. Which is a shame, because what was designed was great… With a bit more care it could have been a journey, an exploration, and not a chore. Instead it felt like a time sink. (To speed things up, hit a manual save and load it, getting you to a travel point, and thus destination, minutes faster.)
  
• Combat is just too simple and easy. Monsters aren’t a threat at any point. If it wasn’t for the music building tension and the need to clear later poi’s, combat would just be another time sink. The guns don’t feel particularly different (except the tommy, which goes ‘brrr’) Infested areas paint a picture of tension and dread, but if you could zoom the camera out and put the benny hill theme on, it would have just been laughable. Charles can run for longer than an Olympic marathon runner without ever losing speed. The number of times I just circled a bus, or a car, or just ignored the mobs and carried on with my shortcut as if it were just another street with an annoying barricade at one end, then turned to look at the pack of creatures running back and forth below me, sometimes stopped by nothing more than a ‘police, do not cross’ stick barricade… It’s laughable. What’s worse is that the guns do almost no damage, but melee interrupts monster attacks. So you have a situation where you’re encouraged to use your spade instead of your shotgun for the vast majority of your fights.
  
• The half arsed crafting and inventory system is also quite heavily responsible for this. Materials are everywhere, you can craft anywhere, and you can only hold a pitiful number of items… What this means in reality is that because combat is melee focused, and materials are plentiful, you end up with a stacked inventory. All this renders most quest rewards pointless. Because apparently I turn down payment when I’ve got all my bullets on me?
  
• It’s also sad that there’s almost nothing to buy. Bullets are meant to be currency, but with no economy it’s irrelevant anyway. No stash in my hotel room for extras, nothing to spend the cash on, no upgrades for my guns, or payment to the proprietor needed? No food or meds or improvements I can give to a faction or a family to help out? No nothing? OK then…
  
• Your choices don’t matter. There’s no impact, no meaning to any of it. In some ways I like that nothing you do really matters, gives you that feeling of being small… But the ‘choices should matter’ part of me just won’t shut up. This is a game where we’re meant to be messing with things we don’t understand as a pivotal point which can swing the very destiny of mankind as a whole… a bit of graffiti here and a line of dialogue there might have made it feel like any of it mattered.
  

• Respect the players time. Basic QoL improvements to show this would be automatically placing case marks on the map, have ALL the case marks visible at once, allowing us to filter to one case, and allow us to teleport FROM anywhere (even if we keep the set places we teleport TO).
  
• Completely remove the crafting, or have it set in specific places/times, and increase the number of the kits and bullets we can carry significantly.
  
[*] Add a hidden points system for the various factions, changing the face of Oakmount and the available quests based on these hidden points. (For example, you side with supernatural? More attacks in places, fewer people on the streets, more empty areas to explore with more bodies. Conversely, you side with the heavily armed groups? Fewer monsters, maybe the odd cleared infested zone. But more checkpoints, possibly the odd random encounter demanding ‘tax’, areas for the locals safer, but more dead innsmouthers in points of interest.)

I liked it at first but I found the story didn't really grip me. No consequences to choices and while solving cases is interesting at first it gets repetitive and boring after a very short time. Combat is also boring and frankly unnecessary

This has been a fun journey, one that I'd definitely recommend, now that you can often grab it for 8-15 quids.
The setting (pulp Cthulhu mythos), the eerie atmosphere, the dark comedy (like a particular cake that shows up in a particular mansion after a vigil), the dialogues, the characters all add up to a very enjoyable CoC experience.
The definite strongpoint of the game are the cases and the decisions you can make. No black and white, no right and wrong, this is a very crooked city with very crooked people all around.
The concept is absolutely smashing it!
Then there is the delivery of all these. Now that's a bit janky, and that's why I recommend it on a sale but not full price.
The game has a single color pattern. Models and animations are lacking. NPCs and sometimes even adversaries are spawning into walls where then they are stuck for an eternity. The combat is a bummer, it's flat and tedious. Traversing the terrain gets real boring real fast.
Now as I said, I very much recommend this journey, because the story and investigations, the atmosphere makes up for all the jankiness; but it1s only fair to say that presentation and gameplay is not its strongsuits.

This is a fine piece of craftsmanship.The atmosphere is in place; it's entertaining but a bit repetative. An OK game from my point of view.

This one is tough. There is so much to like here, but also many glaring issues.

Pros:
- Awesome artstyle
- Very good graphics
- Decent writing
- Detective mechanic works well and is interesting
- Sound design is very good

Cons:
- Combat is a clunky mess
- Limited weapon / enemy variety
- Towns feel dead due to lack of NPC interactions, can't order a drink at the bar let alone talk to random NPCs on the streets
- room at the inn is a missed opportunity for a "home base"
- Every single ending is underwhelming, lacks a boss fight of any kind.
- The game is quite long, longer than it needs to be


As mentioned previously, this is a hard one to judge. Overall, I liked the game due to the interesting detective angle as well as awesome art style and graphics despite some major complaints.

I'd wait to get this game on a steep sale.

Pros:
- Interesting concept
- fascinating investigative mechanics
- characters feel fleshed out


Cons:
- Lost all my progress after uninstalling
- Combat/Shooting feels stiff and clunky
- Enemies will respawn if you die
- Enemies feel too strong/cheap to die to (wouldn't be a huge deal if I didnt keep dying in a house I have to clear in order to investigate)

The premise of this game is amazing: A private detective on an actual mission to solve cosmic horror madness. The gameplay itself is entertaining. Finding clues is mostly fun, and deducing the outcomes makes you feel smart and gives you worthy choices to contemplate. This is a thinking person's game.

The shooting and combat is fun enough to give me a reason to use the game's various weapons. When you run out, you'll find out that the shovel is one of the best weapons when you learn how to dodge attacks.

The ending falls a little short considering the build-up. After taking my time in the game itself, I did a speed-run through all the endings to see if I had chose the wrong one. The problem is none of them are very satisfying. It is still worth playing though.

Good game with a great story and lackluster open world. The lore and atmosphere of the city is amazing with the Lovecraft influences. Throughout the main story and side quests there are a lot of choices to make which impact the end of each quest. Investigation mechanics were great. Combat was good although only features a few different types of enemies throughout the game. My biggest complaint is the world was too big for the content included in the game. A lot of time spent was running from point to point in the city with rarely any interactions in between. Overall a solid game that was well worth the price on sale.

A deeply immersive game set in the Lovecraftian world, Sinking City has been a joy to play and a strong recommendation. There's something satisfying in walking through a city during the early 1900s with your collar high on your neck and madmen walking past you muttering and talking to themselves. An eerie feeling in the air and talk of strange creatures circling around a flooded city buried in secrets.. Interesting characters with their stories and motives. Details you can find scattered around houses that complete the picture and urge you pay attention to everything. This is my first venture to the Lovecraft world in gaming and it has exceeded my expectations.
It is not a perfect game however and I should note some its weaknesses. Assets and locations have been extensively reused and one can't help but noticing it even if they don't try to complete it's far-too-many side quests. Some of the side quests have had interesting stories but many others were repetitive quests of killing mobs and interacting with one or two things. This wouldn't be a problem if coupled with some variety in gameplay and design but unfortunately it is not the case.
Choices matter, in a sense, in this game which welcomes a second playthrough. I, however, don't think I'll be doing so because of its dragged out side-quests and a general "fatigue" I realised I felt playing it.

Not a horror game, but it’s still a nice detective game. After a while some stuff (for example looking for clues) becomes repetitive and boring, but it's still worth playing and city setting is nice.

While the trailer initially piqued my interest, the gameplay itself fell flat. Despite the promise of choices, they feel limited, making the experience feel restrictive. The puzzles are uninspired, lacking any real challenge or innovation, and the visuals leave much to be desired. Overall, it's a disappointing experience. I cannot recommend it.

Terrible. I really tried to enjoy this. I'm a sucker for lovcraftian horror. However, this is plagued by poor design. An incredible amount of trekking across the city and back tracking between areas that offer no benefit or exposition. The enemy variety is limited. Combat is clunky. The investigations are half baked. The narrative has potential but is so bogged down by everything else that's wrong with the game I just don't really care to find out what happens next.