Game #871: The Sinking City

 More Cthulhu, more problems.

 A detective with a mysterious past and an ominous part to play in the fate of the world? A focus on a fishing city? A sanity meter? Decisions that slightly change how you go through a chapter? If the game wasn't titled The Sinking City I'd might very well think it's The Call of Cthulhu. But there's a major difference between games, while CoC was a very linear affair, TSK went for an open world design, to mixed results.

 Most of the game is a very basic third-person affair. Combat is an absolute clunkfest, you have little ammo(Even when fully levelled up) and Charles Reed, the hero, is as nimble as a rock. I'm not ashamed to admit that I had to lower down the difficulty, sue me, at least the game became a bit more tolerable. On the flipside, I didn't realize that I was making it hard for myself, as I kept revisiting a house with a giant enemy just because I didn't realize I had completed the quest, so I kept returning with very limited ammo. Plus, took me a while to realize that enemies don't take damage when they are in their hitstun animation, so conserve your ammo! Still, the game becomes easier when you realize that your melee attack is very reliable on everything but the largest monsters. Plus, there are pretty much no bosses, the only ones I can think of where  a giant watery-mouth thing you just shoot at until it dies, and the other is an optional witch-thing you can melee to death. 

 The game received a lot of praise for how they worked the detective angle, but I don't really agree with it. Whenever you reach a 'crime scene' or a 'mystery scene', you have to go around the house, through every floor looking for every bit of evidence to interact with it. Finding the necessary evidence isn't too bad, usually, but if you want the bonus experience you need to find every single piece. And that can almost turn into a pixel hunt. It's so annoying when you missed that single poster that didn't bring up the interact prompt and you go up and down through the house over and over again.

 People also liked having no automatic map prompts. Instead, you have to read the clues and make your own markers. Honestly? It's just a waste of time. Maybe it's because I was playing on the Easy investigator difficulty, but every clue laid the exact streets pretty clearly, so it was a matter of remembering the name of the two-three streets when the map appeared on the screen. And if I didn't remember? Screw me, back to the clue and hope my short-term memory doesn't fail me. The Archive clues are the worst. Sometimes the clue will mention 'news', 'interviews' or stuff like that. In those cases you have to decide to either visit The Police records, the Hospital Records, the local news records or the University Library records. Once you get there, you have to pick the three correct criteria for the next clue to appear. Not gonna lie, I searched online for an Archive guide and never looked back. I think I can almost understand why some people find it immersive, but I found it annoying. Heck, the final chapter's clues are pretty much impossible to figure out the criteria for on your own. Or maybe I'm just dumb.

 That said, I liked the Mind Palace element of the Detective features, basically, you can mix clues to turn them into deductions, which felt pretty neat.

 There's a crafting element to the game, you collect scavenge and you can turn into bullets and healing items. Nothing to write home about, and adds nothing to the game, but hey, it's there. Surprisingly, you can also level up. You obtain experience points by killing monsters or solving cases, which you can then use to upgrade Charles' abilities. These abilities are pretty lackluster, such as extra health, stronger attacks, higher ammo capacity or a chance not to use resources when crafting items.

 The open world design was a mistake. They didn't have the budget for something so ambitious. The city, on the outside, is quite good looking, I'll give it that, the partly sunken city looks damp and desolate, and the meandering Innsmouther immigrants as well as the locals make for an interesting atmosphere. Heck, having to use a boat to traverse the sunken parts of the city was an engaging idea, even though it controlled a bit poorly. In more than a few ways, it reminded me of Silent Hill Downpour, which I really liked(Sue me). However, they didn't have the budget, so there are about 5-6 house interiors that get recycled entirely, and sometimes partly, over and over again. It's almost ridiculous. Don't even let me get started on the technical issues, it's not unusual to run into parts of the environment that haven't loaded yet, so the game will abruptly cut to a black loading screen. Heck, every time you are going to enter a house the game will have to enter a black loading screen. Every time I brought up the map it felt like the game was about to crash. I can respect ambition, but in this case it pretty much sunk the game.

 Besides the technical issues, this large scope makes the game feel bloated. This is how every single part of the game plays, be it the main story cases or the side cases you can find: 

Step 1) Read the clue, if it mentions the streets place it on the map, otherwise go to right archive and get the clue so that you pinpoint the location through the map.

Step 2) Get to the right location and find the house you can go in(Turn in your magical Detective Eye and spot the door with an H on it).

Step 3) Kill the monsters if they spawn, otherwise...

Step 4) If it's one of the simple sidequests, just find and collect the right item. If it's a main story case or one of the better side-missions, just find all the clues, trigger the 'past visions' if necessary, and use the new clue you found to go back to step 1.

Step 5) Repeat until the mission ends.

That's the ENTIRE game.

 While I've been quite negative about the game, it does have a few things going for it. For instance, I must stress just how much I liked the game's atmosphere. The sunken city lives up to its name, and makes for a very attractive, in a creepy way, location. While most decisions you can take in the game are pretty superfluous, I liked having different outcomes to each chapter, and I liked how pretty much every single time there was no clear 'better' route. I insist, in the grand scheme of things they amount to nothing, but it's a very sweet nothing.

 The story, while nothing special, was pretty interesting too, it was an interesting romp, with interesting characters and even more interesting situations. A few of the horror elements, like pretty most monsters, didn't feel very Lovecraftian, but when they nailed a monster design, they nailed it.

 If you have time to spare and enjoy the Cthulhu mythos, The Sinking City might be worth a look, but I feel like most horror games you can find on the system are better than this one. I do feel like a more simple, and less ambitious approach would've worked much better under their budget constraints.  But, y'know, I don't really regret having spent my time with this game, as I think it's better moments made up for its shortcomings.

5.0