If you read my Part I article (Game EXP: The Sinking City: Deluxe Edition [Part I: The Bad & The Ugly])about The Sinking City: Deluxe Edition on Nintendo Switch, you very probably got the impression that I did not enjoy the game, that it was broken, an unfinished mess, and was a low-effort money grab by a studio that was not up to the challenge of creating a semi-open world Lovecraftian mystery game along with worthwhile DLC. If that was what you took away from that article, along with the mentioning that I spent 70+ hours playing a game that I was not paid to but willingly played, then I apologize for giving the wrong impression and I am here to clear things up.
Is The Sinking City a great game? No. Is it a fun game? Definitely, yes.
In The Sinking City, you play as Detective Charles Reed who is experiencing disturbing visions that lead him to the fictional town of Oakmont, Massachusetts being a city that six months prior experienced a flood that still impacts the city. There are several elements that I feel like could have made the game just a little bit better, like more random NPCs that had dialogue amongst themselves recorded by more than one person, additional floorplans for buildings, greater end-of-quests events, and maybe an explanation as to why people use bullets as a form of currency and why can there not be a store where you can buy things? Maybe. But we are here to talk about all of the things that I enjoyed in the game.
What I figured out pretty early on in the game was that there was a steep learning curve in terms of the archives mechanic. Knowing what information to take from a conversation or a scrap of newspaper and where to go with that could lead you to different conclusions depending on how you personally think about information. Do you go to the local newspaper, The Oakmont Chronicle, to look up a previously published article? Do you go to the Police Station to look-up police reports? Or maybe to the archives at the Hospital of St. Mary to look up patient records? There were several times that I did become confused as to where I needed to go, usually because my line of reasoning was different than what I actually needed to be looking up (City Hall versus the Police Station), but after completing a number of the main quests which walk you through this process on a number of occasions, introducing you to each place that has their own archive and what types of information can be found in each place, it was quite the rush to correctly figure out the deductions on my own. After talking with the quest giver, going to the Oakmont Chronicle and looking up a District of Oakmont along with a particular time Period and cross-referencing that with the Advertisements Section to find out the location of a building (you are given the cross streets in the particular district) that was ruined during the flood and filed for insurance loss, is a pretty great feeling.
A lot of video games since Mass Effect have adopted morality-based decision making and with The Witcher series throwing the concept of not-quite-good and not-quite-evil choices in the players face, I was not surprised and actually thankful that some of the situations I found myself in were not black-and-white, but various shades of grey and puce. Do I side with a gangster who is knee-deep into human trafficking so that I can get an informant out of the city, or do I side with a war hero who might be part of an eldritch cult who is vowing to clean up the mob scene in Oakmont and putting your informant at significant risk of retaliation? Do you not interfere in a local election? Do you side with a doctor who is experimenting on his subjects that borders on torture for the benefit of the citizens of not only Oakmont but the entire world? In games like Skyrim and The Witcher series, there are times when I feel like Pollyanna going around and happily solving people's problems. In The Sinking City, while there was some altruistic work performed by Reed, it just felt like you were delaying the inevitable until it became someone else's turn to deal with the situation. At times Charles Reed was only a bandaid, and that felt pretty refreshing.
There were also a number of times when the story had what seemed like branching paths. Questions asked by prominent NPCs with one of two options were asked, clues from crime scenes lead to one of two possible outcomes depending on how the evidence was interpreted, were a welcome mechanic. There was even one case that allowed me to plant evidence on someone who was innocent of the crime they were accused of, but they themselves were a particularly bigoted person (who may or may not have been involved with the KKK; fine people on both sides and all that). I have not played any games that I can recall that included this type of storytelling, but I assume that detective genre games like LA Noire or other games in the Sherlock Holmes repertoire from Frogwares probably include this type of storytelling device. It was pretty great because I was agonizing about this decision, to follow the law, which Reed has sworn to do, or to make a decision based on morality.
The overall story felt fairly Lovecraftian in this sense, that this did not always feel like Charles Reed's story, but a story about a city that Charles Reed was caught up in. There were several times that I felt that I was not so much beating enemies or saving the world, I was just surviving. In one of the boss fights, your goal was just to survive while this cosmic horror lobbed projectiles at you and cultist tried to kill you. You had no way of really harming this creature, you just had to dodge its attacks, collect your objective, and get out without dying. The hook to get Reed to Oakmont felt a little flimsy at times (wanting to find out about his visions and having a contact in Oakmont who said they can help) and I do wish there was a little more in the way of interacting more with characters and exploring the backstory of some of the more prominent NPCs, but maybe that fits in with the idea that Reed is a pawn. He is not supposed to find out everything little thing about every person. Every person who appears in need of help may not actually want Reed's help, or when Reed does what he thinks is helping, people end up dead. Which may or may not have happened.
And even if there were not as many additional scenes expanding on characters and the setting of Oakmont, there were plenty of scenes that offered nothing in the way of supplementary information. You might be walking down the road and find a dead octopus inside a baby carriage. On the second floor of a tenement building in the center of town, the body of an octopus and a tuna lay dead. No passerby batting an eye at the woman crouched on the ground poking her hands into the long-dead and rotting carcass of shark. It is little scenes like this that I feel were put into the game for the player to question not only what it is they are seeing, but why they are seeing it, as well as creating and maintaining a feeling of unease. Sure it would be interesting to find out why this woman is nearly elbow-deep in the body of a deceased shark, but her story may not be interesting to everybody, so better to let the player have this image in their mind, developing their own conclusions five minutes after the fact.
As I reached the end of the game, I was kind of wanting to be finished, not because I was not having fun, but because all of the main stories were being funneled to a conclusion, although not being able to build up Reed's stats/skills anymore certainly played some part in that feeling. And when I reached the end of the game, I was thankful that I could experience all three possible endings, albeit one-at-a-time. There was the semi-good ending, the semi-bad ending, and the hands-off ending which ended up being my favorite, as it felt the most like an ending, both in a story sense, but also an ending that Lovecraft might have come up with, or at least something akin.
70 hours is how long it took me to beat The Sinking City and some combination of the Worshippers of the Necronomicon and Merciful Madness DLCs (all came bundled in the Deluxe Edition, which does not look like it is currently available anymore for the Switch), which is a decent amount of time to spend in a city running away from large bulbous creatures and skittering cats with crab-like arms. And considering that this was Frog Wares' first semi-open-world game, I do hope that they take what they learned from this endeavor and that their next game(s) is more impressive because I know that I will be waiting.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S.
Here are some additional pictures that I couldn't fit into either Part I or II of this series.
This was pretty early on in the game, and I slowly noped my way out of this room. After I may have accidentally reanimated the creature.
Can't really blame these creatures if they're also killing KKK members.
Oh you know, just riding in a boat up to a flooded graveyard. Just your average Tuesday.
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