At the moment, this is a planned Part I of a two-part series looking at The Sinking City Deluxe Edition by Frogwares on the Nintendo Switch. Part I is going to cover all of the critiques I had with the game, which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the game, and you will just have to read both parts to find out why I spent 70+ hours in a game that I obviously had some issues with. But that is what we are here for, constructive criticism because I have never made a video game and it is easy to be on this side of things and be as critical as hell. Also, if you haven't already, you can check out my First Impressions article from back in May.
[This article will not touch on, apart from this statement, the delisting, and troubles Frogwares has and are going through regarding The Sinking City. For that information, I direct you to their own statement.]
This last weekend (in reality this was a couple of months back) I finished The Sinking City and played it on the Nintendo Switch for just over 70 hours. I mention the 70 hours game length because when I started the game, HowLongToBeat has a completionist run at 30 hours, so I wanted to state right off the tentacle ladened bat that I took two-and-a-half times as long, which is something that I am perfectly okay with. Possibly leading to my extended playtime was that I purchased the Deluxe Edition, which includes the Worshipers of the Necronomicon DLC and the Switch exclusive Merciful Madness DLC, but mainly because I rarely fast traveled and instead used the boats and the eldritch god-given legs to get Private Inspector Charles Reed to/from his destinations. There are three other DLC packs, none of which seemed to be all that interesting, but I will get to those later. Lastly, this article is going to be very critical of The Sinking City, not because I thought it was a bad game, but because I really did enjoy all 70+ hours, but that also gave me plenty of time to pick apart what I liked and where I thought that Frogwares could improve on this, their first foray into open-world games.
And that is where I am going to focus on today's article, my critiques of a game that I very much enjoyed.
After a few hours in and I had been exploring the city of Oakmont, Massachusetts, I began to feel that I had been in buildings and houses that I had never been in before. I began to feel that I could anticipate the layout, where holes in the floor would be, where doors to other rooms were, where the staircases to either the basement (oh, nope, that staircase down has been flooded) or to the upper floors, or even where containers with loot and materials were located. I realized that the developers were reusing building assets, and in some cases, the exact same building layout and what looked like the same set dressing for different buildings. You could chalk this up to lazy development, although I liked to tell myself in my head canon that the town was planned and built by the same architect and developer and had not been updated since its inception some 100 years before. This was the lie I would tell myself rather than believe that the frequent recycling of assets was due to Frogwares getting tired developing new assets or floorplans.
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| One of the more unique NPC interactions. This time, the white cop did shoot the black man here but I did not hear any dialogue leading up to the shooting. The next time this interaction spawned, I pulled a gun on the cop and both people ran away. |
There were a couple of other aspects to the game that felt a little lackluster too, especially considering how much time I spent in this world. Perhaps if I had not walked and boated everywhere and fast traveled it might not have been as obvious? This had to do with the day-to-day operations of Oakmont. As you jogged throughout the city, you would come across citizens going about their daily lives, although for a city of this size, there was very little to be heard as there seemed to be fewer than ten types of NPC citizen that had dialogue you would hear as you passed them by. There was the fish barker, "Fresh fish! Just caught!" There was the newspaperman "Paper, paper, read all about it! Buy a paper mister?" There was the person selling... something, "...cheaper than the rest." Later in the game, there were two different politicians giving general pro-Oakmont statements. The point is, there only seemed to be a few lines of NPC dialogue that would repeat regardless of who was saying it or where they were located. If the newspaperman was an Innsmouther or and Oakmonter, the same audio file was used. Then there was the doomsayer who I only recall finding in Salvation Harbor, being one of the harder-hit areas by The Flood, so that kind of made sense. The other aspect that felt left by the wayside was that aside from a small barge you would come across in the flooded streets, there were no moving vehicles in the streets. Yes, there were trollies and trains derailed, there were cars either up in flames presumably right after a crash, or left off to the side of the road. But The Flood happened six months before the events in the game and it would have been nice to see at least some cars moving around the city.
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| Terrible Fetus was probably my favorite LoO case. Great atmosphere, the the setting was somewhat unique and the set decoration was 100% unique. |
When I purchased The Sinking City, I did spring for the Deluxe Edition, which contains the Worshipers of the Necronomicon and Merciful Madness DLC packs, but there was very little information as to what those three quests in each pack entailed. What was even more confusing was where to find these DLC quests and how to activate them. It was not until I was 20 hours into the game that I realized that I had already picked up one of the DLC quests, the Mystic Tomes quest being part of the WotN DLC that I believe I found by exploring one of the rooms in the Devil's Reef Hotel. Then there was the Defunct Brain Cylinders quest that I found lying around the police station (I think?) and the Letters from Oakmont that was given to me by the owner of the Devil's Reef Hotel, but I could not tell you which DLC pack this questline belonged to. While exciting to have side-quests to do, these essentially were mostly all fetch quests consisting of the following actions:
- Mark Map with Marker from Street Address on Case Description
- Arrive and Kill Wylebeasts
- Although in one instance there were no Wylebeasts which was creepier than actually having them around.
- Search house/building.
- Find the Tome/Brain Cylinder/Occult Object
- Gain Experience Points and Materials.
That was it. There were no additional character interactions, no special items apart from costume/cosmetic changes. Just a description, a location, and an item with a semi-obscure description that had no bearing on anything aside from gaining experience points and eventually Knowledge Points to bulk up the character. I will say though that there was a unique creature at what was supposed to be the end of the Mystic Tomes quest, but since these can all be done out of order (in my case I just went to whichever one was closest to my current location), I ended up coming upon this mini-boss fight halfway through this quest-line. And even when I finished the questlines, there was no fanfare, just text that I had completed the questline and received a lot more experience points. And while one might argue that performing a thankless job plays well into this type of horror setting, it was a little disappointing.
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| All available DLC packs, and the ones I haven't purchased in red. |
And then there are the three other DLC packs which do not seem all too useful. There is the Chicago Organ Grinder which is just a skin for the eventual Tommy Gun that you earn in the last third of the game, which has confused some people who thought that you would start off the game with the Tommy Gun. There is the Investigator Pack which gives you another costume change, which again is all purely cosmetic and does not translate to the cinematics, plus "permanent access" to both health and psychoactive health packs, which reads that you can have infinite health items, but that remains unclear to me, and would be significantly overpowered especially in the early game. And last is the Experience Boost which is just a single Knowledge Point at the start of the game, and would only be semi-useful in the opening area, but as I was able to earn experience points and knowledge points and a regular rate, I feel that this would only prove a waste of $2.99 pretty quickly.
Maybe feeling overpowered before the end of the game could be chalked up to having access to all of the DLC quests and completing all the ones I could find, that I maxed out the skill trees before the end of the game. I even curmudgeonly picked the last couple of skills because there was no point not to, even though I knew I was not going to be receiving double the rewards for completing the quest because that meant completing the game. This was the point when I started fast traveling because uncovering new places along the way would not result in anything tangible and hoping to stumble across another reference to Lovecraft's work would be cool, by the 65-hour mark in the game, again, I just wanted to reach the end and experience the conclusion of this story, which I recognize is a sad view to have for a game that I had so much fun playing.
I know the takeaway from this entire article is that The Sinking City be it with or without any of the DLC expansion quests, is a bad game, but that is far from the truth. Knowing that this was Frogwares' first foray into, more-or-less, an open-world exploration, it was both a bit easier to forgive all of the blemishes as well as making it easier to notice where corners might have been cut so that the game would properly function. Maybe they did not expect players to be able to max out the skill tree before the end of the game, or someone spending 70 hours on a 30-hour game? Maybe there were additional floor plans for buildings but then somehow that became too complicated for the semi-procedurally generated city/interiors? Maybe Frogware cut their losses and shipped a functional game rather than spend more time and money? I know that these issues/complaints were not isolated to the Switch version as the game is the same across different platforms, so this is nothing against Frogwares' ability in porting their own game to the Switch.
You know, that might be it, or at least, as much as I can recall after not having played the game for a couple of months, which probably means that I should have been taking notes. But stay tuned for a more positive article about all of the reasons I did enjoy The Sinking City.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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