The Sinking City Remastered

This game is the closest you'll have to an Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulhu done well. Its has some major flaws in the world building department, but as a detective game within the Cthulhu mythos it's top notch. Buy it.

I think Anarion321 got it about spot on, BUT.. the thing for me was this game got me into the whole detective gaming genre.. I have always been a H.P. Lovecraft fan (I am 53 today) and I have been gaming on PCs since the 80's. The game could be improved upon but i think they did a pretty good job, after all.. they had to create a whole new environment (setting) which is probably good.. H.P.. Lovecraft had drawings of the places he described in his books but they are all rather small so this was a good way of dealing with that. Alot of the buildings are just copied and pasted and then edited, places seem familiar often. The cognition parts are too easy, walk around and wait for the elliptical waves to show up, it was a little bit over simplified, but still not bad. pretty entertaining all in all.

The Sinking City checks most of the classic “lovecraftian story” boxes. But as formulaic as it is, it approaches those familiar subjects in interesting enough style to be engaging. There are a couple of really interesting sidequests - most funny of all to me, you’ll get the priceless chance to relentlessly mock the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Now, the main attraction of the game, and the reason why I’m writing this review, is the game’s investigation mechanic. You collect evidence, and then combine the clues to form conclusions that lead you to solve the case. It’s a pretty unique system and rather cool – at times, it really does make you feel like a detective, especially since the game does not use any kind of automatic quest markers, so you often have to research stuff in the library or various archives, then look at the map, locate the streets mentioned and go there to investigate. I defnitely think the investigation system has a lot of potential, but I’d love it if it gave me the opportuntiy to be WRONG more often, if I was careless when analyzing a case. The problem with The Sinking City is that the game really drags and is pretty tedious in every other element of it. First – the assets are riddiculously over-reused. There are literally only like 3 or 4 house layouts in Oakmont and they repeat over and over and over and over again. Second – the combat is rather unfun, with only 5 (!) types of enemies. Lastly – the city of Oakmont, while rather amospheric, is too big for it’s own good, especially coupled with the reused assets. Do I recommend The Sinking City? Not really. >I< personally kinda had fun, but I am a very patient person. I’d say only buy it if you’re a really big Lovecraft fan, and if the game is on sale. If you’d like to see how the game plays and whether it would interest you, you can see me playing it BLIND here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjSL_isUScA&list=PLp4TpsJ7HUWW0F9HWz0HO3d7fQwJk5Ldn

A chill-paced and immersive 1920s lovecraftian detective story experience that manages to capture the feeling of everything going shite just before the looming end. Sounds good? Nice! However, did you notice the asterisk on the title? We'll get to that next... *however... here's three points good to know before getting at it: 1. Deluxe edition, DLC, and repetitiveness - 'Merciful Madness' and 'Worshippers of the Necronomicon' contain playable content of somewhat uneven quality. There is some good stuff within these two DLCs, however, if you happen to be completionist type of a player, these might also very well commit to the game starting to feel a bit repetitive before you're done with it. The three other DLCs are at best utterly and completely shrug worthy or may even make the gameplay experience actively worse. 2. The Detective in 1920s bit of the experience - It is kind of neat and immersive how you'll be doing some manual piecing together, figuring out, sourcing information from archives, making your own notes on the ingame map, and such and such. But manual does mean manual, so be prepared to think for a bit, run around a lot, and read at least an old-school printed newspaper's worth of text. 3. Beelining through the game is the way to go - The skill tree is boring. Getting overpowered happens a bit too easily and being a god-like figure armed to the teeth kind of screws with the theme of the game. And the optional side quests contain maddening amounts of fetch quest, which snappily make it glaringly obvious that there's no elder goddamn value in scouring through the same recycled building asset for the nth time fetching some unusable thing with no value of anykind. So remember this: minimum amount of XP necessary to progress, and if you need more, avoid the side-quests with lots of icons straight from the get go, as they are a telltale sign of crummy fetch quests. TL;DR: If you skipped here immediately, The Sinking City really ain't the game for you.