The Sinking City Remastered - Deluxe Edition

Second time I bought this. First time was on SWITCH, now on GoG to test it out on my steamdeck. Runs great with a stable framerate on the deck, & once once you go high end graphics with this game you just cant go back to the SWITCH version. That stuff aside. Beautifully atmospheric, investigative gameplay is addictive & about getting your brain thinking rather than just shooting up people, lacquered in love & authenticity to Lovecraft's work with connections to multiple stories, great story & plenty of content so you're getting your money's worth. On the downside the game slows to a crawl when you're stumped, investigating clues tends to follow the same steps of deliberate trial & error until you match the correct evidence, sanity mechanic is weak & borders on being pointless, the visual presentation can obscure the game world during certain points & the side content alot of the time ends up being weak busy work like kill X of Y instead of being fun smaller mysteries to investigate. I pray this gets a sequel in the future! In the meantime I got their remake of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened to tide me over.

First of all this game is massive ! If you wish to see and play all of it, it lasts more than 40 hours, maybe even 50 !!! Second, you can play it many times because each case can be solved in a many ways. And did I mention, there are MANY CASES, all of which could be a separate game with just a bit added to it. I have never enjoyed any game as much. And, I do not like shooting. However, in this game it makes perfect sense and even that is enjoyable. The story (stories) is immensely rich. All characters well portrayed. The graphics are excellent too. You can play it many times and never get bored with it. As, I said, this game is worth every cent. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves mystery. Looking forward to SC 2.

The game has a huge open world city setting, but with large sections that have nothing to interact with. I initially found this frustrating at first. However, once I realized how the case-and-address system worked, it started to make more sense. The story starts off quite slow, but is actually pretty good once it gets going. There are a couple of meaningful choices, of which one or two feel a bit forced, but overall add to the experience. The game's mechanics (combat, sixth sense, etc.) are very simple, but integrated well enough. The game is also a turning point for Frogwares in wanting to make games with action, open world setting, and horror elements, since both Sherlock Holmes Chapter One & The Awakened remake also carried elements from this game. The Sinking City is also getting a SEQUEL, which itself is a pleasant surprise, and it seems this is a series Frogwares will enjoy growing in the coming years.

Wonderful endless madness...

This one is a mixed bag - it seems that for every aspect that is well executed, we get two or three terrible design/executive decisions. The storytelling is pretty decent, having touched all the required parts of a Chthulu game - the horror is a bit toned down, going from mental to visceral, but the mental stability of the protagonist is well made. The combat is so-so, mostly let down by the scavenging mechanic, which exists only to prolong gametime. You get a total of four enemy types (minus humans), with a little variety in their abilities. Same with the terrible journal/quest/case system - you have to manually place pins on the map location and then manually remove them. Which is not terrible, until you realise the map shows only the locations/pins for the currently tracked case. And you track the clues separately for each case. UGH !!! The better side quests flesh out the world of the Mythos, but the rest are simply MMO-styled fetch quests, with nothing more than a text note as information. And you make rounds and rounds in the city, on the same locations, with the same building models over and over again. These seem to only exist to pad out game time, when the only thing they do is to break the flow of the game (if scavenging after every fight wasn't bad enough). A good example for a shorter, more focused game would be the Call of Chthulu from 2018. Which brings me to the terrible part of the game - the DLCs. They SHOULD NOT exist in a single player game: 1. For the 13€ ones, you get a small quest and a bunch of fetch notes (again). 2. For the cheaper ones you get: Skill point?!?!?, skin and a tommy gun. Way better would be to create a 5€ Developer support DLC, that way the people that liked the game can show their support, instead of this "I want more money" crap. With a better thought out gameplay and less junk, this would have been a great game, but right now it's mostly dissapointing, considering the good world building the main story provides.