You’ll travel by boat to navigate some parts of the city due to the flood, and there’s even a trip to the briny deep itself, and that provides a whole new set of issues. Reed’s journey will take him not just through the streets of Oakmont, but to other, more otherworldly places too, so there’s plenty to explore. This is not a thriving place, this is a dying one, a sinking one, and those still left in it are well suited to its sickness. Frogwares has filled it with detailed decay and ruin.

It’s a fairly large city, split into specific districts and all are full of dank and dreary life, and an oppressive atmosphere. If you played Call of Cthulhu earlier this year, then there’s an eerie similarity to the starting area in that game, a dilapidated harbor populated by an assortment of the thuggish and the surly sorts. Oakmont is a decidedly grim-looking place from the moment you step off a boat and onto its waterfront (though due to flooding, Oakmont has a lot more waterfront than it should). We find ourselves in the gummy shoes of one Charles Reed, a war veteran turned private eye, whose sanity is slipping due to some unknown cause, and in an effort to find a cure, he heads to the city of Oakmont, which supposedly holds the key to his ailment, and likely holds some rather sinister secrets.

By blending this with the Lovecraftian setting and story, Frogwares has perhaps made one of the most immersive and disturbing detective games for years. What Frogwares also brings to the table is its exceptional detective systems from its underappreciated Sherlock Holmes games.

You can’t say Frogwares hasn’t gone all in on trying to make a Lovecraftian story feel as authentic as possible as far as world-building goes. It has those things, of course, but The Sinking City takes on a lot more of Lovecraft’s trappings, including the less appealing undertones to it. Bloody Disgusting departs for Oakmont and finds fish-faced terror, and cosmic horrors in The Sinking City review for PC.Ī lot of modern horror games like to dabble in a bit of Lovecraft, few really delve into the man’s work as deeply as Frogwares’ The Sinking City.īy this I mean it doesn’t just slap a few tentacles on the box, ram in a sanity meter, and feature a bunch of mysterious writing alluding to cosmic beings.

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