The Sinking City Reviews
Without a doubt, The Sinking City is the best Lovecraft game we’ve ever seen. It’s still not a perfect title—for some reason, none are—but it’s a damn fun time as a Lovecraftian private eye. Hopefully, Frogwares will follow up with another Lovecraft title with stronger combat. But if investigating eldritch horrors in an entirely unique game world is what you’re after, you need to play this despite its flaws.
It's very hard to call The Sinking City a "good game," all things considered, but it was definitely a game worth making. Keep an eye out for future improvements and hopefully someday it'll be a game worth playing.
Playing The Sinking City feels oppressive, as it should. Oakmont is a terrible, rotten, half destroyed place where lawlessness abounds. Half the city believes in racial purity and the others believe in the long-dormant Elder Gods beneath the ocean. Even with the sometimes clunky dialogue and stiff animations, The Sinking City is a fascinating study of the human condition.
The Sinking City is an incredibly ambitious open world detective title which punches way above its weight thanks to various refreshing mechanics, an engaging narrative and some impressively alluring world design. Combat woes, a rigid open world and numerous technical issues unfortunately let what's otherwise a great game down. However, The Sinking City is still well worth a look.
A promising premise, drowned by its menacing ambition.
The Sinking City is one of the best Lovecraft-inspired games available and, despite some slightly awkward controls in places, the game is brilliantly crafted. Fans of horror will love its atmosphere and those who enjoy investigative games will quickly become absorbed in the depth offered by the gameplay. Those who loved L.A. Noire or Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, and players of the tabletop game, should definitely give thought to picking this title up.
The Sinking City always entails a cycle and maybe that just really how it is but still, its disappointment is the major mood when I got to that last part. What is the point of having choices then? Overall, this game has potential and my advice would be to wait until a few patches get released and maybe by then this game gets the remedy it needs.
The Sinking City has an incredible atmosphere that really grips the darkest parts of your mind. Oakmont feels hostile, unwelcoming and full of secrets, but the game makes it clear that it might cost more than just your life to find out what they are. While it stumbles with its characters and combat, The Sinking City is a great first step into the supernatural detective game.
The Sinking City nearly drowns in its amazing atmosphere and the investigative work, especially when it comes to the main story, is fantastic. However, Frogware’s ambitious attempt at combining an investigation game with an open world simply doesn’t work as well as it could have. Sidequests are mostly uninteresting and with a big part of the game focused on collecting scarce resources from infested zones, the clunky combat doesn’t help.
Unfortunately, the negative aspects in The Sinking City outweigh the positive ones: lackluster graphics, bug-ridden NPCs and a combat system that fails to deliver. But if you can dismiss all this, you will be in for a great action adventure and the most detailed lovecraft game world to date. It's still a must play for every fan of eldritch horrors and detective games!
Review in German | Read full review
The Sinking City has its rough spots, but a good Lovecraft inspired game is hard to come by and Frogwares managed to craft a story that’s interesting enough to scratch that itch.
Frogwares has created an interesting and absorbing world of horror, and it’s deliciously rich in story and world-building. The sanity system works well, throwing some horrific visions at you, and capturing a feeling of nightmarish helplessness. Yes, it comes with some signature flaws too, but The Sinking City is a fine horror game and an engrossing detective RPG.
The game has so much potential to be something really quite special. The setting and the characters, the Lovecraft Cthulhu-inspired imagination of the world of Oakmont and Charles Reed’s search for his own sanity is really quite interesting. There’s definitely something here, it just all feels half-baked. Each critical narrative moment should have the power to knock the player on the ass falls flat, leaving you wanting more but it never arriving.
The Sinking City is a game that in parts, is good. There are parts that I have quite liked, and there are some parts I really haven’t liked and found myself being engaged in at all.
Despite a few issues with combat, The Sinking City features solid world building, strong crime solving mechanics, and is the best Lovecraft game released in recent memory.
The Sinking City is an overpriced technical mess full of awkward mechanics but with a decent plot.
Frogwares tried to merge a pure detective adventure game with horror action elements and the result is a fairly enjoyable title, although not very cohesive. Sometimes, less is more and the studio's ambitions were drowned in muddy waters just like the unfortunate city of Oakmont. Despite that, The Sinking City remains one of the better adventure games released this year.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
The Sinking City is basically Sherlock Holmes off his tits on Opium after reading the works of H.P. Lovecraft. It combines all of the great deduction and investigation mechanics we’ve seen in Frogwares‘ Sherlock games with adequate combat mechanics and an emphasis on plotting out your own map based on the clues you uncover. Whereas I wasn’t a massive fan of the combat in place, it helped mix things up a little so that you’re swapping between investigating and killing things. Neither version I played (PC and PS4) felt perfect, in terms of its performance, but it wasn’t enough to put me off playing the game as the gripping story and horrific aesthetics had me hooked.
Frogwares have made better games than this, though. Their Sherlock Holmes titles are real pleasures of mine and so I come into The Sinking City just a little bit disappointed. I wanted to like it more than I did but I often found myself grimacing, grumbling, and groaning as I made my way around this grimy old world. Power past the faults, though, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find that The Sinking City gradually winning you over.
Updated review - The Sinking City – PS5 Review https://chalgyr.com/2021/03/review-ps5-thesinkingcity.html So overall, The Sinking City's revamp on the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X is worthwhile if you've been thinking of giving this lovecraftian tale another go or had missed out on it the first time. With several upgrades and a new smoothness to the gameplay, going back for seconds alongside the added DLC was not a bad way to spend a few dozen hours. ---- Previous review - The Sinking City – PS4 Review https://chalgyr.com/2019/07/Review-PS4-TheSinkingCity.html So on a whole, while The Sinking City makes some great strides for investigative puzzlers, the open world that it tried to live in doesn’t really work. If you can get past the empty enough world and the clunky mechanics however, and there’s a gem underneath that is just begging to be explored and it’s worth the exploration.