It’s reminiscent of memorable games like the original BioShock and the Silent Hill series. It’s here, within the city’s drowning shoes, that you discover impressive environments that find organic and gorgeous ways to enhance the storytelling. This third-person, action/adventure horror game is set in an open-world version of Oakmont, Massachusetts, a fictional island on the eastern seaboard that has suffered a huge flood. In the end, though, The Sinking City’s mysterious, twisting story is compelling and does a respectable job of combining well-worn plot elements in a new way. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at Reed after having seen tabletop games translate this mythos a seemingly endless amount of times with a much more diverse (and period-appropriate) cast of interesting characters video games can’t seem to step away from the private dick.
It’s not free of cliche – this is far from the first Lovecraftian game to feature a private investigator with a history as a soldier who’s burdened with terrible visions and missing sleep. It inspires political and criminal intrigue amidst its true-to-genre story. It pulls from so many of Lovecraft’s plots, quotes, and themes that it reverently captures the intrigue and interest from these pulpy stories while combining them in a new way. That’s a deep-cut reference to Lovecraft’s short story, " Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family." This is quickly followed up by a run-in with the Innsmouthers, who are basically fish people from another novella.
The first five minutes introduce the protagonist, Charles Reed, to Mister Robert Throgmorton, an important character who appears to be half-ape, half-human. Where 2018’s Call of Cthulhu tries to carve out a small space to tell its own stand-alone story that tucked itself into the already existing cosmic lore, The Sinking City feels like it’s picking up eight movies into a Lovecraft cinematic Cthu-niverse, delivering a concentrated dose of its distinctive flavor. The Sinking City takes steps into genre-refreshing territory in order to set it apart from its Lovecraftian peers.
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