The Sinking City (2019) — criticism/review
The Sinking City is an investigative adventure game. You play an outsider, Charles Reed, World War veteran turned private eye, arrived at the catastrophe stricken urban sprawl that is Oakmont, located in who knows New England. Possessing a pedigree for making games in this genre, thanks to a series of mostly well-received Sherlock Holmes games, The Sinking City’s open-world design provides a new structure and opportunity for developer Frogwares to stretch the limits of their craft. It is an ambitious project; a bolder one, even, as they derive the game’s setting and drama from the mythos established by H. P. Lovecraft and the ideological subtext that girders the late author’s fiction.
Such is the spectacular promise beneath the surface of The Sinking City. A chance to dwell within a crafted setting that engages with a body of literature that has a rarely appreciated American, historical and philosophical identity. In the role of a detective, players might interrogate that fiction and become doomed interlopers; in turn, the fiction of the game might host intersections of cosmic horror and American history, birth mysteries that resonate with realistic connections to the lives and fears of humans in the post-industrial age. Such is the promise, but the reality of The Sinking City often falls short. Its successes, however, are still worth celebrating because of Frogwares admirable desire to tackle Lovecraft’s fiction in ways most games have been afraid to.
The City: Its rubble and its people
As Charles Reed, players traverse the eponymous sinking, flooded city on their way to sites of investigative import. Scattered through the city are crime scenes, public archives like police records, libraries, the town hall, all which become resource for progressing through the game’s many pertinent and non-essential mysteries. You will spend a lot of time along the streets and alleys of Oakmont during your investigations, and an underlying genericness, the ubiquitous repetition of prefab structures that comprise it, should become quickly obvious. Frogwares utilized a similar tech to what Ubisoft uses to construct their realistic cities, generating entirety of Oakmont and its interiors from recyclable assets.
Despite generic origins, the art direction and presentation of The Sinking City survives, and the streets of Oakmont are dramatically rendered. Sure, there are swarms of brainless NPCs wandering the streets, cycling through their broken and incoherent animations, crowds of these huddled next to their exact twin just sobbing or reading the paper, but the character of the city persists beneath its obviously auto-generated aspects.
Oakmont’s pre-flood history glimmers beckoning to you from underneath the surrounding devastation while you navigate its districts. It feels like the city could maybe teach you something about how people live their lives, just never directly, only by suggestion. The living conditions of each district contribute to a shared story about class and ecological stratification in a transformed urban environment. As the infrastructural qualities of the city succumb to harsh ecological conditions, it is as though the social structures suffer just as much; natural and supernatural forces weather away the social, affecting life across race, species and class lines. These are the early hours of social living in the days leading up to the impending apocalypse, which Oakmonters, and us in the real world, will soon be confronted by. All aspects of the city coalesce into a whole as a site with centuries of history, where the ambiance of civilization is still motivating people to try and live a mostly normal life before an encroaching disaster. Oakmont is a setting that becomes animated, not only through exposition during the story, but through its constant and realistic presence within the context of its fiction, as any good environment, real or virtual does.
But moving deeper inside Oakmont, into its houses and offices where signs of life should be most unique and personalized, the story is not as rich. Many of the game’s unique investigations occur in similar looking building interiors, which is a wholly negative way to frame the regular process of trolling murder sites for clues. It really is a glaring fault that makes you ask, why is this the one apartment that everyone chooses to kill each other in? An obviously absurd question with no logical answer, but the repetition in The Sinking City had me constantly slinging rhetorical inanities like this just to keep entertained.
These generic crime scenes draw attention to how much of The Sinking City is derived from a template. What’s worse is how pervasive this template is, extending beyond superficial, graphical details to the structure and mechanics of investigation. The investigative process in The Sinking City is rote, formulaic, and involves no deductive work whatsoever.
2. An Oakmont Definition of Investigation
After players collect all the primary clues within a crime scene, an other-wordly portal opens in its center. Stepping inside lets Charles Reed utilize his supernatural “retrocognition” ability to witness the moment-to-moment events of a crime. Imagine something obviously overpowered and gamey, like Batman vision or playing as a detective with omniscience, and you would be imagining how much drama this contrivance can deflate. By observing still-life moments of a stabbing or fleeing suspect, players sequence the beginnings and endings of a crime, assigning each vignette a number usually out of 3. These are never any challenge because the action is rarely dispersed around a crime scene, they typically move in linear directions (away from the victim). Further, there is no way to complicate the process with false interpretations. You are never allowed to order these differently from the correct sequence.
There is also the mind palace, where players can pair clues to build chains of deductive reasoning. Reed’s mind palace is a poorly implemented system. In another game it is a tool that assists with visualizing the deductive process, but in The Sinking City it just does this work on your behalf. Don’t worry, however, because your deductions can always be reinterpreted or just never made, the mind palace is irrelevant. This means there is no possibility to misunderstand a crime, which is the ultimate failure of Frogwares design in The Sinking City.
Reed’s in Oakmont to investigate the origins of his chronic night terrors, which involve the usual concoction of tentacles, sunken cities, spiteful hallucinations and apocalyptic incantations. This grander mystery has connections to another mystery, which Reed quickly involves himself with when he learns that a local aristocrat’s son, Albert Throgmorton, has washed up after a deep-sea excavation totally mad and totally unaccounted for. Albert’s father, Robert Throgmorton, a proud Oakmont native with distinct ape-like features he claims as marks of racial superiority, hires Reed to investigate his son’s disappearance, involving him with the local efforts to understand the origins of the flooding and an epidemic of mass-hysteria that very similar to Reed’s own psychosis. Thus, Frogwares conflates a quest for Reed’s personal salvation with the salvation of the city, aligning his interests with the aristocrats of Oakmont and introducing him to the local class and racial disparity.
This initial investigation concludes with the discovery of Albert’s corpse and the fingering of an immigrant from Innsmouth — that town of inbred fish-people from Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth — as the number one suspect of the murder. The Throgmortons, proud of their local legacy and racial supremacy, would interpret any violence directed at them by an Innsmouther as an example of racial violence. Players can withhold this detail in telling Robert of his son’s death, taking in to account the consequences of how you frame the narrative of a crime.
The point of investigations is seemingly not about the deductive process but more the act of weighing the social effects of your discovery. I think Frogwares is more interested in having players consider the morality and ethics of the conflicts that The Sinking City’s mysteries have players confront. An investigation usually only diverges in the interpreting and authoring of what all the clues, suspects and motives ultimately speak to: if this was or was not a race crime. Inexplicable acts of occult violence can be made entirely comprehensible with the proper narrative around them. The final interpretation of any crime is the convenient elimination of all ambiguity. Investigation is a mechanical process in The Sinking City that has no function for concepts like truth, accuracy or methodology.
In effect, investigation in The Sinking City is a pretext for the employing of a crime’s significance to serve a social context. It’s about authoring truths and tailoring effects to create or alter social reality.
But your authority ultimately feels ineffectual; the affect of an interloper putting boot-sized holes through the walls of Oakmont’s civic institutions and practices never clings to Reed. As truths are authored, by bullet or by Reed’s word, the city remains the same regardless of his decisions. Reed’s growing prominence within Oakmont lends creed to the assumption The Sinking City wants players to participate in this story as an interloper, one whose brain becomes pickled by a briney eldritch solvent, too deeply involved, like so many characters in the mythos that Frogwares is working from. With as much attention to the civic relationships of Oakmont’s present and historical citizens paid by Frogwares, a character like Charles Reed seems primed to really be a disruption. He might be in the position to decide who lives or dies, but whether anyone lives or dies in The Sinking City is essentially irrelevant to the game as played or how the story proceeds.
3. The Trouble With Charles Reed
Charles Reed is a conflicted presence in The Sinking City. To play as Reed is to experience his inefficacy as an agent in the game world, while observing Reed as he functions within the story is to see him positioned as an essential element of the drama. His investigations never complicate the situation in Oakmont for its citizens or himself, but he is written as the figure which will ultimately decide the fate of the world in the game’s epic conclusion.
Allow me to communicate the extent of his Charle’s Reeds significance. Befriending the Throgmortons, other families and random thugs grants him the political immunity to skirt and go above the law on several occasions. He is uniquely supernatural, omniscient, can observe conversations from the past in vivid detail, and is an unparalleled detective for it. The world’s fate is his to decide(or is predetermined for him, but either way). And most significantly, he is the player-character in a world of NPCs, granting him access to the perks of a talent-tree, crafting menu and fast-travel. The world of The Sinking City is Charles Reed’s stinking rotten oyster.
The mechanics of the noir-mystery story The Sinking City constantly flirts at telling clashes with its open-world game design. There is a dissonance at the core of the game that originates with Charles Reed, the protagonist, and Charles Reed, the player. At the level of dramatics, Charles Reed can never reach the lowest, most inhospitable and difficult to navigate spaces because he must inevitably reemerge to make the ultimate story decision: which of three endings to pick. There is never a point in The Sinking City where the player endangered or powerless. Reed cannot lose possession of his equipment, because that would undermine the Knowledge Points or the crafting materials players have spent to make their combat experience better. And Charles Reed cannot miss important investigative details, because that would obscure his path to become the special one, whose destined right it is to decide the fate of the world. A talent tree and crafting system signals from the start that playing The Sinking City is, in un-abstracted terms, a process of cultivating power.
Rhetorically, this is game design that rebukes the circumstances that create the drama which Lovecraftian cosmic horror and noir mysteries classically derive their protagonists. The narrative and mechanics cannot accommodate progression through failure, where a player’s decisions might result in a permanent slamming of a door that catches their pistol hand in the jamb. There is nothing in The Sinking City that suggests Frogwares designed these systems as a conscious rejection of how powerlessness functions in these literary traditions. Considering this disharmony alongside the generating of Oakmont via middle-ware (which is not a problem in itself), it does at least feel like The Sinking City is largely shaped by concessions, like its ambitious promise has been paired down in service of a homogenized concept of mainstream playability. Players will encounter plenty of scary enemies with bad AI that will whittle their ammo and sanity meter away, but these losses and “risks” are just how the game affects cheap danger. The only loss to experience is a conventional player death that the latest save will always soothe. Nothing poses a threat to Charles Reed because the structure wasn’t made that way.
I have no real sense of what it was like to develop The Sinking City, but I suspect that a more cohesive and competent game would have resulted if Frogwares had reduced the scale of their vision and designed something smaller. In a smaller game, many of the systemic-narrative collisions would be obviously inappropriate and would hopefully never be include. I can’t rightfully say if The Sinking City is this repetitive and dissatisfying because Frogwares conceded to popular taste by adopting conventional open-world design, but I can say what is good about the game is buried under miles of mediocrity.
Littered throughout the game are examples of a visionary mangling of Lovecraftian tropes. As Matthew Gault wrote at length for Waypoint, the weirdest and most detested figures of Lovecraft’s mythos find refuge and a semblance of humanity in the city Frogwares created. Playing boring games long enough to witness buried, transformative moments is the unfortunate, but often ethically necessary labor to unearth hidden, noteworthy experiences. My new favorite example of a trope being inverted came from such work, learning that the Esoteric Order of Dagon have diversified their goals after establishing themselves in Oakmont. No longer merely a cult for the worship of a fish god, they now provide food and community services similar to the socialist Survival Programs of the Black Panthers during the American 1960s. This could be a brilliant highjacking, but between moments of intrigue and fun, generic boredom pervades.
I believe Frogwares could create a good, Lovecraftian investigative adventure game, but The Sinking City is not that. Their talent and passion for handling the source material is clear to me when the normalcy of regular, urban, 20th century American living survives and isn’t completely dissolved by the weirdness of an Eldritch reality. In that quality, I found an empathetic bridge to the terror and struggle of living in Oakmont, a connection to the real world, that most Lovecraftian media forget to build. But it is difficult to find anything specific in this sinking, auto-generated mess. Without the anxiety to build a game that , in every aspect, strives and fails to be as big as contemporary open-world games usually are, The Sinking City might have been a better game that I could recommend. But it isn’t that game.
