Saturday Morning Gaming: The Sinking City

The Sinking City is on sale for 90% off on Steam. That’s four bucks! Be warned, this game isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s got all kinds of potential Content Warning stuff going on in there. Self-harm, suicidal ideation, graphic violence, and then some.

You’re Charles Reed. A private investigator tormented by nightmares of an upside-down city. There are many people afflicted with this particular nightmare, it seems. Enough that you get invited to Oakmont to talk to people who claim to know why this is happening. And, of course, Oakmont is hell on earth.

Oakmont is a place where you can go to but you can’t leave from.

The richest guy in town quickly hires you to find his son and then it’s all downhill from there:

You’re a detective and you have to investigate various mysteries and murders. You have been cursed with something like the ESP from The Dead Zone where you can look at an item or a location and see the events that transpired there. Visions of the past and this allows you to piece together a narrative that explains what happened. Oh, the guy woke from a deep sleep and went nuts and jumped out of that window…

It’s a Lovecraft-kinda story so you have two wells of hit points. The first is, of course, “hit points”. The second is “sanity” and this is where the game kinda shines. If you use your Dead Zone powers for too long, you start going nuts. At first, this manifests as your vision getting a little fish-eyed. Then you start seeing things (perhaps remembering them). After that, it starts getting *DARK*. Like, your character points his gun at his head. That sort of thing. Fake monsters start attacking you (and they can do damage to your real hit points).

Oh, and encountering particular events or creatures will also trigger your sanity. There’s a particularly offensive mirror that harms you if you stand too close to it.

The game does a lot of stuff right. The atmosphere is amazing. You’re given a handful of choices at various points and your choices are between “oof, I don’t want to do that…” and “holy cow, I *REALLY* don’t want to do *THAT*”. There’s a palpable feeling of dread as you wander around in the game. The wharf looks like it *STINKS*. As you boat around the city, the water looks seriously non-potable. The NPCs are ugly and everything looks like it’s in the process of rotting.

It *FEELS* like a Lovecraft story.

The way they handle investigations is by having you look at the evidence and put two and two together (specifically, you link evidence together in your head):

After you link the right pieces together, you can move on to the next thing and probably be horrified by it. Sometimes you have to look for stuff in the newspaper’s archives or go to City Hall to find a particular address for a company. So it feels like you’re actually doing investigation.

It’s not perfect, it’s very easy to overlook a piece of evidence and so I admit to playing with a walkthrough to help me do stuff like “find the bottle of morphine in the hallway outside of the suspect’s room” (seriously, how was I supposed to see that?) and so if you don’t like the idea of a game that pretty much requires a walkthrough to beat it, well… you’re going to have a bad time with this one. But if you don’t, this is one of the best adaptation of his style that I’ve seen make it into gaming.

If you have any love for Lovecraftian fare, check it out. Hey. Four bucks!

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is your first look at Oakmont. All screenshots taken by the author.)