Stepping inside lets Charles Reed utilize his supernatural “retrocognition” ability to witness the moment-to-moment events of a crime. An Oakmont Definition of InvestigationĪfter players collect all the primary clues within a crime scene, an other-wordly portal opens in its center. The investigative process in The Sinking City is rote, formulaic, and involves no deductive work whatsoever. What’s worse is how pervasive this template is, extending beyond superficial, graphical details to the structure and mechanics of investigation. These generic crime scenes draw attention to how much of The Sinking City is derived from a template. 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. 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. 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.īut 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. 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.
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. 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. The living conditions of each district contribute to a shared story about class and ecological stratification in a transformed urban environment. It feels like the city could maybe teach you something about how people live their lives, just never directly, only by suggestion. Oakmont’s pre-flood history glimmers beckoning to you from underneath the surrounding devastation while you navigate its districts. 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. Frogwares utilized a similar tech to what Ubisoft uses to construct their realistic cities, generating entirety of Oakmont and its interiors from recyclable assets.ĭespite generic origins, the art direction and presentation of The Sinking City survives, and the streets of Oakmont are dramatically rendered. 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. 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. The City: Its rubble and its peopleĪs Charles Reed, players traverse the eponymous sinking, flooded city on their way to sites of investigative import. 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. Such is the promise, but the reality of The Sinking City often falls short. 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. 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.
Such is the spectacular promise beneath the surface of The Sinking City.
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