#The sinking city tips archive
#The sinking city tips series

Seemingly every crime scene, story area, and empty, side mission-hosting house with a similar layout is infested with fleshy gray abominations of inscrutable anatomy that Reed must shoot with a gun until they’re dead.

Other activities, like putting crime scene events in order, similarly feel like time-wasters, though nothing quite approaches the drudgery of the game’s frequent combat. Despite the presence of fast travel points, the process of running between crime scenes, archives, and the various characters grows tedious for as interesting as the city can be beneath the surface, its grim, gray ruination makes for a rather homogeneous sight. Most of The Sinking City, though, is spent putting boots to ruined pavement in what feels like little more than busywork. And although these investigations can feel a bit guided and simplified since there are only ever two real conclusions, they always leave a nagging sense that perhaps you were wrong. Is their cult, for example, really up to no good, or is the man opposing them just a racist? (Answer: It’s the former.) Based on such context, as well as other factors like your knowledge of the city itself or the personalities of involved characters derived from evidence, you piece together your own conclusions and make story decisions as a result. You will, perhaps, take some of the in-game prejudice into account when you make your deductions. When it comes to Lovecraft’s metaphorical expression of his own abject horror at the Mixing of the Races, the game is largely uncritical. Reed that its journeying into race relations feels more like a perfunctory disclaimer. The game specifies that they’re not all wrapped up in a Dagon-worshipping cult devoted to getting human women to birth fish-people, but so many of them are and the game is otherwise so disinterested in the average Joe Innsmouther (or even people of color) compared to the exploits of the white Mr. In a rather tenuous attempt to address Lovecraft’s virulent racism, fish-faced refugees from nearby Innsmouth are a common sight, minding their own business as they try to feed their own families like anyone else. Citizens simply step around the rotting carcasses of sea creatures that litter the streets of poor areas, and they’ve gotten used to weird new fauna like crustaceans that seem to wear dead cats like shells. Oakmont is a truly fascinating backdrop, where Lovecraftian horror has essentially become the new normal. Thick crusts of barnacles seem to cake every surface, while hasty barricades wall off areas where the monsters are. And that disaster is decidedly ongoing some ships have run so far aground that they block off parts of the city, and so many of the streets are underwater that citizens often travel by boat or on crude, makeshift wooden walkways. Reed has arrived in Oakmont due to disturbing visions only to find the place devastated by a flood all but biblical in its proportions. Lovecraft and his overarching Cthulhu mythos.

#The sinking city tips series

It’s a fitting accompaniment to the game’s myriad crime scene investigation sequences, where you’ll comb an area for evidence and then fit together clues to form new, sometimes differing, conclusions in the “mind palace” section of the game menu.ĭeveloper Frogwares is best known for a long-running series of Sherlock Holmes games, and that influence is clear in their latest adaptation, which is based on the works of H.P.

#The sinking city tips archive

Here, you need to make deductions in order to figure out where you’re going, to decide which archive has the information you need and which combination of search criteria will get it.

Such decidedly analog activities are one of the most engaging elements of The Sinking City in an open-world game like this, they’re a slightly more involved alternative to the usual process of mindlessly following arrows to the next cutscene and accompanying action sequence. Reed becomes such a familiar sight to the librarian, whose mouth is sewn shut as a punishment according to “local custom,” that she later sends him a note asking for help. With the right information, he digs up addresses that must be manually marked on the map after consulting the labeled city streets. Reed is on his own, tramping through the dilapidated streets of Oakmont, Massachusetts to the university library, the hospital, or some such place, combing through newspaper archives or police records based on scant clues. The game’s fedora-wearing protagonist, Charles Reed, owns a shotgun but has no access to a GPS, a minimap, or a little earpiece to talk to some computer-whiz partner who does all his research. The life of a 1920s private investigator is hardly a convenient or particularly romantic one, at least to hear The Sinking City tell it.