The Call of Cthulhu is an old pen and paper RPG. Nevertheless, there have been few attempts to try to depict the horror game on the PC. Most such attempts from Bethesda’s Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, to Stygian, to Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhu (one of my favorite Cyanide RPGs, not that that is saying much) have done one thing well and that is to depict the Lovecraftian atmosphere. However, as games they have been fairly short, fairly linear, and have been somewhat good, but not particularly memorable. The Sinking City, alas, is also not the perfect Cthulhu game, but it does try something different with its gameplay, and in the end, I think it is maybe the best Lovecraftian RPG game, gameplaywise. Theoretically, The Sinking City is an older game. But its initial release was marred by conflict and litigation. The publisher released the unfinished game on Steam without the developer’s permission. After finally winning all the rights to the game in court, the developer then released the finished game on Steam. Before that it was only available on their own website.

You won't find the inhabitants of Oakville very inviting.

Story and Atmosphere

Our character, a former navy diver and war veteran, now private eye arrives in Oakville at the beginning of the game. Our detective Charles Reed suffers from horrible nightmares, and at the advice of a mysterious expert who he has corresponded with comes to the city. Oakville is only reachable by boat and isn’t on most maps. In addition, the city has suffered a catastrophic flood and lies half under water. The inhabitants aren’t fond of outsiders and quickly let our detective know it. Nevertheless, our mysterious expert sends us to find Mr. Throgmorton, one of the city’s wealthy patriarchs, who is looking into the nightmares plaguing the city. Thus, our detective tries to find answers for his own affliction by helping Throgmorton.

In good Lovecraftian style, we are soon sucked into conspiracies, find ourselves pitted against cultists, and are never sure whom to trust. The game also throws a number of moral dilemmas at us, where no choice is clearly good or evil and where we have to often choose our poison. For example, at one point we have to determine whether stopping a horrible cult is worth the price of taking hundreds of innocent lives. These choices not only can change the end phase of a quest, but they also are acknowledged by npcs over the course of the game. The Sinking City is a game where we get used to an almost casual horror around us. Most citizens who wander the streets look haunted, while cultists of strange gods and casual violence take place around us while the police ignore it.

Half of the city is covered in water, with barnacles and other strange growths hanging from building walls. The carcasses of gutted fished animals, some of them natural others unnaturally large or mutated lie about the street. 

The story is creepy and twisted as you'd expect in a Cthulu game.

Gameplay

The Sinking City is an interesting game, the game’s city is completely open, meaning after the first hour or so of the game you can go anywhere in the rather large city. You will move around a lot on foot or by boat. Both forms of movement seem a little too slow and rough. You have to be especially careful on boat, at it can easily get stuck, which is pretty annoying. There are fast travel stations (phone booths), which became my good friends as the game advanced.

You will spend a good amount of time in the game on and below the water.

Unlike other open world games, though The Sinking City is not brim full of side quests or things to harvest. This is because of the way the inventory and loot system work. In Oakville the inhabitants use bullets as currency and there are no merchants. Your detective can only carry a limited amount of ammunition and crafting materials, which means that you alternate between times when you have no interest in getting materials, because your detective has a full load and periods after combat where you need to actively look around to restock your supplies. The best place for supplies are the so-called contaminated areas that are barricaded off, and are inhabited by monsters. Here stealth and running are your best friends, since if you actually fight you will probably lose more ammunition than you find. 

Ahead of Charles Reed is a contaminated zone, which are the best places to find loot.

At other times, The Sinking City is a detective game, where you have to search a crime scene for clues using natural and supernatural means (your character has a kind of second sight, which costs his sanity to use, but is necessary to finding clues and secret doors). You also have to search various archives for information on some cases, whether it’s at the library, the police station, the city hall, or the local newspaper. Detective work requires finding a number of clues and reconstructing a crime in your mind, which is creatively done with various gameplay elements. 

To proceed in the story we need to do research at various archives.

The main quests are usually quite involved with multiple steps, mixing combat, a good amount of detective work, lots of story elements, and limited exploration.  There are side quests you come across as you follow the main quest. Many of these are much more dangerous and involve a lot more combat than the main quest does. Side quests tend to be pretty involved and you usually have to go to multiple locations to finish them.  The Sinking City also does things differently than I expected from a typical open world game. For example, there are quest markers, but many of them you have to put on the map yourself, with a somewhat vague address as your guide. Also houses have no numbers and few of them have signs. Buildings you can enter, contaminated zones and treasure cashes are marked with magic signs, which you can more easily see with your second sight. Unlike most Cthulhu games, The Sinking City is actually a decently long game if you complete the main quest and find and complete all of the side quests (It took me just short of 30 hours and I completed most , but not all of the side quests). 

We need to gather evidence to reconstruct events using our second sight.

Character Development

The Sinking City has a relatively shallow character building system, but one that will feel familiar to anyone who has played a number of modern action rpgs. You have a number of skill trees which let you improve Reed’s health, sanity, and carrying capacity. You can choose to craft more efficiently or gain more XP, or suffer less damage when falling. Few of these upgrades feel very significant. For example, you can buy 3 different perks to raise Reed’s health. Only the last one which raises it by 25% feels a little significant. Otherwise, Reed stays at his starting health, and even with all health upgrades most big monsters will still kill you in 1-2 hits. There are a few notable exceptions, like one perk which allows you to have 4 rounds instead of 2 loaded into the shotgun.

Speaking of weapons, we pick up a number of them in the course of the main quest, starting the game only with a small caliber pistol and a spade which we can use in melee. When we get the high-powered revolver, then a shotgun, the rifle, and finally the submachine gun, it feels like more dramatic power jumps than anything the skill system has to offer. Also, by the end of the game, you will most likely have unlocked the majority of the skills in the skill trees. That limits replayability to some degree. The only reason to replay the game would be to make different story choices. Still, I don’t think that would make the game play differently enough to motivate me to replay in the future.  

This is what the limited inventory system and skill trees look like about 2/3 of the way through the game. 

Presentation 

The Sinking City is fully voiced with cut scenes. There is still a fair amount of reading, with plenty of letters, archival documents and newspaper cuttings. The voice acting in general is pretty good, but the graphics, especially the faces appear pretty plastic and many of the npcs seem similar. While many parts of the city appear very distinct from one another, we see the same citizens and may similar looking streets. Also we see most of the game’s horrors, with the exception of bosses, pretty early in the game. Also we see most of the game’s horrors, with the exception of bosses, pretty early in the game.

While the voice acting is quite good the faces on the people
you talk tocan look too plastic and unrealistic.

 

The city, however, looks dark and impressive.
 

Conclusion 

The Sinking City earns points for me for being not only for being a good story driven atmospheric Cthulhu horror rpg, where you observe your protagonist with every successful step come closer to doom and madness. It is also a game which mixes a number of distinct gameplay elements into an interesting cocktail. In doing so it at least tries to capture some elements of the tabletop game, where fighting often takes a backseat to researching mysteries and investigating problems. The mix of combat, detective work, storytelling, and open world exploration make The Sinking City a pretty unique game. However, the shallow character development and loot systems don’t help it. Also, the plodding movement can be annoying at times. In terms of presentation, the Sinking City doesn’t reach AAA quality either, but it does compare well to most midbudget action rpgs. In the end its not a game I’d recommend to everyone, but with little competition it its lane, The Sinking City is worth taking a look at if you are looking for a good Cthulhu RPG.