The Sinking City
So, here's the thing about 2019’s THE SINKING CITY: You literally don't need to play it.
And I mean that in at least two ways.
One: It's an absolutely forgettable over-the-shoulder action/exploration game, with a huge environment that is full of "atmosphere" (i.e. textures) instead of interaction. I promise, you have played virtually every part of this game before, in titles like SKYRIM and ARKHAM ASYLUM (and if those seem like really disparate games to you, then that might be an indication of just how generic this one is).
And two: It's got one of the laziest illusion-of-choice storylines I've played recently. In every main quest, you choose who dies at the end - but no matter what you choose, both the people involved are written out of the story, so the plot can progress the same way no matter what choice you make. Your most significant choices literally don’t matter - they're just chores to get to the end, where the final reward is just a choice of which astonishingly short cutscenes. You could watch the ending cinematics by themselves, with no context, and be just as well-off. You literally don't need to play this game.
But this isn't a rant about making decisions matter in gameplay.
This is a rant about how to make a game that is much less than the sum of its parts.
Signal and noise
The game actually starts off real strong. You play as a private investigator in 1921, who travels to the fictional city of Oakmont seeking an answer to the enigmatic nightmares that have been plaguing him. After an opening cinematic where you see one of those nightmares first-hand (involving the sky being replaced by an ocean, in which swims an enormous tentacled monster - the visual that got me interested in the game), you step off the boat and immediately learn that Oakmont is far weirder than you could’ve known. Six months ago, an unnatural flood separated Oakmont from the mainland - and the waters keep rising. By now, Oakmont has collapsed in on itself: monsters prowl dark places, entire buildings and streets have fallen apart or sunk, and paper currency has lost all value (people trade in bullets now). On top of that, Oakmont was already a strange place before the flood. The locals have their own religious sects, their own deity, their own dialect, and their own grisly traditions. In Oakmont, people who are half-fish or half-gorilla are just a normal part of the scenery. It's a fascinating and uneasy setting.
The game's first quest is a supernatural murder mystery, which introduces you to the main mechanics of the game: combat and investigation (the latter being a great idea for this sort of story). Investigation uses a neat system called the "mind palace" that you use to combine evidence to reach deductions that gives you a sense of solving a mystery. You can combine things in different ways to reach different, mutually exclusive conclusions - making the whole system feel less like “discover the truth or get it wrong”, and more like “decide the truth, because no-one can ever know for sure”. For example: In this first quest, you always discover who the murderer is - but you have to determine why they did it. They tell you that they have no memory of the crime, that they were gripped by a supernatural madness that compelled them. But they also have motivations that could’ve led them to murder, too. The first choice of the game is whether or not you believe this person: Were they actually possessed by a strange force, or did they just kill someone they already hated? It all looks really promising at first.
…Aaaaand then you repeat the same shit over and over again for 20 hours until you're done, and the “mind palace” system ultimately never amounts to anything more complicated than “choose outcome A, B, or C”. Oh well.
I've heard players and reviewers repeat the phrase "rough around the edges" when talking about this game, and I want to take it further - the game is all edges. By which I mean: the pieces don't fit together to make a whole puzzle.
You might notice a little red flag during this first quest, amid all the promising indications, for example:
In that first quest, you have a scripted encounter with one of the game's otherworldly monsters. The creature is clearly unnatural, and a disturbing mix of humanoid and alien parts. It serves as one of your first major indicators that Oakmont's problems are much deeper than a simple flood. Just looking at the creature drains your sanity meter, emphasizing mechanically how otherworldly this is. And there are two mandatory dialog encounters during the quest where you you express surprise at this bewildering creature, and a jaded local explains that it’s part of the horrifying current reality of Oakmont.
Except that all around you, before you even progress far enough in the first quest to encounter the first enemy, you can see other otherworldly monsters scurrying around and eating dead fish all over the docks. These little creatures are a nightmarish mix of cat and shrimp, with fur and thin antennae and twitching legs and a crustacean head peeking out of a feline mouth. They look just as bizarre and clearly not-of-this-world as any other enemy in the game. And they're all over the city. I have no idea what they're called, because you can't interact with them or talk to anyone about them. You don't lose sanity for looking at them, either. Shrimp-cats are totally normal things; what’s your problem?
Eldritch, sanity-shattering abomination
Just a normal thing
Here's another example:
Many parts of the city are flooded, and you need to use a boat to cross them. You can swim, too, but it's a worse idea. Like many games, THE SINKING CITY has a meter while you're swimming, and when it runs out, you die. In this case, that meter is your health. Why does your health go down as you swim? Because every single body of water in the entire city is absolutely infested with carnivorous eels, which start eating you alive if you're in the water too long. Your character doesn't react to that at all, though. He doesn’t even grunt in pain. He just...takes damage, while the "eels eating you" animation plays over your character as they do their normal swimming animation. Nobody that I've talked to in the game remarks about this city's infestation with ravenous man-eating eels. That's not noteworthy, apparently. There isn't even a cutscene or mandatory line of dialog to introduce the concept as a mechanic.
One last example for now:
At repeated moments throughout the game, you dive underwater to visit the ancient ruins underneath the city. During virtually all of these dives, there is an enormous tentacled monstrosity somewhere nearby - lurking just out of reach, sometimes just barely out of sight until you see an enormous shadow move and realize that it's alive. It's awesome. It's terrifying. And yes, you lose sanity by looking at it. In fact, this monster is the exact same creature that keeps appearing in your nightmares. (Or at least, the same model.) Considering that your cryptic nightmares led you here, this should be a major moment, at least once. You never talk about it, though. Why would you? It's just an impossible alien creature that you see in your dreams, living in ancient ruins immediately below the city. What's unusual about that?
Don’t get me wrong. It's not that every single texture in the game needs to have pages of lore associated with it that you explore in dialog. That's not the complaint here.
The complaint is that the world of the game is incoherent.
This is a game that is, in theory, about exploring strange things - but it's full to the brim of strange things that you can't explore or interact with at all. It feels impossible to reconcile the content of the story with the content of virtually every texture around you.
You know how Bethesda titles like SKYRIM and FALLOUT 4 will have you kill human beings with hopes and dreams and families by the dozen as long as it says “bandit” above their head, but then have one quest where the decision whether or not to kill an individual bandit is played up as this weighty moral choice?
THE SINKING CITY does that same thing, except instead of morality, it does it to its setting.
Only the things that the game tells you are weird, are treated as weird. Everything else is just dressing. But the fact that you're utterly surrounded by all those weird textures makes the main story of the game - the things it tells you are weird - seem hollow and arbitrary. Either the world is fake or the story doesn't matter. Or both.
The visual assets are the most, well, visible illustrations of this issue - but it permeates the whole game, down to the core of its story. Just to drive this home, consider this moment:
Later in the game, you discover that a mysterious organization has been conspiring around you during every event of the game. They know everything that's happened around you. They even orchestrated some of it. In their hideout, you find a letter that contains an incredible revelation about the murder from the first quest: Not only was the murderer just straight-up lying about being “possessed”, but the murder was planned out by multiple shadowy organizations. The secret conspirators you're investigating at that moment had actually teamed up with an entirely separate shadowy evil cult from a different part of the story, in order to jointly ensure that the murder would take place no matter what. That's some serious ROSEMARY’S BABY shit! Who can you trust after that? It also directly impacts events that were central to the beginning of the story, events that the player participated in first-hand. It blows a ton of assumptions you had completely out of the water; it’s a betrayal of your understanding of the story’s reality from the very beginning of the game. It's really, really cool.
Or it would be, in theory, but nobody gives a shit about it. Certainly not your character - they don’t even say a single throwaway "No...it can't be..." voice clip when you read the note (which is totally optional, by the way). You can't talk to anyone about it. It should change everything, but in THE SINKING CITY, it changes nothing. A major story twist like that is rendered just as meaningless a part of the scenery as that texture of a dead octopus on the pier which you see in 87 other places throughout the game.
And so, everything that was initially charming or fascinating in the beginning of the game gets defanged by this complete lack of cohesion. You know that all the weird shit is just a texture, so it loses impact. Sure, there's a rotting whale in the middle of the street, but it literally doesn't matter, no-one cares. Sure, anywhere else it would be weird that multiple people keep having visions of giant creatures under the sea, but you literally see a giant alien monster in the sunken ruins immediately beneath the city, and that is apparently not worth anyone's time, so...the main "mystery" of the game never even seems like a mystery. You're just going through the motions so the next NPC can tell you where to go, over and over, until the credits roll.
Big and empty
All of this gets exacerbated by how huge the map is. The city of Oakmont is actually pretty big. In order to fill that map, though, everything gets repeated a million times. There's loads of identical beached whales all over the city. I've seen the same rotting shark in fifty billion places. The architecture repeats, too - which is funny, because the buildings are virtually all rotted/falling apart/etc., so you'd expect they have more distinct maps. But no, there are broken down buildings in different parts of town that are so identical I got them mixed up during gameplay. The repetition of assets necessary to fill up such an enormous map prevents any setpiece from being really memorable or noteworthy, which again, leaves all of the "color" and "flavor" toothless.
While exploring the city, I remember the first time I saw a neon sign for "West, M.D." on a building. I was delighted - it's a cute, subtle reference to a character from one of Lovecraft's stories (about a Dr. West who became obsessed with reanimating the dead). But then I saw that sign about a hojillion more times. Sometimes multiple times on the same block, just a few yards apart. And on top of all that, the main quest introduces a character named Dr. Westerbrook, who is...obsessed with reanimating the dead. That's…that’s the same reference. Again.
Why did you put two versions of the same reference in your game? Didn’t you worry that repeating one of them a million times on street signs might take some of the bite out of it when you cashed in the other one in the main story? They do this sort of thing a bunch of times, too. I've seen the same sign for "Whately Chemicals" all over town (the Whatelys are a family from another Lovecraft story), only to later be introduced to a family called the Whitelys later in the game.
Now, there were some references that didn’t get overplayed. There’s a couple of posters that only appear once in the whole map, and I not only noticed them but remembered them - like one which is a reference to an old YouTube video about a specific Sherlock Holmes game (which was made by the developer of this game). I loved it, it was such a cool callback to discover and recognize. But if it’s only in one place, how did I find it with crawling all over the whole map? Because it's right next to a fast travel point.
A rare moment of pure joy in THE SINKING CITY. (The poster reads: Sherlock Holmes - Mystery of the Creepy Watson)
In fact, almost all of the landmarks that stick out in my memory are right next to fast travel points. The rest is just...empty space. Unlike better open world games, this one doesn't actually reward you for exploring - in fact, their combat mechanics pretty strongly discourage it (combat is dangerous, and you’re likely to lose more than you get out of it). So you have no reason to be anywhere other a quest location or a fast travel point. People complain about the travel in this game being a slog, but I think this is really what they're complaining about. It’s not necessarily that travel mechanics are terrible, it’s that the world is terrible to travel through.
Fairness and meanness
Now: Is it wrong for me to beat up on a game for reusing assets when it doesn't have as huge a budget as AAA titles?
Kinda. And while I don’t know the details of this game’s development, we do know that the developer had a troubled relationship with the publisher - who literally stopped paying the developer during development, and then basically tried to steal ownership of the game, as explained by the developer in a public statement issued more than a year after the game’s release. I could absolutely see a lot of these issues stemming from financial problems during development (most notably, the extreme overuse of assets and emptiness of the city).
But I’m not here to put the developer on trial for the game they made; I’m here to explore it and see what we can learn from it. The problems with THE SINKING CITY are so deep and pervasive that you can’t imagine them just flipping a money switch and fixing them all while keeping everything else the same - core features would need to be approached completely differently across the board.
There’s another reason why I’m being rough on THE SINKING CITY, though.
I saw footage from the game (which turned out to just be the opening cutscene), and I got really excited for it. I noticed that no-one was really effusive about it, though, so I read a few reviews - and they were, at worst, lukewarm. IGN gave the game a 7.8 out of 10 and an overall positive summary, comparing it to titles like BIOSHOCK and some entries in the Silent Hill series. Even accounting for score-bloat in reviews, it seemed like the game was overall serviceable. At the very least, I got the impression that my interest in the subject matter and familiarity with this genre of game would carry me through what seemed to be relatively minor shortcomings.
Y’all, this game is not good.
And you shouldn’t have to sink 20+ hours into it only to retroactively realize which parts of the reviews actually turned out to be major problems. The reality is that any game which is functional and made by a team of artists and professionals will “have its moments”. This game certainly does. But this game has way more problems than it has charm, to the extent that it feels almost deceptive to even say “it has its moments”.
To give you a clearer idea (and hopefully a few laughs without needing to spend $40 on the thing like I did), here’s a quick hits list of some other clear problems with the game:
Regardless of what choice you make at the end of each chapter, the game will play the same cutscene. So not only do your choices not affect the story, they don’t even effect what the game shows you. And a few times, the cutscene shows the outcome of one specific choice, too, so you can pick one option and be shown something completely different, in a totally different place, only for you to be told in dialog that what you just saw didn’t happen when the cutscene ends.
Whenever you load a save file, the game places you at the nearest fast-travel point - even if you hadn’t discovered it yet. Many times when I was playing, I would die while exploring a new area, and then the game would load me somewhere completely new. And you usually keep the evidence and such that you found before you died, so dying not only doesn’t stop you from progressing - it actually advances you sometimes. By accident.
They make a big deal about how bullets are currency in Oakmont, and you’ll need to decide whether to use them as ammo or spend them as money to get a favor from someone. It turns out that there are only about 3 times that you can “spend” bullets in the game, and each time it only costs 1 bullet.
Enemies basically don’t react to taking damage. No yelps, no blood splatters, nothing. Just sponge it up until they die. And they’re big sponges, too. I spent half the game thinking every enemy was invincible.
Treasure chests refill themselves whenever you exit a building and then enter it again. You can use this in exactly the way you are thinking of now.
At one point you discover that both you and one other person are "the Chosen One". You then have to make a choice between two options, which are presented as "Only one Chosen one can survive" and "Only one Chosen one can remain". These are different choices; one of them means you kill the other person, one of them means you kill yourself. Can you guess correctly which means which?
Multiple main-plot NPCs have the exact same facial models.
NPCs that aren’t involved in plot stuff only have one line of dialog that they repeat forever. Sometimes that line of dialog will spoil something that’s about to happen, because you weren’t expected to talk to that NPC until after talking to a different one.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
To be extra clear: I’m not saying that the real people who worked on this are some kind of art villains because they contributed to a game that didn’t rock. But as it stands, they made a game that is virtually a how-to guide for making this kind of open world game badly.
The end of all cycles
THE SINKING CITY is a game that is alternatingly forgettable and frustrating. You could imagine it being fun to play (or stream), the same way a certain type of bad movie is fun to watch, if not for just how long and repetitive it is. Even the jokes made at the game’s expense get old by the end of your playthrough.
At the end of the day, I can’t imagine any changes or DLC or anything that would make me want to go back to it. Even if they found some really cool things to add, they’d be subsumed by the deeper structural problems with the game.
Nothing resonates, nothing has any impact.
How can it? It's either not interactable, repeated to the point of meaninglessness, contradicted by another part of the game, or all of the above. It's all a disparate pile of stuff. It's all edges. None of the pieces add up to something bigger - the game’s design basically guarantees that. Even though this probably is the best big-budget Lovecraft game out there right now (which is a really bleak reality for fans of the genre), it's just not worth it, even for die-hards. It's just the boring pieces of games you've already played, with a generic Lovecraft re-skin.
By the end of the game, you’ve learned that you are a “Chosen one” that arises once every 100 years, with the unique ability to unseal an ancient alien evil that will end the world. In the sunken ruins beneath the city that are older than you can ever know, you are given one final choice.
You can run away and spend the rest of your life trying to avoid your destiny.
You can kill yourself, as the previous “Chosen ones” did, delaying the end of the world for another 100 years until the next “Chosen one” arises and must make the same choice.
Or you can go ahead and awaken the monster that ushers in the apocalypse.
Whenever I play games like this, I make a real good-faith effort to play the story out sincerely. I try to put my personality in my character, and play them both consistently and in a way that reflects my own feelings. I try to make these sorts of decisions honestly and on-the-spot. When I got to the end of BASTION, I spent forever just staring at my ceiling and searching my soul for the answer to which of two ending choices was “right”.
And after running around Oakmont for a few days, I thought, fuck it - end it all.
Let's see something new.
