The Sinking City

[Wrote a much longer criticism of *The Sinking City* for my blog, but here's the conclusion.]

I have no real sense of what it was like to develop The Sinking City, but I suspect that a more cohesive and competent game would have resulted if Frogwares had reduced the scale of their vision and designed something smaller. In a smaller game, many of the systemic-narrative collisions would be obviously inappropriate and would hopefully never be include. I can’t rightfully say if The Sinking City is this repetitive and dissatisfying because Frogwares conceded to popular taste by adopting conventional open-world design, but I can say what is good about the game is buried under miles of mediocrity.

Littered throughout the game are examples of a visionary mangling of Lovecraftian tropes. As Matthew Gault wrote at length for Waypoint, the weirdest and most detested figures of Lovecraft’s mythos find refuge and a semblance of humanity in the city Frogwares created. Playing boring games long enough to witness buried, transformative moments is the unfortunate, but often ethically necessary labor to unearth hidden, noteworthy experiences. My new favorite example of a trope being inverted came from such work, learning that the Esoteric Order of Dagon have diversified their goals after establishing themselves in Oakmont. No longer merely a cult for the worship of a fish god, they now provide food and community services similar to the socialist Survival Programs of the Black Panthers during the American 1960s. This could be a brilliant highjacking, but between moments of intrigue and fun, generic boredom pervades.

I believe Frogwares could create a good, Lovecraftian investigative adventure game, but The Sinking City is not that. Their talent and passion for handling the source material is clear to me when the normalcy of regular, urban, 20th century American living survives and isn’t completely dissolved by the weirdness of an Eldritch reality. In that quality, I found an empathetic bridge to the terror and struggle of living in Oakmont, a connection to the real world, that most Lovecraftian media forget to build. But it is difficult to find anything specific in this sinking, auto-generated mess. Without the anxiety to build a game that , in every aspect, strives and fails to be as big as contemporary open-world games usually are, The Sinking City might have been a better game that I could easily recommend. But it isn’t that game.