The Sinking City Joy
Carri Seargent
The Sinking City is an action-adventure game developed by Frogwares and inspired by the works of horror fiction author H. P. Lovecraft. Set in the fictional city of Oakmont, Massachusetts during the 1920s, the story follows private investigator and war veteran Charles W. Reed as he searches for clues to the cause of the terrifying visions plaguing him, and becomes embroiled in the mystery of Oakmont's unrelenting flooding.
The Sinking City was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in June 2019, for Nintendo Switch in September 2019, for PlayStation 5 in February 2021 and for Xbox Series X and Series S in April 2021. A sequel, The Sinking City 2, is set to be released in 2025.[1][2][3][4][5]
The Sinking City is an open-world detective game with a third-person camera perspective. It features an investigation system in which the outcome of the player's quests will often be defined by how observant the players are when investigating different clues and pieces of evidence.[6][7]
The town of Oakmont is made up of seven districts (Advent, Coverside, Grimhaven Bay, Oldgrove, Reed Heights, Salvation Harbor, and The Shells) which have all been affected by flooding to various degrees, and the player must use a boat to safely traverse the flooded streets to reach drier areas. The player can swim if necessary, but the water is infested and can fatally damage the player's health and sanity. The player also assembles an arsenal of tools and weapons, and at times must use them to kill otherworldly creatures and dispel hallucinations. However, as Oakmont is an isolated place with dwindling resources and deteriorating social order, bullets have replaced money as the preferred currency; expending too many bullets can leave the player unable to barter for desired items. Another major resource is sanity, which is spent on investigative powers used to reconstruct crime scenes and identify clues. Sanity slowly regenerates on its own, but can be replenished faster with antipsychotic drugs. Disturbing scenes and encounters can cause sudden, sharp drops in sanity, affecting the player's perception of the surrounding environment, and complete loss of sanity is fatal.[8][9]
The Sinking City takes place in the secluded city of Oakmont, Massachusetts in the 1920s, a place that is not marked on any map and few people know how to find due to its remoteness. Oakmont has a long history of association with the occult and many of its citizens are not only eccentric, but unabashed practitioners of occultism. Cultists in bloody ritual garb are an unremarkable sight on the streets alongside fishermen, average townsfolk, refugees from the destruction of nearby Innsmouth, the destitute and desperate and well-heeled members of the upper class. The town also developed its own unique dialect over the years, but the origin of many phrases is murky. Six months prior to the events of the game, Oakmont was inundated by a mysterious, persistent flood of supernatural origin that has submerged many of its streets and cut it off from the mainland. The Flood brought with it a dark force that inexorably instils hysteria and madness in the minds of the terrified citizens, along with a plague of otherworldly creatures attracted to death called Wylebeasts, and the struggling city is on the brink of collapse. In addition, droves of people from outside Oakmont who were reported missing have been turning up in the town, drawn by haunting, unaccountable visions.[10][11][9]
Charles Reed, a U.S. Navy sailor and World War I veteran turned private investigator, travels from Boston to Oakmont at the invitation of Professor Johannes van der Berg to discover the cause of the nightmarish visions that have been plaguing him since the disappearance of the ship he served on, the USS Cyclops. These visions are shared by numerous other people and are reported most frequently in Oakmont. Soon after arrival, Reed is also hired by Robert Throgmorton, the influential and physically striking head of one of Oakmont's leading families who has also been studying the visions, to locate Professor Harriet Dough, the researcher Throgmorton had tasked with uncovering the cause of the Flood.
While pursuing his primary investigation, Reed also pursues several other tangential cases which embroil him in the politics and conspiratorial machinations of the power players of Oakmont. He investigates a break-in at the storehouse of a charity organization called the EOD ("Everyone's Obvious Duty") and uncovers the perpetrator is a university professor who wasn't trying to steal the supplies being handed out by the organization, but rather poison them, because the EOD is actually the Esoteric Order of Dagon, a cult worshipping Dagon, the God of the Deep Ones, which is trying to expand its influence in town. Reed can either choose to turn in the poisoner or aid him in the hopes that the death of innocent charity recipients will sabotage the EOD's schemes.
Later, he is hired by local crime boss Brutus Carpenter after somebody drugged him in his own home, sent him to a morgue to be burned alive and then replaced him with an identical clone. Reed discovers Brutus' attempted killer was his own son, Graham, a wounded World War I army veteran who's fallen under the sway of the Church of the Lord of the Woods, a sect that worships Shub-Niggurath. Graham wishes to use his father's vast fortune to help the needy, while also advancing the sect's goals in town. Reed can choose to either kill Brutus and allow his son to take over the family or tell Brutus the truth, after which he has his own son killed and retakes control of his criminal syndicate.
Reed discovers Professor Dough was kidnapped by Innsmouthers working for Ebernote Blackwood, the last surviving member of one of Oakmont's grand families who are secretly Deep Ones. Ebernote's family raised him believing that he was one of the Chosen Few, people granted visions who would play a crucial role in the family's doomsday prophecy, but it turns out Ebernote wasn't Chosen, so his family abandoned him when they travelled into the Deep Ones' undersea secret society. Now Ebernote wishes to conduct a ritual to implant another Chosen's visions onto himself so that he can use the power to sabotage his family's foretold doomsday, out of spite for their abandonment. Professor Dough is one of the Chosen, but Ebernote fails in his ritual and the Professor dies due to the lack of a vital instrument called the Seal of Cthygonnaar. After Reed recovers said Seal, he can choose to allow Ebernote to perform the ritual on him or kill him to escape. Even if Reed performs the ritual, Ebernote is killed by a mysterious force that wishes to see the prophecy realized.
Reed goes to confer with Professor van der Berg, only to find him murdered and himself framed for the crime. Reed discovers the true killers were a gang called the Yellow Kings, who serve a deity called Hastur. They kidnapped the family of Glenn Byers, a man who looks remarkably like Reed, and threatened to kill his family if he didn't murder van der Berg. After rescuing the Byers family, Reed can either tell Glenn to turn himself in or frame Milton Pierce, the corrupt politician who witnessed the murder and testified Reed was responsible.
Reed's search for answers ultimately unearths a plot by one of the Great Old Ones to purge humanity. Van der Berg is shown to be alive, as he is Hastur in human guise. He lures potential Chosen to Oakmont in order to unseal the sunken temple of Cthygonnaar, which imprisons Cthylla, the secret daughter of Cthulhu and Idh-yaa as well as the source of the Flood, Wylebeasts and the nightmares. Once Cthylla is freed, she will give birth to Cthulhu's reincarnation, resulting in Oakmont drowning in the sea and the world being destroyed by Cthulhu's arrival. Van der Berg reveals he brought Reed to Oakmont and prompted him to become immersed in its underbelly because he wished to persuade him of humanity's worthlessness and instigate him into fulfilling the prophecy.
When planning The Sinking City, developer Frogwares envisioned the open-world setting of Oakmont as a densely-built urban area that was two kilometers square.[12] As the scope of this made handcrafting the entire town unfeasible, Frogwares turned to Unreal Engine 4 and followed the example of city generation techniques pioneered in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series to create entire blocks of Oakmont at once through procedural generation. These prefabricated blocks were assembled from assets based on actual early 20th century New England architecture, with blocks in different districts of Oakmont following different sets of rules to give each district a distinct purpose and atmosphere. Among the various generic blocks, the designers placed a number of unique buildings and landmarks, and also decorated the generic blocks with other assets by hand. The areas of the town designated for flooding also used unique assets in their generation, such as silt, seaweed, and barnacles, to make them stand out in their districts.[11]
The Sinking City was announced by Frogwares on March 9, 2016,[13] with pre-alpha gameplay footage debuting on July 28, 2017.[14] The game was originally slated for release on March 21, 2019,[15] but it was eventually delayed to June 27, 2019.[16][17][18] Frogwares Community Manager Sergey Oganesyan explained that the decision to delay the game was made in order to avoid a crowded release window and allow for additional polishing time.[19] Frogwares later announced that The Sinking City would be a one-year timed-exclusive release for the Epic Games Store on PC, but this would not affect the console releases.[20] A Nintendo Switch port was self-published by Frogwares on September 12, 2019.[21][22]
The release of the game for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One was distributed by Bigben Interactive, which claimed to be the publisher but was only a distribution intermediary.[23] The exact role of Bigben (and Focus Home Interactive previously) was explained by Frogwares CEO in an interview given to the French media Plante Aventure in February 2020, in which he explained that Frogwares had never worked with publishing companies. Bigben Interactive and Focus Home Interactive were only licensees which do not possess intellectual properties on the games.[23]
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