The Dark Truth Behind The Sinking City's Nightmarish Enemies

H. P. Lovecraft's fingerprints are all over this game, which Oganesyan mused on initially:

"The best part about Lovecraft for us is that there's a lot of descriptions but they're all very vague. You don't really know the exact outlines of a creature from Lovecraft's novels, and it means that things are open to our interpretation. Whenever we design monsters, it goes from narration, to coming up with the design in words, then it goes to the concept artist, and then it goes to the 3D modeller, who actually shapes the monster."

"At each stage the decision is influenced by the people who actually do the job, and people who love Lovecraft have a pretty good idea of what a Lovecraftian monster would look like. It's not only tentacles! It's the shapeless figures, unnatural stuff. When I spoke to the concept artist who designed the monsters, the best idea that he gave me is that we're trying to mix Lovecraftian monsters with something else."

And that 'something else' can be anything from spindly collections of hands to various other decomposed body parts, as the game gleefully combines human nature and Lovecraftian horror for its otherworldly monsters:

"There is this idea that when you see creatures that look human - or they have human parts - they look like a human, they act a little bit like a human, but at the same time they are not exactly human. And when you notice this difference that's when your mind goes 'Okay, there's something very wrong here.' [...] And we are pursuing this idea with some of the monsters in The Sinking City."

He summarised it as so: "We want to give them humanoid features. We feel it's the best kind of monster, it's something you can relate to but not exactly. It's really weird."

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