The Sinking City Review - The Year's Best Horror Game?

5. Elementary Detective Work

Where The Sinking City excels against similar titles is that it seems to want to do everything just a little bit differently. Investigating crime scenes is a search for clues that you write down in your casebook, but you also have the ability to see with your 'mind's eye', opening up flashback images of the crimes as well as ghostly reenactments you can piece together to find out what really went down.

There's hidden walls, ritual chambers, and creepy rune-laden omens that will guide you in your searches, but look too closely into the dark and the dark will look back - dropping your sanity meter into peril, causing blindness and terrifying visions to materialise and attack. These features are all wonderfully implemented throughout the main storyline, making the pacing consistently immersive and proving for some surprising finds in Oakmont's secretive underbelly.

The culmination of all this investigation work ultimately comes together in a tab titled 'The Mind Palace', where you link all the clues you find in different ways to come up with final deductions of how to solve the case. Sometimes you'll want to lie in your results to protect a victim, and sometimes you'll be going off pure educated guesswork, but it all feels satisfyingly solid in terms of playing an actual detective doing actual detective work, and gives branching choices with different consequences.