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

3. A Story That Tackles Difficult Themes

The game definitely thrives on its atmosphere, which is its biggest strength - offering a forebodingly large map that is rife with the weird and wonderful. Houses poke out of the water covered in strange growths and boarded up windows, and the streets themselves often are so waterlogged you have to take a short boat trip to the other side. The sky is oppressing and bleak, it's almost constantly raining, and the locals are all sorts of strange - if they're not battering each other for a fish, they're on soapboxes wielding driftwood staffs and pointing to the ocean. Developer Frogwares has perfectly captured the essence of a Lovecraft story and distilled it into The Sinking City's very sense of being, and it's a real treat to run around the streets of Oakmont soaking it all up.

Of course, that also means that some less than savoury aspects of Lovecraft's world building have had to be incorporated too. The game opens up with a warning about the game's content representing prejudice, which feels somewhat alarming given we're inhabiting a dark, fantastical, and wholly fictional world - but it soon becomes clear that this isn't reflective of what you'd expect. Frogwares have made the effort to sift Lovecraft's hateful approach to race into cross-species humans that are warring against each other, giving us the wealthy Throgmorton family who are proudly 'gifted' with Ape genes, and the snubbed, fish-faced Innsmouthers seeking refuge from their destroyed home nearby.

The developers have taken the time and care to represent this divide between the various inhabitants of Oakmont in a tasteful way as you work between them to quell tensions, and crafted some memorable faces in the process, too, which is relieving to see in the place of what could have been in a Lovecraftian work.