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

2. Its Ambitions Escape Its Reach

However, as wonderful as all the things that The Sinking City gets right are, there's a few glaring problems that rear their head as the gameplay progresses. The open world is an excellent concept for this Lovecraftian nightmare, but it's also one that's incredibly hard to live up to with the tools that this indie title possesses.

It's sometimes a bit too vast, repeating house models and NPCs to a noticeable point that then takes an incredibly long time to run between in the sprawling streets. The game feels like it's been stretched, copied and pasted to create scale rather than honed into one incredibly tight vision, which perhaps could have been possible if its districts were squashed down somewhat, or NPCs made more interactive. There's a few times that the detective work can get a little overly familiar, too, with repetitive beats to hit at each scene you experience.

The construction of the monsters is another high point, but the way they interact with the environment can be troublesome. Playing through the early stages of the game saw plenty of moments where limbs were poking through solid walls or creatures sinking through floors where they shouldn't, and on one frustrating occasion I personally fell into a staircase with no way out other than by loading an old save point. This is something that will likely be tightened up post-launch, but I can only go from my own experience - which was fine for the most part, but occasionally immersion-breaking when seeing a disembodied lump of flesh poking through a doorframe every now and then.

Combat is not particularly inspiring either, though sneaking and running is obviously the intended (and far better) option for facing up against enemies. One exploitation that I discovered is that if you get too close, you can smack crawling creatures with your shovel without their attacks landing as intended - which again will need patching in the time to come. Other than that, load times are long and common, but expected in a piece this large.