The Sinking City Remastered

Oakmont, the titular city, is a place coming apart at the seams. A place where the barrier between normal life and annihilation has become so distressed and worn that to even imagine the horrors poised to wash over it is to invite those horrors to seep through the cracks. Skeletons of beached ships lay mangled against partly submerged tenements. Diesel fumes belch from outboard motors and mix with the musk and grime of the unwashed ferry-goers to dance above a salty stew of rotting whale carcasses and spilled industrial chemicals. And yet the people of Oakmont cling to normalcy as best as they can, casting fishing lines from makeshift docks fashioned outside their apartment windows, butchering meat at the market, drinking at the bar. The monsters can be terrible and the people sometimes monstrous, but the true horrors here are the omnipresent reminders of just how fragile that day-to-day normalcy we so take for granted can sometimes be. Astoundingly prescient for a game originally released in 2019. Gameplay wise, there’s not much to write home about. The combat is clunky and the tactical decisions can almost always be boiled down to “do I need to use a grenade here, or can this be beaten to death with a shovel?”. And sometimes enemies are just plain stupid – like “stand there doing nothing while you repeatedly shoot them” stupid. There’s a crafting mechanic to replenish supplies, and a degree of redundancy in the sorts of ingredients you use which, in theory, should force the player to decide between, say, making more pistol ammo or more Thomson ammo, but the ingredients were so plentiful that I rarely found myself in such a conundrum. (Perhaps playing on a higher difficulty would have forced me to be more thoughtful, but I have an inkling that it would have merely made the game frustrating.) There’s an investigation mechanic, too. If you’re hoping this allows you to exercise those brain-muscles by deducing events previously transpired, then you might be a bit disappointed as it’s more a storytelling feature. However, this mechanic does force the player to really explore the world and soak up the details – which is really the crux of the game. If this game is greater than the sum of its parts, the exploration is the ingredient that makes that formula work. The city is festooned with sights and details both terrible and compelling and the real pleasure of playing the game comes from discovering these things. As good as the sights are, the sound in the game also stands out quite a bit to me, specifically the music. A cool noir groove accompanies you as you dwell the streets, broken up by interludes of surreal ghostly voices. When entering infested areas the tone changes to a ponderous, hateful electrical static that evokes the tearing of reality as creatures burst forth from the earth. And then there are the little effects like the sound of movement from another room as you investigate the scene of a fresh atrocity. Overall, The Sinking City is a flawed game. The sum of those flaws would disqualify most games from an endorsement, but I can’t help but give this game a ringing one because of the job it does in simply bringing to life such a beautifully broken place like Oakmont.