Despite the visual aid offered by the Mind’s Eye ability, Charles will need to use real-world detective tactics to discover complex sequences of clues and ultimately solve the crime. The methods used to solve these crimes are presented in a much more realistic way than most any other detective game I’ve played before – even the Sherlock Holmes games. There is a brilliant complexity and an ongoing progression of seriousness for each case and how it impacts the big picture of what is going on in Oakmont and even the world. The Sinking City is loaded with crimes and mysteries, and once you solve that initial murder case prepare for many more investigations from simple robberies to crazy cults, horrible racial hate crimes, and even government corruption. Most games will lazily put a mark on the map, but The Sinking City turns something as simple as traveling into its own mini-game of discovery. Sometimes location clues are verbal while others are buried in the hundreds of documents you’ll want to carefully read while playing. Yes, there are a few key locations on the map from the beginning, but generally, when somebody tells you to go somewhere they might only give you a street name, or if lucky an intersection. Speaking of locations, I was also impressed that the game doesn’t hold your hand when prompting you to find a place in the city. The Sinking City is heavy on conversation and dialogue trees, and the one thing I really appreciated was that any discoveries you had made prior to talking to someone appeared as dialogue options, and as such indirectly rewards your thorough investigation of the city, or at least the immediate area, prior to engaging with key people, otherwise you fall into that trap of backtracking between people and locations, and this is one game where you want to minimize travel…more on that in a moment. It’s all quite intuitive, even during the initial investigation that serves as your in-game tutorial. As clues are revealed they are placed in your Mind Palace where you must link that critical information into valid deductions to solve the crimes. The Sinking City is primarily an adventure game, but there are also heavy components for puzzles and even some RPG-lite integration with three skill trees covering Combat, Vigor, and Mind abilities.įans of any of the recent Sherlock Holmes games will find familiar material when you start analyzing crime scenes with a unique detective vision called Mind’s Eye that reveals visual clues that you must sort through to recreate a sequence of events. He has come to Oakmont to seek out the source of these visions along with exploiting his private investigator skills in solving a few crimes along the way. You’ll be playing as Charles Reed, a WWI veteran who has been suffering from nightmarish visions just like the one that launches the game. Racial issues have led to segregation with various species confined to certain districts, but no matter what part of town you are exploring there is this overwhelming sense that something evil is lurking beyond the obvious. Oakmont is quite massive and divided into multiple districts offering unique looks and gameplay opportunities as you travel across the city. In addition to a great setup for the story The Flood offers plenty of inspiration for the artists who have created a haunting version of Venice where flooded roads are now canals and boats are a primary mode of transportation. Immigration and racial issues are still obvious within the storytelling but don’t seem to resonate as much as they do in our current political and social climates when we are talking about fish and monkey people trying to survive in Oakmont, Massachusetts after The Flood has submerged much of their city and separated them from the mainland. Rather than skirt the obvious issues with the controversial author that inspired the game, the developers embrace them with an upfront warning about what you are about to experience, but then brilliantly disguises those same issues in a world of fantastic locations and mystical creatures. Lovecraft’s “ Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” will certainly recognize familiar storylines, but knowledge of the author or his works is not required. The Sinking City fits into that category perfectly, blending imagery and gameplay mechanics from Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and a splash of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. The mere mention of the name sparks images of a certain visual style, a certain gameplay style, and an overall sense of what you are going to get when you play the game, no matter what it is. The name Frogwares has become as much of a genre as it is a studio.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |