1/9/2023 0 Comments The sinking city first case![]() ![]() Just looking at the creature drains your sanity meter, emphasizing mechanically how otherworldly this is. It serves as one of your first major indicators that Oakmont's problems are much deeper than a simple flood. The creature is clearly unnatural, and a disturbing mix of humanoid and alien parts. In that first quest, you have a scripted encounter with one of the game's otherworldly monsters. You might notice a little red flag during this first quest, amid all the promising indications, for example: By which I mean: the pieces don't fit together to make a whole puzzle. I've heard players and reviewers repeat the phrase "rough around the edges" when talking about this game, and I want to take it further - the game is all edges. …Aaaaand then you repeat the same shit over and over again for 20 hours until you're done, and the “mind palace” system ultimately never amounts to anything more complicated than “choose outcome A, B, or C”. The first choice of the game is whether or not you believe this person: Were they actually possessed by a strange force, or did they just kill someone they already hated? It all looks really promising at first. But they also have motivations that could’ve led them to murder, too. They tell you that they have no memory of the crime, that they were gripped by a supernatural madness that compelled them. For example: In this first quest, you always discover who the murderer is - but you have to determine why they did it. You can combine things in different ways to reach different, mutually exclusive conclusions - making the whole system feel less like “discover the truth or get it wrong”, and more like “ decide the truth, because no-one can ever know for sure”. Investigation uses a neat system called the "mind palace" that you use to combine evidence to reach deductions that gives you a sense of solving a mystery. The game's first quest is a supernatural murder mystery, which introduces you to the main mechanics of the game: combat and investigation (the latter being a great idea for this sort of story). In Oakmont, people who are half-fish or half-gorilla are just a normal part of the scenery. The locals have their own religious sects, their own deity, their own dialect, and their own grisly traditions. On top of that, Oakmont was already a strange place before the flood. ![]() By now, Oakmont has collapsed in on itself: monsters prowl dark places, entire buildings and streets have fallen apart or sunk, and paper currency has lost all value (people trade in bullets now). Six months ago, an unnatural flood separated Oakmont from the mainland - and the waters keep rising. ![]() After an opening cinematic where you see one of those nightmares first-hand (involving the sky being replaced by an ocean, in which swims an enormous tentacled monster - the visual that got me interested in the game), you step off the boat and immediately learn that Oakmont is far weirder than you could’ve known. You play as a private investigator in 1921, who travels to the fictional city of Oakmont seeking an answer to the enigmatic nightmares that have been plaguing him. The game actually starts off real strong. This is a rant about how to make a game that is much less than the sum of its parts. You literally don't need to play this game.īut this isn't a rant about making decisions matter in gameplay. You could watch the ending cinematics by themselves, with no context, and be just as well-off. Your most significant choices literally don’t matter - they're just chores to get to the end, where the final reward is just a choice of which astonishingly short cutscenes. In every main quest, you choose who dies at the end - but no matter what you choose, both the people involved are written out of the story, so the plot can progress the same way no matter what choice you make. I promise, you have played virtually every part of this game before, in titles like SKYRIM and ARKHAM ASYLUM (and if those seem like really disparate games to you, then that might be an indication of just how generic this one is).Īnd two: It's got one of the laziest illusion-of-choice storylines I've played recently. One: It's an absolutely forgettable over-the-shoulder action/exploration game, with a huge environment that is full of "atmosphere" (i.e. So, here's the thing about 2019’s THE SINKING CITY: You literally don't need to play it. ![]()
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