Reviews
[Review] ‘The Sinking City’ is an Engrossing Blend of Eldritch Horror and Detective Work
Bloody Disgusting departs for Oakmont and finds fish-faced terror, and cosmic horrors in The Sinking City review for PC.
A lot of modern horror games like to dabble in a bit of Lovecraft, few really delve into the man’s work as deeply as Frogwares’ The Sinking City.
By this I mean it doesn’t just slap a few tentacles on the box, ram in a sanity meter, and feature a bunch of mysterious writing alluding to cosmic beings. It has those things, of course, but The Sinking City takes on a lot more of Lovecraft’s trappings, including the less appealing undertones to it. You can’t say Frogwares hasn’t gone all in on trying to make a Lovecraftian story feel as authentic as possible as far as world-building goes.
What Frogwares also brings to the table is its exceptional detective systems from its underappreciated Sherlock Holmes games. By blending this with the Lovecraftian setting and story, Frogwares has perhaps made one of the most immersive and disturbing detective games for years.
We find ourselves in the gummy shoes of one Charles Reed, a war veteran turned private eye, whose sanity is slipping due to some unknown cause, and in an effort to find a cure, he heads to the city of Oakmont, which supposedly holds the key to his ailment, and likely holds some rather sinister secrets.
Oakmont is a decidedly grim-looking place from the moment you step off a boat and onto its waterfront (though due to flooding, Oakmont has a lot more waterfront than it should). If you played Call of Cthulhu earlier this year, then there’s an eerie similarity to the starting area in that game, a dilapidated harbor populated by an assortment of the thuggish and the surly sorts.
It’s a fairly large city, split into specific districts and all are full of dank and dreary life, and an oppressive atmosphere. Frogwares has filled it with detailed decay and ruin. This is not a thriving place, this is a dying one, a sinking one, and those still left in it are well suited to its sickness. Reed’s journey will take him not just through the streets of Oakmont, but to other, more otherworldly places too, so there’s plenty to explore. You’ll travel by boat to navigate some parts of the city due to the flood, and there’s even a trip to the briny deep itself, and that provides a whole new set of issues. In short, this is an expansive game world, and it is a delight to be in.
As he sets foot in Oakmont, Reed almost immediately strolls into a case he needs to solve in exchange for information. Charles gets to see the first of many grisly sights here, and this task is one of the more straightforward and morally sound things he’s asked to do during his time in Oakmont. All he will be asked of will be further stress on his increasingly frazzled mind, and that, in turn, will affect how the game plays out, so everything you do has to be carefully considered. From conversation to combat and beyond.
Oakmont is full of cruel-hearted opportunists, desperate, tortured souls, and miserable hatemongers, always looking to find an angle to negotiate for someone to do their dirty work, and Reed, with his particular set of snooping skills, is a hot commodity for these scoundrels, saps, and savages.
Charles Reed is not just a naturally good detective, it seems a side effect of his crumbling psyche is a set of supernatural powers that aide his investigation. These gifts allow him to see things others cannot, which in game terms means you can view reconstructions of crimes by piecing together clues, and discover short visions by interacting with relevant objects. Helpful, but it comes at a price for Reed. He is driven closer to the brink of madness with every use. Once Reed’s sanity slips far enough, he’ll hallucinate, and see some frankly weird shit. The trick to staving off this madness is to use a keen eye and methodical use of Reed’s powers to solve puzzles with the least amount of stress possible.
It adds an interesting wrinkle to Frogware’s sleuthing mechanics. On the one hand, the supernatural powers are a big help when you’re confounded by the clues in your possession, but on the other, you can’t rely on them explicitly. It’s a nice compromise between accessibility and mastery, and freshens up a tried and true formula. Frogwares also allows for several difficulty options for puzzles (and other aspects) so you can tailor The Sinking City to your preferred playing style.
Check Out This Concept Art For The Sinking City
When not using your time for investigative tasks, there’s plenty more for Reed to tackle. Conversations with the residents of Oakmont can branch off in a number of ways, and the consequences of them can be felt long after the last word. Nobody here is exactly decent as people go, and the ongoing war between rival families in Oakmont has left its mark on the mood of the place. Lives can be altered and there’s a high probability it won’t be for the better.
As if Oakmont wasn’t suffering enough, the waterlogged city has a monster problem. There’s some pretty interesting creature design too, blending the usual Lovecraftian far with things akin to something you’d find in The Evil Within or Silent Hill. The local populace does its best to avoid these stalking supernatural creatures, but they still claim victims as they move around the streets. Unfortunately for Reed, he can’t avoid them so easily, and that’s where combat comes into play, The Sinking City‘s weak point.
While you don’t have to fight everything (and you shouldn’t because combat with these nightmares put a further strain on Reed’s sanity), the story will inevitably take you places where confrontation is necessary. The Sinking City‘s gunplay is a tad clunky and slow to operate. It feels like a deliberate choice for the most part, but it leads to frustration on occasion, especially as the longer encounters go on, the more damage you end up doing to yourself in the long run. The other problem with so much combat is that it dulls the terror a bit to have so much protection against monsters, but in fairness, it is at least pretty fairly balanced so they don’t just feel like cannon fodder.
The only other gripe of note is on the technical side. Frogwares has often released games that have some technical hiccups and a lack of graphical polish, and that’s definitely the case here, but as with those previous titles, the visual style and mechanics of it more than make up for any shortcomings by showing a clear identity.
Frogwares has created an interesting and absorbing world of horror, and it’s deliciously rich in story and world-building. The sanity system works well, throwing some horrific visions at you, and capturing a feeling of nightmarish helplessness. Yes, it comes with some signature flaws too, but The Sinking City is a fine horror game and an engrossing detective RPG.
The Sinking City review code for PC provided by the publisher.
The Sinking City is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Nintendo Switch release later in 2019.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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