The Sinking City

Oakmont’s Got Issues, But I’d Still Visit Again

At some point during my stay in Oakmont, I realized I’d stopped questioning the parade of fish faced locals and just started judging their fashion choices. That’s what this game does, it slowly dissolves your sanity with damp sincerity until you’re reading the ramblings of cultists like it’s your morning newspaper. There I was, knee deep in swamp water and existential dread, trying to decide if a bloated corpse was a clue or just bad city sanitation. The Sinking City is weird. Deeply, stubbornly weird. But it’s also kind of brilliant in a way that feels accidental. Developed by Frogwares (of Sherlock Holmes fame) and dropped into the world in 2019, this open world detective horror game feels like someone spliced Resident Evil 4 with a Lovecraft audiobook and forgot to add a tutorial. Which sounds like a nightmare. But, in the murky stew of rough animations and brilliant design choices, there’s a game worth losing your mind to, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Oakmont is a city that should not exist. It's flooded, it’s cursed, it’s infested with otherworldly creatures, and most of the residents look like they’ve been breathing mold since birth. But there’s something magnetic about it. The city is drenched in dread and rot, but never in a try hard way. It's not screaming “LOOK HOW DARK WE ARE,” it’s just… quietly decaying while everyone goes about their business like this is normal. That tone, this casual descent into madness, is where The Sinking City nails the Lovecraftian vibe. It doesn’t need tentacle jump scares every ten minutes to remind you something's wrong. The wrongness is ambient. It’s in the half flooded buildings and grimy police stations, in the way people speak in riddles and look past you instead of at you. And, in the midst of all this soggy despair, the writing pulls you in. You’re not here for Hollywood melodrama or quippy banter. You're here to spiral deeper into a story that doesn't explain itself. It's addicting the way late night Wikipedia rabbit holes are, you want to know more, even if it gets weirder and more uncomfortable.

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Bring a Notepad and Your Last Two Brain Cells

Gameplay in The Sinking City is mostly detective work mixed with survival horror elements. Think Resident Evil 4 meets Sherlock Holmes after a bad acid trip. You’ll investigate crime scenes, scour half submerged buildings, connect mental dots inside a literal Mind Palace, and occasionally unload a revolver into the ribcage of a crab demon with a face like a melted potato. The game does not hold your hand. At all. It tosses you a clue and basically says, “Good luck, champ.” No glowing waypoints. No “follow the breadcrumbs” nonsense. You’re expected to read clues, check your map, cross reference street names, and actually think. It’s slow, deliberate, and, once you realize the game isn’t trolling you, extremely satisfying. This is where it shines. Solving a case feels earned, like you clawed it out of the chaos through sheer stubbornness. It respects your intelligence in a way most games don’t anymore. The systems can be clunky, sure, but the ideas behind them are rock solid. Even when I was lost, frustrated, or screaming at my map, I still wanted to see it through. I wanted to crack the next case, even if it meant getting eaten by another shrimp monster. The survival horror elements are decent but definitely the side dish. Ammo’s scarce, guns hit like peashooters, and the enemies tend to teleport out of sewer holes like they forgot to RSVP. But again, the combat isn’t the point. It’s there to make you nervous, not heroic. You’re a detective, not a marine. Every fight feels a bit desperate.

A Little Moldy Around the Edges

The Sinking City is charming in a “haunted house that’s probably not up to code” kind of way. The atmosphere is grimy perfection. Oakmont feels waterlogged and unclean in the best way. There's a texture to it all, buildings look like they’ve been aging in brine, interiors are cluttered with decay, and there's an oppressive fog that never really lifts. But the technical side... yeah, it’s rough. Character animations are stiff, like someone gave a wax museum basic motor functions. NPCs blink like they’re trying it out for the first time. Load in stutters and janky transitions pull you out just enough to notice, but not enough to ruin the mood entirely. It’s all kind of charming in a busted indie horror film sort of way. The audio, well, the voice acting is mostly solid. Your protagonist has that grizzled, "seen too much" tone that fits the mold, and some side characters sell their roles better than others. The real letdown is the music. It’s not bad, just... unmemorable. You might notice it for a second, but don’t expect it to stick with you. It’s functional background noise in a game that otherwise nails mood.

Drez

Cosmic Horror, But Make It Niche

Now, innovation is a tricky thing with games like this. You’ve seen most of these mechanics before, just not smashed together like this. What makes The Sinking City feel different is its commitment to player driven investigation and its refusal to modernize the experience with hand holding or overexplanation. It borrows from survival horror classics and noir detective stories, then stirs in pure Lovecraftian unease. What you get isn’t totally new, but it is distinct. There’s nothing quite like it on the market, not because it’s perfect, but because it has the guts to be weird and demanding. You feel the indie ambition in every corner of the game. The good kind. The kind that tries to do something memorable instead of just profitable. Sure, it stumbles over its own systems sometimes, but it stumbles with style.

The Madness Lingers (And That’s a Compliment)

If you like horror that simmers instead of screams, detective work that actually makes you think, and worlds that feel genuinely diseased, this is your jam. It’s not polished. And it absolutely refuses to make things easy for you. But it earns your time with atmosphere, storytelling, and a sense of place that most games barely attempt, let alone pull off. And when you finally close the casebook and walk away from Oakmont, the feeling sticks. Like mildew on your shoes or a nightmare you don’t quite remember. It’s not perfect. It’s not clean. But it’s real. And sometimes, that’s better. The Sinking City is a scrappy love letter to Lovecraft that gets more right than wrong. The world is disgusting in the best way, the story sucks you in like a cultist sermon, and the detective mechanics respect your brain more than most modern games dare to. It’s weird, it’s broken, it’s kind of brilliant. On the flip side, the combat’s serviceable at best, the animations look like they were programmed during a thunderstorm, and the music fades faster than a wet newspaper. But if you can look past the grime, literally and figuratively, you’ll find something special bubbling beneath the surface.