![]() Why’s this octopus standing upright? Why’s that corpse lit with no light source? Nobody knows! However, it didn’t take more than 30 minutes of playtime, after coming across my first enemy and immediately seeing it get stuck clipping violently inside a doorway, for my initial feelings of cautious optimism to dissipate and dread to (unintentionally) set in. And to its credit, your opening interactions with the burg’s best and brightest while trudging through the city’s storm-weathered slums accentuates that focus on the thematic. Pretty standard for a Lovecraftian affair, but it does a good job of setting up both a narrative and tonal intrigue, which is paramount to the identity of the genre. The game’s premise is a familiar one to those acquainted with this flavor of horror: neurotic private eye Charles Reed is compelled to investigate a string of disappearances occurring within the mysteriously flooded city of Oakmont, with the added motive of uncovering why said city seems to frequent his nightmares. And once I finally sat down to see exactly what developer Frogwares had to offer… I was underwhelmed. So, I actively avoided pre-release material and builds, abstaining in order to quell my bias and give this game its fair shake when release day inevitably drew near. Yet as I had been reminded last year with the exceptional mediocrity I found in CALL OF CTHULHU, high expectation often leads to heightened disappointment. ![]() An open-world detective game revolving around the Cthulhu mythos and developed by a team that already cut their teeth with a decent Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover seemed preordained to be … interesting, if nothing else. THE SINKING CITY seized my attention early on with nothing more than proof of concept. Pictured: Exactly what it looks like, I guess Yet on rare occasions, like what happened as I waded through THE SINKING CITY, you find a game that just does it for you, capturing the essence of what makes Lovecraft enjoyable… even if the package it comes in is objectively a hot mess. Suffice to say, getting a good cosmic horror fix is a rarity if an abundance of tentacles ain’t your end-all-be-all. poetically fails to grasp the genre’s intrigue past some base aesthetic choices. On the other end, it’s common knowledge by now that Lovecraft’s work is notoriously difficult to emulate outside the realm of literature, to the point that the most media bearing the elder sign of ol’ H.P. ![]() On one end, it’s a legitimate joy whenever this underrepresented branch of horror peeks its antediluvian head from the abyss, gracing us with the occasional gift before returning to slumber in the shadowy depths. Consequently, no one knows how to derive value from entertainment regardless of obligatory “Is It Good?” ratings better than Lovecraft fans. As the resident Cosmic Horror junkie here at MGRM, I can say without a doubt that nobody gets the shaft harder in the horror department than Lovecraft fans.
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