The Sinking City

The Sinking City is an open-world detective game with a third-person camera perspective. It features an investigation system in which the outcome of the player's quests will often be defined by how observant the players are when investigating different clues and pieces of evidence.

The town of Oakmont is made up of seven districts (Advent, Coverside, Grimhaven Bay, Oldgrove, Reed Heights, Salvation Harbor, and The Shells) which have all been affected by flooding to various degrees, and the player must use a boat to safely traverse the flooded streets to reach drier areas. The player can swim if necessary, but the water is infested and can fatally damage the player's health and sanity. The player also assembles an arsenal of tools and weapons, and at times must use them to kill otherworldly creatures and dispel hallucinations. However, as Oakmont is an isolated place with dwindling resources and deteriorating social order, bullets have replaced money as the preferred currency; expending too many bullets can leave the player unable to barter for desired items.

The Sinking City takes place in the secluded city of Oakmont, Massachusetts in the 1920s, a place that is not marked on any map and few people know how to find due to its remoteness. Oakmont has a long history of association with the occult and many of its citizens are not only eccentric, but unabashed practitioners of occultism. Cultists in bloody ritual garb are an unremarkable sight on the streets alongside fishermen, average townsfolk, refugees from the destruction of nearby Innsmouth, the destitute and desperate, and well-heeled members of the upper class. The town also developed its own unique dialect over the years, but the origin of many phrases is murky.

Six months prior to the events of the game, Oakmont was inundated by a mysterious flood of supernatural origin that has submerged many of its streets and cut it off from the mainland. The Flood brought with it a dark force that pushes its terrified citizens toward madness, along with a plague of otherworldly monsters called Wylebeasts, and the struggling city is on the brink of collapse. In addition, droves of people from outside Oakmont who were reported missing have been turning up in the town, drawn by haunting, unaccountable visions.

When planning The Sinking City, developer Frogwares envisioned the open-world setting of Oakmont as a densely-built urban area that was two kilometers square. As the scope of this made handcrafting the entire town unfeasible, Frogwares turned to Unreal Engine 4 and followed the example of city generation techniques pioneered in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series to create entire blocks of Oakmont at once through procedural generation. These prefabricated blocks were assembled from assets based on actual early 20th century New England architecture, with blocks in different districts of Oakmont following different sets of rules to give each district a distinct purpose and atmosphere. Among the various generic blocks, the designers placed a number of unique buildings and landmarks, and also decorated the generic blocks with other assets by hand. The areas of the town designated for flooding also used unique assets in their generation, such as silt, seaweed, and barnacles, to make them stand out in their districts.

The Sinking City was announced by Frogwares on March 9, 2016, with pre-alpha gameplay footage debuting on July 28, 2017. The game was originally slated for release on March 21, 2019, but it was eventually delayed to June 27, 2019. Frogwares Community Manager Sergey Oganesyan explained that the decision to delay the game was made in order to avoid a crowded release window and allow for additional polishing time. Frogwares later announced that The Sinking City would be a one-year timed-exclusive release for the Epic Games Store on PC, but this would not affect the console releases. A Nintendo Switch port was self-published by Frogwares on September 12, 2019.

The Sinking City received "mixed or average" reviews according to Metacritic. Reviewers generally praised the game's writing, worldbuilding, and the lack of hand-holding in finding and drawing conclusions from clues to solve cases, but criticized the combat as slow and frustrating, and noted multiple technical issues, such as overly long loading times and screen-tearing.

Jeff Marchiafava of Game Informer summarized: "The Sinking City shares all of the same problems of Frogwares' previous games, but it also capitalizes on the same strengths. Reed's cases offer up surprising twists and memorable moments, and flesh out a twisted world and cast of characters that I enjoyed learning about."