Charles Reed's a private investigator out of Boston, who has traveled to the town of Oakmont to seek the answer behind the hallucinations he's been having. The Sinking City is about his investigations into that, as well as all sorts of other things happening in the city, and below it.
Most of The Sinking City revolves around solving mysteries. This takes a number of forms. Asking questions of witnesses or acquaintances, but sometimes checking various archives. The library, the police station, the hospital, the newspaper. The trick is figuring out which archive you need. Is information about a current prominent church in the newspaper or the library? For a person's death, do I check with the cops or the paper, or maybe the hospital?
I don't want to give the impression it's actively dangerous to have to travel from one to another. As long as you don't try to short-cut through the "infected" zones - clearly-marked areas where the various smaller Lovecraftian horrors have taken over - you aren't going to encounter any hazards. It's just time consuming, and I wasn't always sure if I wasn't finding anything because I was looking in the wrong archives, or because I hadn't found enough evidence for the game to decide Charles could make the deductive leap to what he needed to search for.
Because the other type of investigating involves nosing around the scene of the crime. A symbol will pop up on something you can interact with, or at least observe. Sometimes you can pick the object up, sometimes not. Charles also has a sort of second sight. Sometimes the screen will get these pulsating lines and you hit "X" and it reveals something that happened. I assume via psychic residue imprinted on the object, I think that's called psychometry, Longshot's other power besides the luck and hollow bones.
At a certain point after you gather enough evidence, a void will appear in the place, and if you walk Charles through it, he can pass through these floating clouds which show a recreation of part of what happened. Once you walk him through all of them, it's up to you to figure out the order things occurred in. If you get it right, the screen flashes green and Charles recaps. If you get it wrong, the screen flashes red and you try again.
You don't want to take too long, because that sort of thing drains your sanity meter. The effect of that is mostly that Charles hallucinates. Stuff like slugs with sharp mandibles, or himself hanging from a noose, or a creepy doctor advancing on him with a gun. First time I saw that last one, I snapped off a shot at it on reflex. After a while, that stuff was pretty easy to ignore, it was the way the screen would wobble and warp that gave me headaches. There are drugs Charles can take to get his sanity back faster - really wonder what 1920s medicine was prescribed for that - and they aren't to difficult to craft more of, so I'd recommend using them to spare yourself the headaches.
The thing is, sometimes you can get to that point without gathering all the available evidence (the game will tell you when you've collected all evidence in a place.) And if you haven't, and go to the archives, even though you know exactly what you're looking for, Charles apparently doesn't. So you have to go back and keep nosing around until you find what you missed or you can't progress.
There are a lot of mysteries or cases, some vital to the story, others just sidequests. Although some of the vital stories feel like sidequests. One guy won't tell you what he saw unless you get him passage out of town. The only guy who can arrange that is a crook, and he wants something, and so on. A couple of times, I forgot what I was investigating originally. The main cases usually give you an option on how to proceed, once you put together enough of the clues in your "mind palace" to come to multiple conclusions. Each option is phrased in the way Charles would mentally justify it, but the game lets you pick whichever you prefer.
Example: You have been framed for murder. The danger of being an outsider in an insular, weird town. The key witness is running for mayor, but needs money, and might just be inclined to change his statement, if you poison his mother so he can get his inheritance. Or you could bring in the actual killer yourself, maybe even convince him to turn himself in. Or you can pin the murder on the aspiring politico, which is what I did. Hey, I found a map on a wall suggesting he was tied up in something big with a lot of other people I was pretty sure were involved in dragging me here. I don't think Charles ever made that connection - didn't say anything aloud if he did - but I guess he's just not as good a detective as me. Which leads me to wonder how he hasn't starved to death if this is how he makes his living.
Most of the sidequests are more simple fetch-its. The guy with the room next to yours in the boarding house disappeared, but left a list of places he thinks the "damn Innsmouthers" were hiding treasures. The treasures aren't actually things you can sell - there's not really any buying or selling in this game, just scrounging for supplies, or being paid in bullets and alcohol and whatnot - so it seems like the main reward is whatever you scrounge while searching. Is that worth it? I don't know. Sometimes felt like I was using more bullets than I was getting back, but at other times, I definitely was coming out ahead.
Which is nice, because there's a fair amount of combat on land, and bullets and firebombs will kill the creatures you run into. (You've also got a shovel, but I don't recommend using that for anything except the knee-high spider things you encounter.) My fights were usually a frantic affair of me firing while backing up or trying to run in circles to keep them at bay. If you flee the building you can eventually get far enough away they'll sink into the ground, which might give you time to boost your health (or mental health) back up if they're getting low. If you try that within the building, they're liable to simply appear on whatever floor you ran to and resume pursuit, which was an unpleasant surprise the first time it happened.
But at least you can fight them. Periodically, the game sends Charles underwater. He was in the Navy in WWI and has experience with diving suits. Handy! Also experience with seeing things underwater that drove him mad. Less encouraging! Though the game gives you a speargun and some flares whenever you descend, I found those pretty useless. The speargun might temporarily slow the crocodile-jawed squid-things that come after you, but they don't kill them. And while you can repair your suit when it gets damaged, you have to stand still and repeatedly tap a button for that. Which you can't do if the aforementioned crocodile-jawed squid thing is attacking you.
I really hated the underwater parts, precisely because it felt like Charles surviving until I got him where he was going was down to luck. I gather that in Lovecraft stories the protagonist is often confronted with something they can barely comprehend, and which is far beyond their ability to harm, but this didn't feel like that. It wasn't that Charles kept having to walk past immense, many-tentacled horrors whose mere presence shredded his sanity like a napkin at the claws of a cat (though those things are out there.) It was just a sort of standard monster thing, but the tools the game provided were insufficient. Like I'd been meant to upgrade the speargun, but missed the cue.
Back to the surface. Oakmont's become largely cut off from the world. Large portions of the city are flooded, so getting from Point A to Point B involves switching between running, and driving little boats with outboard motors down what used to be streets. Again, the game allows you to move around unhindered. There are a few stock character models - weirdo religious cultists, guys trying to sell newspapers, homeless men fighting over stuff, cops - that repeat over and over, but you can walk past them with no trouble.
Charles himself spends the entire game with 5 o'clock shadow and deep bags under his eyes. I'm guessing he hadn't gotten a good night's sleep in months, and doesn't get one for the duration of his time in Oakmont. I think I played him like that for the most part. I'd go along with whatever grandiose notions or assorted nonsense a character might spew until getting the information I needed. Then I was usually done with that and would tell them what I thought of them before we started shooting it out. Man's tired, he can't be expected to keep listening to bullshit forever.
And there's a lot of bullshit, or perhaps mania, in Oakmont. Even the characters that don't strongly resemble fishmen (the Innsmouthers, targets of much racial prejudice) or apes (the Throgmortons, because the deceased Papa Throgmorton apparently divorced his wife and fucked a gorilla at some point during a trip to Africa) fall into the uncanny valley. A lot of them sport weird grins, with eyes too large and bulging. Even the ones that are dealing straight with Charles, I hesitated to trust because their design screamed, "Something's wrong inside this guy."
There's a lot of backstory about churches and great families and founders but, since I was going three weeks sometimes between playing, I forgot most of it. It's not essential to the gameplay except to the extent it helps you figure out a given case. Once that's done, feel free to forget. If it's a critical point - say, about the Seed or the Dreamer, which heavily relate to Charles himself - the game will remind you later.
I don't love the sanity meter, and I definitely don't love the visual distortion effect when the meter's changing, but I enjoyed the game. It took a while for me to get into it, find the groove of collecting evidence and putting things together, but once I did, it really took off. The combat wasn't anything special, but it's challenging enough to keep me on my toes, and Charles looking over his shoulder.
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