The Sinking City Hands-on Preview: Like Sherlock Holmes, But Weird

Sherlock Holmes? More like Shock-ler...Bones. I tried.

- Hayden Dingman

Oakmont, Massachusetts, is drowning. Fully half the city has been abandoned to the sea, bustling city streets now replaced by rivers, winding between the sagging wooden edifices of lost storefronts. Problem is, I need to get into one of those shops. A diving crew’s gone missing, the only known survivor’s gone mad, and I’ve been charged with finding out whether the rest are alive or not—and the workshop that made diving suits is on this block somewhere.

Sighing, I clamber into a nearby rowboat and hope that the top levels have survived relatively unscathed. I’ll tell you what, Sherlock Holmes never had it this rough.

STARING INTO THE ABYSS

The Sinking City (go.pcworld.com/sink) is more ambitious than I imagined. When the project was announced—back when it was still a Call of Cthulhu game—I expected developer Frogwares to turn out one of its Sherlock Holmes games with a cosmic horror bent. And that would’ve been fine! The Sherlock Holmes games all follow the same basic case-by-case structure, but they’re (with the exception of 2016’s Devil’s Daughter [go.pcworld.com/ dvil]) also fairly enjoyable detective games. Easy, but enjoyable (go.pcworld.com/crpn).

Frogwares has quietly come into its own though. Writing about Crimes and Punishments in 2014, I said the Sherlock Holmes games had gone from guilty pleasure to “legitimately good,” in part because of improvements on the technical side. Devil’s Daughter was by-and-large disastrous from a story and structure standpoint, but continued to push for larger and better-looking environments.