![]() Let's get that out of the way now it's not scary. ![]() "That's the point, Yahtz." I mean surreal more in a janky design than the horrific way. There's something very surreal about Sinking City. "Yeah, pesky buggers, aren't they? We kind of got used to them after we barricaded off the seven or eight streets they hang out on." I'm sorry, how many streets?! What are the fucking cops doing?! Shooting at me, apparently, because I got confused and briefly pointed my gun at a deranged, heavily-tattooed Deep One cultist as he walked nonchalantly down the street to the chemist. The game has a rather insipid combat element as partial justification for the open world, so every now and again, we get attacked by reject Silent Hill: Homecoming monsters in a basement, and no one seems to give a shit. Besides that, they're alright lads, but I wish they'd stop flooding the local economy with all that gold they get from those Deep Ones they're always knobbing." It just throws me how everyone including the protagonist takes all this in their stride. You know how, in The Shadow over Innsmouth, the fact that the townspeople worship Dagon, are turning into fish-men, and routinely knob Deep Ones was the big, horrifying revelation that drove the narrator mad? Well, Innsmouthers show up in this game, and someone points them out and says, "They look weird, don't they? It's because they worship Dagon and are turning into fish. So Lovecraftian horror requires a different approach to be effective these days, and whatever the ideal approach is, it isn't whatever the fuck Sinking City is doing. ![]() But that horror doesn't work so well in the modern age, when we only need open a web browser to be reminded that humanity is pointless and deserve to die out and leave naught but cheap plastic Spider-Man Halloween costumes for the archaeologists of future races to puzzle over. The horror of Cthulhu lay not in Cthulhu wanting to nibble off our knackers, but in the fact that Cthulhu doesn't really give a shit he was around before humanity, will be around long after, and spares us no more thought than he would the dust mites in his bathroom carpet. Cosmic horror was all about challenging humanity's self-importance. Now, the thing about Lovecraft's particular brand of horror is that it doesn't really translate to modern attitudes, even without the racism stuff. This week's haunted detective protagonist is Charles Reed, who is drawn to the titular sinking city so that he might understand his strange visions of vast apocalyptic horrors beneath the sea, unsatisfied by the explanation of "too much convenience store sushi on an empty stomach", and quickly finds himself tasked to investigate various crimes and disappearances surrounding the apparent fulfillment of a doomsday prophecy. Outstanding at this rate, they'll be adapting modern literature roughly around the time of the heat death of the universe. It's nice to see Frogwares finally managing to step outside their comfort zone of developing detective games based on late 19th century literature and instead develop a detective game based on early 20th century literature, and it only took them 17 fucking years to make the jump. So imagine what they can achieve now they're deliberately trying to be creepy. Remember " Creepy Watson"? Yeah, that was these lads. But will The Sinking City be an improvement on Call of Cthulhu? Well, it's by Frogwares, who, since 2002, have been utterly cornering the market on slightly janky Sherlock Holmes adventure games. Well, forcibly marry me off to a fish if it isn't a second Lovecraft-themed detective game by an ambitious mid-range developer in as many years! One where the main character is a generic detective even more generic and detective-y than the one from Dark Corners of the Earth, and the intention is not to adapt any specific Lovecraft work, but mash them all together into a big bowl of tentacles and faint undercurrents of conservative social anxiety. This week in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews The Sinking City.
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