Let's go back to the eerie Oakmont town to see how The Sinking City performs on Nintendo Switch in this review
If in spite of all the horror films available on the gaming market these days you are looking for something special and perhaps more related to a certain literary tradition, this review of The Sinking City for Nintendo Switch could be particularly interesting, even if you have to say right away that the version taken here is not really the best available expression of the Frogwares adventure.
There has always been a relationship of particular closeness between Lovecraft's literary universe and video games, due to the typical atmosphere of the writer's work or to the natural relevance to his works that is traditionally found in the environments of the videogame and role-playing community (in a word: nerd), but now Cthulhu and company have come out of a niche for a while, becoming a sort of pop phenomenon. Not many times, however, the aspect of the Lovecraftian metaphysical horror found in The Sinking City has been translated into a video game: perhaps also for a greater adherence to videogame genres we often find reference to the most personal and intimate horror, as in the recent Call of Cthulhu or in the classic Alone in the Dark, while here we are dealing with the larger, social and urban aspect of Lovecraft's disturbing visions, which brings him somewhat closer to Bethesda's Dark Corners of the Earth. This is a characteristic that makes the title very interesting, also because it plays without too many reverential fears on some of the most controversial aspects of the works of the writer of Providence, staging fears and horrors that lead to complex topics such as xenophobia, the relationship with the different and the moral decadence of modern times, for which the sense of threatening and imminent end assumes the aspect of a sort of condemnation inflicted by the ancient divinities on the corrupt society.
The premises of this investigative adventure are therefore excellent, combining the peculiar characteristics of the Frogwares games (which became famous with the cult series on Sherlock Holmes) a subject of great interest and caught even in a not exactly abused sense. Too bad the good ideas failed to translate perfectly into an equally positive game.
Charles Reed and the strange case of the sinking city
The private investigator Charles Reed is a war veteran and of a mysterious shipwreck that left him marked in the psyche but also enriched by a particular power to reconstruct past events. He is a man tormented by nightmares and apocalyptic visions that seem to have to do with marine depths and gigantic primordial creatures, extraordinarily similar suggestions to the deliriums of many inhabitants of the town of Oakmont, struck by what appears to be a wave of collective psychosis linked to a strange condition in which the area has long been pouring. Recalled by the letters of a researcher, Reed finds himself investigating the mystery of the sinking city, gradually discovering that behind the progressive and slow flood that is swallowing Oakmont lies a horror of difficult understanding, somehow linked to his forgotten past but in able to threaten the future of all humanity.
For all the basic elements of gameplay and history we refer you to the review of The Sinking City written a couple of months ago by Davide Spotti for the PC version, limiting here to broadly recall the features of the game and analyze above all its transposition on Nintendo Switch.
We were saying that Frogwares is a specialized team above all on the investigative graphic adventures and this is evident also in this production: the writing is rich and pleasant and clearly the game gives the best of itself in the phases of investigation, while it falls tremendously in those of action that they almost seem like foreign bodies stuck into the structure of the game to make it more appealing to a wider audience. This is also evident from the gameplay mechanics, heavily unbalanced in favor of the investigative phases: on the one hand we find interesting dialogues with multiple choices, a special power that allows us to reconstruct past events and a brilliant system of organizing clues and tests with the construction of different hypotheses, while on the other hand, in situations of confrontation the title is reduced to a woody sketch of action in third person partially enriched by a system of experience and skilltree little amalgamated with the fabric of the game.
