The Sinking City Remastered - the Unreal Engine 5 spruce-up of developer Frogwares' 2019 Lovecraft-inspired detective adventure - has slithered out of its tenebrous seclusion sooner than expected, and is available now for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
For the uninitiated, The Sinking City tells the story of troubled private investigator Charles Reed as he travels to the supernaturally flooded city of Oakmont, Massachusetts, in search of a way to quell his hellish visions. There's a bit of gunplay as the cosmic horror begins to take hold, but mostly it's a game of exploration and investigation, playing out across a series of open-ended cases and the titular open world.
All that's true of The Sinking City Remastered, of course, but Frogwares is also promising an "upgraded visual experience alongside some requested quality-of-life features". There's talk of enhanced and fully relit locations with additional levels of detail and objects, for instance, alongside 4K textures, improved reflections, "various" gameplay adjustments, and new accessibility features. There's also a photo mode and, on PC at least, support for the likes of DLSS, FSR and TSR upscaling.
To mark The Sinking City Remastered's arrival, Frogwares has released a new trailer showcasing some of the differences between the 2019 original and its new Unreal Engine 5 update. And if that's got you in the mood for some eldritch adventuring, The Sinking City Remastered gets its digital release today on Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S - and it'll be available as a free upgrade for all existing owners.
Frogwares' remaster comes ahead of The Sinking City 2, which was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter earlier this year. The sequel is again set in 1920s America, but this time sees players exploring the flooded streets and crumbling buildings of Arkham in an survival horror-style adventure said to shift away from the deduction focus of its predecessor in favour of combat and exploration.
All this activity follows Frogwares' lengthy dispute with publisher Nacon over the rights to the original The Sinking City. Since a resolution was last year, the studio has taken over as The Sinking City's publisher, updated the Steam build, and released new DLC. The Ukrainian studio also found time to crowdfund and release 2023's Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, as it continued to adjust to life during Russia's ongoing invasion.
"We plan to do big things with The Sinking City IP, starting with the sequel and then beyond," Frogwares publishing director Sergiy Oganesyan wrote in a statement accompanying today's remaster news. "So, after our rather well-known struggles with the original, it feels amazing to have this positive moment be part of the game's twisted history and for us to be the ones to fully decide it. Making it free to all our existing fans is our way of giving back to them for having supported us all this time through thick and thin."
Pretty neat, I actually just finished this game for the first time earlier this year. It could definitely use a little improvement in a few areas, though I would have said it looked fine graphically.
Disappointed to hear the direction they're taking the sequel in though. The combat is probably the first game's weakest element. It's not terribly interesting, and is often mandatory for exploring a location. It's annoying because it makes the game formulaic and cuts into the deduction and exploration which could be so much better if they hadn't wasted time on combat and crafting.
At times, it almost shines. You talk to someone, they tell you a story, you get a clue. Perhaps if you check city hall you can dig up some records related to the clue. That works, you get an address. You go to the location, explore and find more clues. It's quite compelling and makes you feel like a Lovecraft detective protagonist.
Except I lied and omitted some things. The clues are annotated to tell you that you need to look them up in records, and they tell you where. The only deduction is deducing how to open your menu. I think there's an option to turn this off, but there's not much feedback on false trails so its like playing Skyrim with quest markers off. It can be done, it's more immersive, but the rest of the game isn't designed to support that mode of play.
And when arrive at the address, there will be a fight. There always is. When you arrive at a new location, monsters will always teleport in to fight before you can explore. You are almost never surprised by them, or given means of avoiding them. You show up, they pop in, you kill them like you're the city's only pest exterminator, then you look around for stuff.
There also just isn't much to do in the open world other than investigate and fight monsters. There's scant folks to talk to, no shops, no real reason to ever revisit most places, and fairly few open world quests. There's the quest lines to recover tomes and visit historical locations, but thats like 3 or 4 quests in the whole game and they feel less like scavenger hunts or surprises than just another set of checklist quests requiring you yo go to a place, fight some monsters, and pick up a thing.
So yeah, kind of sucks they have this almost brilliant but slightly held back detective game, and they've decided to drop the detecting in favor of even more monster fighting. Lame.
