The Sinking City Remastered Review – The Shadow Over Oakmont

When The Sinking City originally came out all the way back in 2019, many reviews, including our own, spoke about how the game had plenty of great ideas that were marred by uneven execution, mediocre visuals, and clunky controls. More than half a decade later, developer Frogwares is back with The Sinking City, this time around with a brand new coat of paint, and it’s now time for us to take a look back at the investigative horror game and see if its problems have been solved with the use of Unreal Engine 5.

The Sinking City Remastered is definitely a demanding game in terms of the raw horsepower required to max out its visual effects. On my system – an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB of GDDR5 RAM and an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT – I was obviously not able to max out the graphics while still hanging on to a reasonable frame rate. With everything cranked to its highest and FSR set to native anti-aliasing, the game would crawl along at between 30 and 40 FPS. However, just the act of switching FSR to Quality mode and disabling ray tracing instantly doubled my frame rates.

"Overall atmosphere and the investigative gameplay is one department where The Sinking City didn’t really need much in the way of improvements, and the remastered release makes this clear by making minimal changes in this regard."

The higher-resolution textures, as well as support for modern features like FSR/DLSS – depending on your graphics card – as well as frame generation means that The Sinking City Remastered can certainly have moments where it looks absolutely gorgeous.

However, there are still some places where the game can look quite rough. Characters, for example, are expertly modelled and animated, especially in conversations. However, just about every instance of facial hair on a character ends up looking like a cartoonish mess of coloured blobs. This is despite the fact that some of the smaller nuances of a character’s model tends to have had great attention paid to it. A perfect example is protagonist Charles Reed, whose eyes are red because he hasn’t been able to get a proper night’s sleep for quite some time. This is communicated purely through visual storyetlling, and never gets brought up in a bout of exposition-laden dialogue.

Overall atmosphere and the investigative gameplay is one department where The Sinking City didn’t really need much in the way of improvements, and the remastered release makes this clear by making minimal changes in this regard. The city of Oakmont remains one of the most interesting takes on a world inspired by the horror stylings of H. P. Lovecraft, melding together elements from several of his stories into one larger tableau that is an absolute joy to explore.

"The Sinking City Remastered can certainly have moments where it looks absolutely gorgeous."

The setup to the story is about as Lovecraftian as you can get; private investigator Charles Reed is drawn to the city of Oakmont because of repeated nightmares he has been having where he starts hearing strange voices calling him to the depths as his ship is stranded in some sort of limbo between the ocean and the sky, while a gigantic leviathan floats overhead.

Things don’t get much easier for Reed once he lands at Oakmont, however. Outsiders aren’t really trusted much in the city, which happens to have its own problems with water levels rising, strange monstrous creatures showing up, and the Grand Families taking part in their own political machinations. Reed is able to discover that many at Oakmont are seemingly having the same nightmares and visions as him, which culminates in him getting his major case: figure out what happened to an expedition that was exploring the connection between the flood that ruined much of Oakmont, and the visions that many are having.

It’s a fairly classic Lovecraftian setup and leans in quite hard on what has essentially become Frogwares’ forte at this point: investigative gameplay. As Reed, you have to take on cases, find clues, and figure out what’s happening. To help you with this, Reed is equipped with a supernatural ability called the Mind’s Eye, This ability lets him him track more mundane things, like the trail of someone that was running away, as well as more complex things, like giving Reed the ability to recreate scenes from the past that he must put together in chronological order.

"It’s a fairly classic Lovecraftian setup and leans in quite hard on what has essentially become Frogwares’ forte at this point: investigative gameplay."

The investigative aspects of The Sinking City Remastered are the parts that shine the brightest in what ends up feeling like an otherwise dull gem. Much like a real-world private investigator would have to do, Reed will need to find clues at the local newspaper’s archives, talk to the police to try and get access to their records, talk to witnesses, discover smaller clues, and ultimately connect all the dots in his head to get a clear picture of what’s going on.

While investigations can often feel like intricate puzzles that are really fun to solve, the other main part of the gameplay in The Sinking City Remastered – the combat – still feels like it shouldn’t have been there at all. Every now and then, you’ll have to get into a fight, be it against other people, or more commonly, against otherworldly horrors that can eat up your sanity just as quickly as they eat up your health. To take them on, Reed can get his hands on a number of weapons, from a simple pistol to start out with, all the way up to a rifle, a shotgun, and a submachine gun.

While the controls don’t quite feel as janky and awkward as they did in the game’s original 2019 release, the changes made in the remastered version don’t really help justify their presence in the game much anyway. Combat encounters can swing wildly in difficulty, where some feel like they were simple point-and-click affairs that were only there to eat into your precious piles of ammo, or incredibly difficult fights where your enemies end up feeling like bullet sponges.

"The investigative aspects of The Sinking City Remastered are the parts that shine the brightest in what ends up feeling like an otherwise dull gem."

The unfortunate thing is that the combat often tends to interrupt some of the more fun parts of The Sinking City Remastered, and it tends to be a bit of a pace killer when you’re hot on the trail of a suspect but have to be distracted by this strange creature that you either have to kill, or sneak around while hoping that it doesn’t see you. The game manages to keep its creepy, tense atmosphere just fine most of the time, and combat feels like a completely unnecessary addition to the game.

The progression system feels similarly unnecessary. As Reed continues his investigations, he will inevitably earn experience points, which eventually translate into Knowledge Points that can be used up on unlocking new passive abilities. These tend to be fairly simple, like giving Reed more health, the ability to carry more bullets, or flat damage increases for some weapons. The lack of anything that might aid the investigative gameplay stops the progression system from feeling like it was a natural addition to the game. Rather, it feels incredibly tacked on.

The Sinking City Remastered fixes quite a few of the issues we had with the original release; most of the visuals have been improved by leaps and bounds over what we last saw in 2019, and the overall movement and combat doesn’t feel nearly as awkward as it used to. However, there are still places where the game lacks some polish, be it the awkward facial hair on characters, or the completely unnecessary combat and stealth sequences. Despite this, however, The Sinking City Remastered is once again one of the better games out there that manages to tackle the horror themes of H. P. Lovecraft.

This game was reviewed on PC.