A shipwreck on a mountain top, a flying tentacle beast, and psychotic hallucinations of skin melting off people`s faces. With an opening as eerie as this, it wasn`t difficult to get swept up in the bizarre intrigue of The Sinking City, the latest from Frogwares--a studio that`s known for its work on the cult favorite Sherlock Holmes adventure games. But any lover of H.P Lovecraft´s Cthulhu mythos should find these motifs familiar. It`s the sort of stuff that makes these tales of eldritch abominations and the unfortunate souls who discover them so captivating. Attempting to unravel these mysteries kept me thoroughly invested in my demo of The Sinking City, but it was the unsettling world and its potent realities that gripped me the most.Set in the fictional half-submerged city of Oakmont, Massachusetts during the 1920s, you play as Charles Reed, a troubled WW1 veteran and private investigator traveling in search of a cure for his persistent hallucinations. But the moment The Sinking City begins, this task becomes far more complicated. Mysterious creatures known as wylebeasts infest Oakmont`s streets, and worse yet, the city is embroiled in a tense race war between two grotesque human-animal hybrids. Even the normal humans who occupy Oakmont have their own personal prejudices against outsiders and the hybrid races.The first hybrid I met was a wealthy man named Robert Throgmorton, whose ape-faced appearance threw me off-guard. Aside from Charles` initial hallucinations, everything I`d seen up to that point felt grounded in a semblance of reality. But talking to Throgmorton changed all that--at least until he was revealed to be a pompous and repulsive being whose xenophobic and eugenics-fueled rhetoric disgusted me. Suddenly, my disbelief came barreling down to an ugly reality that was all too true to life.My first case had me trying to find Robert Throgmorton`s missing son in exchange for information about Reed`s mysterious visions. The search took me all around th ...
|
