Short on ammunition and shorter on breath, you pause at the exit of a run-down sheet metal factory, head swiveling as you look for the nearest chance at safety.  Painful experience has taught you the bleeding, monstrous horror crumpled behind you won’t be the last, and an inhuman roar from downstairs lets you know in no uncertain terms delay is not an option.  To your left is a fence at the end of an alley…if you can make it over, whatever it is that’s chasing you might lose your trail.  You make a break for it through the rain, holding your hat tight and wondering why you ever came to Oakmont.  When you make it over the fence, splashing into muck that now has two shoe-shaped craters, that’s when it hits you.  The Sinking City is a game about baptism.

At least, that’s what this particular wannabe investigator got out of The Sinking City: Remastered, but perhaps some introductory information is in order.  The Sinking City: Remastered, released early in 2025, is Frogwares’s new and improved version of The Sinking City from 2019.  (Having only played the remastered version, I cannot speak from experience as to the changes between versions.)  In it, you play as Charles Reed, a private investigator who’s just stepped ashore in the fictional Oakmont, Massachusetts.  Reed’s afflicted by grim visions he can’t fully explain, and believes a professor in Oakmont may be the only one who can help him.  Unfortunately, the locals aren’t too keen on helping.  As it happens, the foggy harbor town has become the site of all things eldritch since a recent spate flooded the city and left it partially submerged.  As Charles, you hope to put your P.I. skills to use, earning your keep in Oakmont and hopefully finding an opportunity to rid yourself of what plagues your mind.

The Sinking City’s investigatory gameplay follows a pattern.  Each case has you pounding the pavement and plying the waterways of its open setting in search of clues.  These clues may come from dialogue with witnesses and suspects, archival documents, or from finding relevant evidence at crime scenes.  Once you’ve collected enough evidence at the scene of a crime, you’ll be tasked with piecing together the sequence of events that happened there.  It’s never as involved as investigations in Frogware’s similarly themed Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, but it still requires thought and is more interesting than simply being told what happened.  Then, after you’ve obtained enough evidence through such deductions or dialogue, you’ll have populated what’s called your “Mind Palace”.

The Mind Palace is a repository of open-ended information based on the clues you’ve obtained about the case, such as probable causes or suspects’ potential motives.  In the Mind Palace, you must match these disparate pieces of information together in order to form conclusions.  However, since your information is never perfectly complete, it’s possible to interpret the set of facts in more than one way, and The Sinking City uses that mechanism to force you to make entertainingly agonizing judgment calls.  Given the Lovecraftian milieu, I was not surprised to be offered choices between very mixed bags, but I did appreciate that The Sinking City’s choices don’t just have you reveling in grimness like you’re in a Call of Cthulhu one-shot run by a proudly nihilistic undergrad.  You can still operate by-the-book, but not without costs that will still make you wonder if you really made the right call.

Stakes in the investigations are low, as there’s really no way to fail.  (You’ll arrive at the right answer as long as you’re patient, so the only thing at risk is your ego.)  As such, it’s up to The Sinking City’s sanity system and combat to provide the tension, and I think they mostly succeed.  Reed’s sanity is measured by a blue bar next to his health, and it decreases in the presence of monsters, after witnessing something horrific, or after reaching a terrifying conclusion.  (Spoiler alert: they’re all terrifying.)  As the bar declines, the atmosphere dims and Charles hallucinates visions overlaid on the screen or even phantasmal enemies that must then be defeated.

When fighting, you have a number of firearms at your disposal, as well as traps and a melee attack.  Enemy variety is definitely limited, but the monsters you face still have distinct attack patterns and weaknesses, so there’s an opportunity for you to develop some skill.  Doing so helps you conserve your scarce ammo, so it’s worth your while.

As you defeat monsters or solve cases, you’ll also earn skill points you can spend on any of three skill trees which customize Reed’s skills over the course of the game.  The trees themselves are perhaps a more underbaked part of the combat system.  Certain perks, such as those which award higher rates of experience point gain, seem like obvious first choices.  Why not just set the base-rate to the maximum from the get-go, and have more interesting choices on those nodes?  The weapon-based perks can also feel unsatisfying, as spending a point to increase the accuracy of a weapon for which you almost never have sufficient ammunition seems like a waste.

The Sinking City’s visuals have their mixture of strengths and weaknesses, too, but I think Frogwares could be commended for what they achieved with what I assume was a tight budget.  The city’s not densely populated, and has a fair bit of conspicuously familiar interior floor plans, but what is there nails the feel of a Lovecraftian short story.  The weather effects in particular stood out to me, with the fog creating a creepy and oppressive atmosphere, while Reed’s rain-soaked trenchcoat made me shiver in sympathy.  The murkiness of the water in the diving sections, and its attendant hints at its immense tentacled denizens, was also effective at threatening my own internal sanity meter.

On the audio front, there’s little in terms of melodic music, but the sound effects always serve to heighten the tension.  Enemy sounds run from squishy and skittering to grave and lumbering, and they’re all intimidating in their own ways.  The dialogue is all fully-voiced and well-acted, though there is one character whose accent seems off.  Given the nature of that character, I’m not sure what one could do to make her sound “right”, but it was jarring enough to take me out of the experience momentarily.

Overall, The Sinking City: Remastered recalls the adage about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.  The individual aspects of the game may not be standard-setting, but in combination I, at least, could not get enough of it.  And of course, it didn’t hurt that all the flooding and water imagery contextualized the Lovecraftian mythos in a sense I’d never thought about before.

Pulled from the Watery Chaos

H. P. Lovecraft’s stories are often both “God-less” and “god-ful”.  His characters peel back layers of a mystery until they confront the horrifying reality of incomprehensibly ancient cosmic beings (the “old gods”) that expose humanity’s fragility, and are driven mad or join a cult – occasionally both.  One could be forgiven for assuming a Lovecraft-inspired tale like The Sinking City would not be a font of baptismal themes, but I’d argue God’s conspicuous absence is part of what makes it ring true.

Lovecraftian “old gods” / “elder gods” like Cthulhu or Dagon might be fantastically envisioned beings from the depths of space or the ocean, but they aren’t divine.  Even if they’re written to have powers and knowledge beyond our comprehension, they’re still participants in nature, and therefore function more like the consequences of original sin.  They represent those aspects of our earthly life that we’d prefer not to notice or contemplate, but instead pretend are unfathomably distant.  It’s not easy to think about how unpredictable natural disasters, unseen pathogens, or freak accidents can change our lives in an instant, because they remind us we’re not in control.  They remind us our lives aren’t really ours.

In The Sinking City, characters who are faced with the reality of our contingency in their run-ins with Dagon et. al. have few options.  They can try to find some incantations that will offer an illusion of control over eldritch powers, fail in the process, and go insane.  If reading’s not their thing, they can join a cult around one of the old gods, then go insane.  (Overachievers can and do have the option to skip straight to the insanity, too.)  The juxtaposition of tentacled alien monstrosities, ancient rituals, and 1920’s USA makes for unique reading and gaming, but beneath the lurid imagery, is it really all that dissimilar to how humans of any time period have tried to face our fragile lives absent an understanding of God?

If we believe having a certain accolade, object, or amount of money is going to make us whole and secure, are we not mimicking a pursuit of the right incantations and symbols of power?  Thanks be to God, we generally don’t end up like some of the unluckier Lovecraft-inspired characters, under the knife of some rabid and robed cultist, seconds away from becoming an offering to an ancient amalgam of teeth and tentacles.  Even still, we become consumed by such pursuits, handing ourselves over to unliving things of the earth instead of being living sacrifices for God.

Alternatively, if the weight of our contingency drives us to a “nothing really matters” philosophy, what could we expect but descent into a pattern of self-destruction?  Again, thanks be to God, we probably won’t end up enthralled in a wild, hedonistic ritual to an alien being, but do we not see the madness that can result if we reject anything transcendent?  Even if it’s not God as I perceive him, there is no chance at harmony on a societal or personal-relationship level if there’s not something outside of those involved to which they all adhere.  Indeed, this is what we see time and time again in The Sinking City, as antagonist after antagonist is all too ready to justify whatever it takes in pursuit of their aims.

It’s against this backdrop that Charles Reed steps foot in Oakmont.  In some ways, Reed even sets a good example, as he is metaphorically (and sometimes literally) just trying to stay afloat when confronted by the worst mankind has to offer.  He’s trying to set right what little he can, even if it’s ultimately a futile effort.  His mission’s futility, particularly as he approaches his final choices, points to a luxury we have that he does not.  We and Reed are both wounded from the beginning, and immersed into a world marked by sin, but we’ve got someone who wants to pull us out.

Reed’s mission might feel futile, but it should be futile.  His is a sort of half-way baptism: he’s gone into the watery chaos alone, and therefore doesn’t have someone to pull him out.  So it is with us – we can’t save ourselves from sin, but fortunately the story doesn’t end there.  In meditating on our fragility, we may, like Reed, feel like we’re living Psalm 88: “You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep…you overwhelm me with all your waves”.  It doesn’t take a grizzled private investigator, though, to continue to Psalm 89, and acknowledge our dependence on God who “rule[s] the raging of the sea”.  We have recourse to Jesus, who’s stepped into our own Oakmont, partaking in our same nature, “that through death he might destroy him who has the power over death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.” (Heb 2:14-15)  May we never let ourselves sink, but remember Christ who wrests us out.

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