Charles Reed, a former Navy diver turned private investigator with unexplained visions, is not alone in his strange visions and doubts about reality. The citizens of the isolated town of Oakmont suffer from similar delusions, which is an opportunity for the private eye to find the source of his insane illness.

But once he lands on the shores of a half-flooded city, where misery and ruin are the new norm, all sorts of events will seemingly distance him from his goal. And here comes the reason why you should play The Sinking City. A great detective work from Frogwares, which makes the Sherlock Holmes series a worthy game adaptation of the original.

The creators also use a mind palace in their latest game, where your findings from interviews with witnesses and suspects and from examining the crime scene are collected. Yes, you will pick up many objects, turn them and look for interesting things on them. You will read many, many letters, notes, diaries, newspaper articles, threatening messages, but also completely unrelated excerpts that add atmosphere to the game.

The detective has been given supernatural abilities related to his hallucinations. Thanks to them, he can reveal hidden objects to an ordinary citizen, as well as entire rooms. He can also replay the events preceding the crime, and it is up to you to determine their correct order. And to make matters worse, strange silhouettes from another world can navigate him to the escaped criminal, similar to the hitchhiking in the third Witcher.

Where (fish)people and evidence are of no help, one of the archives will come in handy. At the police station, you can find out the identity of the perpetrator based on the crime, in the newspaper you can find a cannery through an ad, and in the library you can find additional information about one of the many religions.

It is in these cases that The Sinking City excels, because it requires you to engage your brain. Archives are an exact science, so if you enter any of the required information incorrectly, you will not get the result. For example, if you are looking for a patient with a gunshot wound to the shoulder in a hospital, you will not enter the string Personnel-Therapeutic Department-19th century (the game takes place after World War I).

The Sinking City is a good detective game. Unfortunately, the term detective is accompanied by the words RPG and action, which simply have no place here. Not in this form. As a whole, it simply does not work as expected and you will have to make a lot of concessions to enjoy wandering around the flooded city. If you can pull it off, you will get a decent game in an attractive environment. 30%

This game is so bad. It feels like it was made by interns learning Unreal Engine on the job, who have also never made a game in any other engine. And this is, like, the...15th game of this studio? Do they think this quality is acceptable or do they just not care? I guess I'm part of the problem, because I keep buying their games, as they do fill a niche, but that's no excuse to ship something so terribly amateurish, broken and unfinished.
If you like detective/mystery games with interesting stories, get it in a deep deep discount.

i got stuck at the very first part of the game and i don't like it