In real life, the Ku Klux Klan did not hate black people because black people came from a dark magical origin or had a connection to a great evil. In a world where Innsmouthers are actually, historically descended from Deep Ones (who sleep beneath the city and are unknowable and evil etc etc), depicting the Ku Klux Klan as opposing them makes the common mistake in fiction of assuming racism is logical. The metaphors are clearly being drawn to invoke real prejudices and injustices (both historical and contemporary), but unfortunately The Sinking City falls into the same tired tropes of ‘fantasy racism’ that are common in works of sci-fi and fantasy. The Innsmouthers are shown as relative newcomers to Oakmont, and are often depicted as a stand-in for immigrant populations, as after their original home of Innsmouth was destroyed, they took refuge in Oakmont. The Throgmortons, a rich and traditional family of Oakmont citizens, see their ape-like features as a blessing, a sign of their pure bloodline.
The Innsmouthers and the Throgmortons are both playing on Lovecraftian archetypes, but here they are fleshed out a bit more.
Oakmont is home to three races of humans, with your bog-standard Homo Sapiens as the predominant species, and joined by the fish-like Innsmouthers and the more ape-like Throgmortons. Frogwares clearly made an attempt to depict real world prejudices and to grapple with Lovecraft’s history of racism, but while I was initially hopeful for an incisive take on Lovecraftian themes and racism, I came away feeling somewhat underwhelmed. Divided into six districts, it is a town dealing with both supernatural threats (in the form of the Flood, cultists, and the occasional Lovecraftian monsters) and mundane threats (oppression, racism, sexism, and plenty of plagues and diseases). Solving cases is for the most part satisfying, interesting, and fun-each clue feeling like another breadcrumb toward the answer, and even the most difficult cases never leaving me too stumped. Main storyline cases usually contain multiple steps, dozens of clues, and multiple possible conclusions from the deductions that are available to you. The Sinking City is first and foremost a detective game, although Reed’s supernatural ‘retrocognition’ ability gives him a slight leg up on his contemporaries. It follows Charles Reed, a World War I veteran and private eye plagued with visions of the supernatural that led him from his home in Boston to Oakmont, and as soon as he steps off his boat finds himself embroiled in the local politics and mysteries of the island town. The Sinking City takes place in the flooded town of Oakmont, located on an island somewhere in the Northeastern United States. While it’s rough around the edges and not without its flaws, it’s also easily the best Lovecraft game I’ve played this year (mind you, that bar is not especially high).
Tv tropes the sinking city series#
Frogwares, developers of a well-received series of Sherlock Holmes mystery adventure games, have dipped their toes into something far more eldritch with The Sinking City (published by BigBen Interactive).
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