Publisher: Frogwares

Developer: Frogwares

Release Date: 6/25/2019

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I love Lovecraftian horror, but video games have really struggled to bring these mythos to life. Most of the games get the atmosphere and monster design down, but can’t nail a good gameplay loop or decent story. By far the best game for this is still Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. While its gameplay is clunky it has great storytelling that’s somewhat memorable. The Sinking City does a great job nailing the twisted town of Oakmont with great visuals, but that’s about it. No single gameplay element or loop comes together to create anything interesting or worthwhile to make you want to stick around outside of the main story.

Unlike most other Lovecraftian games this one doesn’t take place in Innsmouth, but it is referenced that many are fleeing from that town. You play Charles Reed who is a private eye investigator searching to end his visions. That’s about as far as the entire story goes. You bounce around from case to case-solving problems of townsfolk in form of favors to get one step closer to where you need to go. This is where things start falling apart. Not a single character is interesting, including Reed, the dialogue is drab and boring despite the voice work being pretty decent. There are small little stories for each case you can unravel, but I didn’t care about any of them. I just wanted to progress further and hope there was some cool twist and that never came.

When you are inside investigation areas you can examine items and look at objects. There are key evidence items to progress the story and bonus items to complete all evidence for achievements. This is mostly uninteresting and there are dozens and dozens of these with you just wandering and looking at everything to find any object you can to examine. Once you examine everything you are given clues to advance the case, but nothing is marked on your map for you. You are given a district and then cross streets and have to pin that yourself. I found this kind of interesting until I found out all of the main story cases are almost always right near fast travel points.

Speaking of fast traveling it’s so necessary because the town of Oakmont is boring and lifeless. Sure, there are people wandering around, but they are just animations to fill space. They don’t make any sound, have any dialog, and there are no stores or anything like that. It’s just linear streets that look pretty broken up with water-logged streets that require a motorboat to navigate. Some areas are sectioned off as infested areas full of monsters and aren’t worth going into for any reason outside of a few side cases that require it.

That gets us into combat which is another half-baked idea. The game is trying to be a survival horror game by making ammo scarce, but you can craft ammo and health though! Sure, but you will literally be scrounging bullets and some areas have tons of monsters I got lucky, but usually went down to my last bullet, and aiming carefully is a must. There are 5 different weapons including throwables and traps, but honestly, you just start with your weakest gun and work your way up until you’re spent. There’s no strategy to this and all the weapons feel the same and don’t have any weight to them and there is no cover system. Like any Lovecraftian game, there is a sanity meter and as this drops, you hallucinate wylebeasts and they will attack you unless you take psych meds.

There are some underwater levels in which you walk around in a diving suit and avoid hot air vents and a couple of monsters, but it’s slow-paced and even duller as they are all pretty much the same just with different layouts and an excuse to maybe add filler. You can shoot a harpoon gun to slow the monsters down, but there was no challenge in these 6 or so underwater areas. There’s a single boss fight, and you occasionally attack humans which are easy but usually come in large numbers. Part of the appeal of this game is story choice. Choosing who lives and dies, doesn’t really affect much except what endings you can choose, which are uninteresting and unfulfilling.

There’s literally nothing else to do in the game. I desperately just tried to find all the fast travel points. I don’t understand making this open-world if it’s so boring and uninteresting to explore and feels so lifeless. The same loop of investigating cases, fighting some monsters, fast traveling around to the next case, and listening to the dialog, is so dull and I only kept playing because of my love for the lore. If you don’t care about Lovecraftian mythos then I wouldn’t even bother with this game. I also didn’t bother with any side cases as the main story takes around 12 hours and drained me. I couldn’t spend another minute in this game.

Overall, The Sinking City is another barely passable Lovecraft-inspired game that gets the atmosphere and looks right, but can’t nail any gameplay elements. While none of them are broken or bad they are just boring and could have been greatly expanded upon. The main story doesn’t really go anywhere, there are no interesting characters, the dialogue is drab, and the bullet scrounging gets tiring of the number of monsters that get thrown at you. Not to mention the dull and lifeless open world with literally nothing to do in it. If you truly love Lovecraft stories you might find some enjoyment out of this like I did otherwise it’s a hard pass.

Publisher: Frontier

Developer: Okomotive

Release Date: 03/01/2022

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Lone Sails was an interesting puzzle adventure game that took place on a 2D plane. You micro-managed various things on your vessel while acquiring upgrades to pass new obstacles. Changing Tides is exactly the same thing but on a boat instead.

There is no store or character building at all and that really sucks. I can tell the world in Far is sad and clearly post-apocalyptic, but the game gives me no reason to care about it other than the puzzles. You start out swimming this time and learning the basics. Jumping, climbing ladders, moving objects, and picking them up. You then acquire your ship and learn how to manage your fuel, sails, filling with air or water for submarine controls, cool your engine, and use your boost power. You acquire these over the course of the game, but fuel management is key. Don’t use fuel unless you don’t have wind which was the mistake I made. I wound up with tons of fuel at one point without realizing that’s the most I would ever get and that was 2/3 through the game.

Gathering fuel is done by collecting junk laying around. This isn’t often and sometimes you will hit a buoy and below these are caches of fuel. Don’t get lazy and skip them, but sadly the game never tells you to look out for these either. Each upgrade requires a giant puzzle of a level and they were never hard or complicated. Mostly it’s pushing a lever to drop an object to place into a machine. They’re fun, but not hard. While you’re sailing there will be long stretches of nothing. Sometimes not even music. This can get quite boring as the micromanagement of the ship gets tiresome after a while. It was fun at first, but I felt like this was the main gameplay loop and not the puzzles. Overall there are only four upgrades to get so about 4-5 puzzles in total. You spend at least 2-3 hours just sailing and micromanaging your fuel and sails.

Once in a while, there are cinematic platforming moments in which you just follow a linear path which was neat because it’s the only action in the game. I just can’t care a lot about this series without some kind of back story or context. Games like Limbo, Inside, and Little Nightmares do this well with storytelling from your environment. There’s not much to tell in open oceans with just wasted buildings. Even the puzzle areas had murals that supposedly told a story, but it really didn’t mean anything. There’s only one neat moment at the very end of the game before the credits roll and that was it.

The platforming itself is fine if not slippery. I constantly found myself wanting to twitch jump around the ship and I would constantly fall down holes, get stuck on ladders, or not get to where I wanted because of the slippery jumping and physics. It’s also a bit too floaty. The puzzles are the most enjoyable part of the game and it’s a shame the boating is so tedious and boring most of the time with nothing going on. If it were cinematic or more interesting a management system I would really like this idea. I didn’t care for it in Lone Sails and it was doubled down on here.

Overall, Changing Tides looks good for what it is and has a nice art style, but you will quickly forget this game. It’s about 3-4 hours long and I can’t stress enough that there’s way too much boating and not enough puzzle-solving or platforming.