Frogwares built The Sinking City in the shadow of H.P. Lovecraft, and the game does not flinch from that inheritance. It is an open-world detective story set in Oakmont, Massachusetts in the 1920s, a city that appears on no map and has been half-drowned by a flood no one can explain.
You play Charles W. Reed, a former U.S. Navy diver and World War I veteran turned private investigator. He arrives from Boston chasing the cause of visions that have plagued him since he survived the wreck of the USS Cyclops. The published critical score sits at 7.0 out of 10 across 15 outlets. That number is fair, and this review lands on the same figure.
Trailer, via Nacon.
Oakmont’s Seven Districts
The city is the best thing in The Sinking City. Oakmont is split into seven districts — Advent, Coverside, Grimhaven Bay, Oldgrove, Reed Heights, Salvation Harbor, and The Shells — and the flood has hit each of them differently. Some streets are dry enough to walk. Others are canals, and you cross them by boat. You can swim when you have to, but the water is infested and it will eat your health and your sanity in bites.
That geography does real work. It forces you to plan a route before you leave a building, and it makes the map feel like a place rather than a menu. Oakmont has also developed its own dialect over the years, and the origin of many phrases is murky. Small touches like that carry more weight than the game’s larger set pieces.
Bullets Instead of Money
The economy is the sharpest idea Frogwares had. Oakmont is cut off from the mainland, its resources are thin, and its social order is coming apart. Money is worthless. Bullets are the currency.
Every shot you fire is money you cannot spend. Every purchase at a vendor is ammunition you will not have when a Wylebeast comes through a doorway. The game does not warn you about this. It just lets you run dry and then asks you to barter for something you now cannot afford.
Sanity works the same way. You spend it to use investigative powers — the ones that reconstruct crime scenes and pull clues out of a room. It regenerates slowly on its own, faster with antipsychotic drugs. Disturbing scenes and encounters cause sudden, sharp drops, and when your sanity falls, the environment itself starts to lie to you. Lose all of it and you are dead.
Charles Reed and the Cyclops
The plot holds together better than the combat does. Reed comes to Oakmont at the invitation of Professor Johannes van der Berg, who wants to know why so many people are having the same nightmares. The visions cluster in Oakmont. They are reported there more than anywhere else.
Soon after he arrives, Robert Throgmorton — the physically striking head of one of the city’s leading families — hires Reed to find Professor Harriet Dough, the researcher Throgmorton sent to uncover the cause of the Flood. Dough is missing. The Flood is not natural. Six months before the game begins, it submerged the streets and cut Oakmont off from the world, and it brought something with it: a dark force that pushes people toward madness, plus a plague of otherworldly creatures called Wylebeasts.
Reed is a good vessel for this. He is a veteran with a specific wound — the wreck of the Cyclops — and the game treats his visions as a symptom rather than a superpower.
The EOD and the Esoteric Order of Dagon
The side cases are where The Sinking City earns its 7.0 rather than settling for less. Reed investigates a break-in at the storehouse of a charity called the EOD, which stands for “Everyone’s Obvious Duty.” He learns a professor was trying to poison the EOD’s food bank to discredit the organization, because the EOD is actually the Esoteric Order of Dagon, a cult that worships Dagon.
You then choose: turn in the poisoner, or help him finish the job. The game does not tell you which is right. It lets the outcome of your quests depend on how observant you were while working the evidence, and it does not soften the result.
Later, crime boss Brutus Carpenter survives an assassination attempt and is replaced by an identical clone. Reed finds out the killer is Brutus’s son, Graham, an army veteran who wants to pull the family out of crime and spend its fortune on the needy. Graham made a bargain with the Redemption Church, a cult that worships Shub-Niggurath, and used their magic to make a docile duplicate of his father. You can back Graham’s idealism, cult problems and all, or back Brutus’s old-fashioned mob leadership. Whichever you choose, the other Carpenter dies.
This is the part worth watching. The Sinking City is at its best when it hands you a decision with no clean side and then makes you live in Oakmont afterward.
A City That Is Not on Any Map
The setting does the heavy lifting, and it is worth naming what is actually in it. Oakmont has a long history with the occult. Many of its citizens are not just eccentric but open practitioners. Cultists in bloody ritual garb walk the streets next to fishermen, ordinary townsfolk, refugees from the destruction of nearby Innsmouth, the destitute, and the wealthy.
The city is remote enough that few people know how to find it. That isolation is the premise of the whole game, and it holds. Droves of people reported missing outside Oakmont have been turning up inside it, drawn by visions they cannot account for. The game never explains this away too quickly, and it is better for the patience.
What the Investigation System Gets Right
The investigation system is the reason to play. Quests often resolve based on how closely you looked at clues and evidence, not on whether you won a fight. You assemble tools and weapons, and sometimes you have to kill otherworldly creatures or dispel hallucinations, but the shooting is the weakest part of the package. It is functional. It is not why anyone stays.
The third-person camera and the open world are standard for the genre. The sanity meter and the bullet economy are not. Those two systems turn ordinary exploration into a running calculation, and they give the game a texture that most Lovecraft adaptations never find.
The trade-off is polish. The Sinking City was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in June 2019, for Nintendo Switch in September 2019, for PlayStation 5 in February 2021, and for Xbox Series X/S in April 2021. A Remastered version followed in May 2025 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game was initially released under the Nacon label before a dispute between the parties. That history shows in the seams, and no remaster fully closes them.
Here is how the pieces rank, from what carries the game to what merely fills it:
- The bullet-as-currency economy, which turns every fight into a spending decision.
- The sanity system, which makes the environment itself unreliable.
- The investigation mechanics, which reward attention over reflexes.
- Oakmont’s seven flooded districts and the boat routes between them.
- The EOD and Carpenter cases, which give the choices real weight.
- The combat, which is serviceable and forgettable.
- The technical polish, which is the weakest link and the reason this is not a higher score.
The Verdict on Oakmont
The Sinking City is a smart game with a dull trigger finger. Its best ideas — bullets as money, sanity as a resource you spend to see the truth — are the kind of design that changes how you move through a world, and Frogwares commits to them instead of sanding them down. The EOD case and the two Carpenters show a studio willing to let players make a call and then face it.
What holds it at 7.0 is everything around those ideas. The combat never rises above adequate. The technical side has been patched and remastered and still shows its age. The game asks you to tolerate a lot of rough edges to get at the good parts.
The sequel, The Sinking City 2, arrived on August 18, 2026, and that release is the real test of this design. Frogwares now has a second pass at the bullet economy and the sanity meter, and a second chance to build combat that does not feel like a tax on the good parts. If the shooting catches up to the investigation, the next score should not need a decimal point to explain itself.
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