It has been a long time coming for me, but after several years, and two different versions of the game coming out, I have finally completed The Sinking City Remastered, and I do have some thoughts on this one.  It is a game that really had me going in fits and starts for so many years.  It also left me a bit confused as to what the game wants to be, but let’s sit down and talk about it for a bit.

The Sinking City deals with a detective named Charles W. Reed.  I would describe him as a character that was created after someone went on a bender for a month watching old school detective movies and books.  Even his voice reminded me of someone doing a poor Humphrey Bogart impression.  Charles has been tasked with coming to the city of Oakmont by one Robert Throgmorten.  Throgmorten son has come up missing from a diving expedition.  However, this simple mission dives Charles Reed into a winding mystery that could decide the fate of Oakmont and the rest of the world.  Sounds a little dramatic, but trust me, this story goes places.

The Sinking City presents itself at first as a story based RPG, with you talking to people, picking up missions, and over time, gaining points that can be used to upgrade skills.  However, it muddies itself up with cumbersome mechanics that can be frustrating.  The game adds in real time combat, enemies that can easily blend into the brown color palette that drives the game, and a narrative that can be confusing as hell to follow.  It almost seems like someone designed the game using a dart board full of different game ideas, and then mashed them into The Sinking City and just prayed it would all work out.

That said, if you are patient, and read everything that comes at you from items you find in the game, there is a compelling narrative in The Sinking City.  Even your protagonist adds to the confusing narrative when he becomes and unreliable narrator.  He suffers from visions that make you start to wonder if what he is seeing and doing are actually happening, or is this all in his mind.  One of the many mechanics in the game includes a sanity meter that can bring about visions and make believe enemies if you let it sit at a low level for too long.

Talking about the color palette in The Sinking City, it does leave us a bit to be desired.  The game at times looks spectacular with the new remastered version.  It runs at a smooth frame rate, and the characters that you interact with look pretty good.  But the world is full of muddy browns and blacks, and you lose track of a lot of the details.  At one point in a mission, I was tasked with finding wagon tracks, and I wandered aimlessly for a few minutes as I could not find a single track in the bland backgrounds.

One thing that I will say that I hated at first and then began to love was the locating missions in The Sinking City.  You will get locations, but the maps do not plot those locations for you.  Instead, you have to locate the place on the map and add the markers yourself.  It was a weird mechanic that I grew to love over time.  Searching the map to find my locations and giving me a best guess location was weirdly fun.  Its a small detail, but it added a lot to the game.

Now you heard me talk about how I played The Sinking City over multiple version of the game, and you heard that correctly.  I started with the original release of the game back in 2019 for all the usual platforms.  Then a new version was released that added native support to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.  Then game a remastered version of the game in 2025, for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5.  Did your save progress transfer between any of these versions?  Of course not.  Licensing issues, and publisher differences, meant that there was complete incompatibility between all these versions, which meant that I had to restart the game several times.  Even my wife lamented this, as she got so far in the original game, fighting the frame rate and stability issues on the orignal Xbox One version, only to find out she would have to start over again if she wanted to play with the new improvements.

So, where do I actually stand on The Sinking City?  On one hand, I found myself slowing digging into the story when I actually read through all the additional lore that I found.  There is a lot of fun to be had here if you are willing to find it and dig into it. It just means that you are actively fighting with the general palette of the game, and the combat which is not great.  If you fight through all of that, you will find a weird narrative that will grab you.  Now, lets see how that sequel works with the ending of the game I got!