Originally I thought about buying this game when it launched but was convinced otherwise by some bad reviews following the release.
I should have stuck with that, but instead decided to buy it at discount for me and my friends Lovecraft evening on Saturdays.

The game starts promising enough with you entering the city of Oakmont and some decent storytelling surrounding the murder of a member of the city elite. We had lots of fun in this first section and while we were constricted to the small section within the city harbor the game seemed flawed but ultimately decent.

Unfortunately, after this section, our opinion of the game continued to drop until we finally reached the end.

The city itself is the first reason for its ultimate demise. I was under the impression that it would be a mysterious place, sparsely populated after the calamity that had befallen it, with some survivors either trapped or too stubborn to leave. However, the game seems to spawn people in front of you wherever you go, the barricaded "dangerous areas" being the one exception where the streets are truly abandoned. While there are quite a lot of different kinds of Oakmont residents, with different clothes depending on the district, you will see so many people/twins strolling around at once that you wonder if anyone actually died in the cataclysm.
The buildings themselves are another disappointment. In the beginning, we were following a side quest leading us around big parts of the first district to gather notes about some weird occurrences that happened there.
Here we happened to notice that most of the buildings are just copy-pastes of each other, with just some furniture moved around. Later we learned that this was not only the case for side content but the main content as well. Not even the impressive villa of the most powerful family of the city gets a different treatment, its clone is just on the opposite side of the street. And why do we need three nearly identical bars, when one interesting one would have sufficed?

The next problem is the game’s story: I don’t think it’s very compelling.
In their effort to have as much Lovecraft in the game as possible, a trap that a lot of Lovecraft games seem to fall into, the story ultimately feels very generic and barely worth your time. They go as far as having a gang called “the yellow kings”, whose leader messes with you for no other reason than to be mysterious. The related quest is a gigantic waste of everyone’s time, its main purpose is apparently the statement: “Isn’t Hastur mysterious and weird?”.
“Giant waste of time” is a reappearing theme within the game’s story, with many decisions being made by the time the game finally ends being entirely or at least in part pointless except maybe for roleplay reasons. Do you kill this guy or his son? Does it change anything significant going forward? Not really, but hey one seems to be kind of a ♥♥♥♥ so you might as well. Do you side with the obvious Dagon cultists or with the dude causing a bunch of collateral damage? Well even if you side with the cultist, which by the way due to a bug was the only option for us, the alliance lasts for an entire staircase before ending in gunfire.
Here less would have been more: Have fewer choices but have them make a bigger impact.

Good gameplay can balance out a mediocre story, but here the game fails again. The gunplay is absolutely dreadful and unresponsive. With every mouse click for a shot, the game takes 1 ½ seconds to decide if you actually fire your gun. This, combined with the need to craft most of your ammunition, makes you waste a lot of your bullets just shooting walls or the floor.
Frequent combat is indeed a problem in itself, while the creatures, even the non-aggressive vermin in the street, were interesting, even scary, at the beginning of the game, the game pushes combat on you during every quest making them very unthreatening and boring after a while. The typical case goes like this:
First, you are given some sort of hint of how to proceed, the solution being to travel to one of the many “archives” in the city, for example, the newspaper archive or the city hall, going to the desk with the symbol and matching the story with categories like time, people and places. While this may sound fine at first remember that you will have to do this at least once per quest just with different desks and categories. Even the most interesting “archive” in the game, the library, is just another place for the matching desk and the changing categories don’t make up for the frequent visits.
After that, you will receive a clue that the place you are looking for is in Lovecraft street, between Yellow King road and Arthur Jermyn lane. You look at your map, mark the spot and begin your travel.
The travel takes you through streets being entirely populated by twins, canals that are entirely safe as long as you stay on your boat, which will always spawn on the nearest shore, and maybe some “danger zones” where monsters exist. You don’t need to engage with the monsters as there is more than enough time to loot some of the area’s chests and then just climb over the nearest barricade. In fact in my experience actually fighting the beasts is just a waste of bullets as the whole area doesn’t give you enough resources to make up for the tedium of combat and the bullets wasted.
When you make it to your goal look for the one door marked with signs and enter. Once you take a few steps you can hear the maddening sound of non-optional combat. After you fought through however many enemies spawned from the ground, keep in mind that this is neither fun nor rewarding, you will then interact with clues in the room. We once got stuck because we missed a bottle in a corner of the room that added no additional information, so you have to be very thorough. Then you will enter “spooky vision” where your piece together which of the shown scenes happened first. This normally results in the next clue, rinse and repeat until you get to the decision of who you want to kill this time.

If you are particularly unlucky part of your quest will involve “underwater fun time”, where you dive with your diving suit. Even disregarding that the same cutscenes play every time (who thought that this would be a good idea?) “underwater fun time” is where the game shows how bad things can be. The ground is littered with small geysers, your movement is even more unresponsive than during combat, making it hard to avoid the damage. Climbing up rocks is a nightmare, especially if there are geysers nearby, as it’s hard to judge what part of the climb is just for show and which one is the one you actually need to climb.
Underwater combat at least gives you infinite ammunition and it works a lot smoother. This may be because the game doesn’t need to calculate damage because shooting a monster only stuns it for a short time before it will follow you again. So it would be a good idea to look behind you while you sprint away if your way here hadn’t taught you about the geysers.
I would have loved for those underwater walks to just being mysterious sections of the game without enemies, where you take in the sunken parts of the titular Sinking City and wonder what the strange shape in the distance is and whose tentacles are waving over there. Sadly it wasn’t meant to be and so underwater is like land but worse.

It’s no wonder then, that even finishing the game is worth a golden achievement, but that seems to go for a lot of later quests. I was hoping for it to all be worth it in the end, having an ending that would either leave us with some dread about the cosmic horror lurking between the stars or at least be so bad that it would be entertaining. As the 5-second ending cutscene played we realized that this was neither, just disappointment.

TLDR: I didn’t like it very much. Neither the story nor the gameplay nor the city itself wowed me and our excitement about this game dropped at every turn.

Originally I thought about buying this game when it launched but was convinced otherwise by some bad reviews following the release. I should have stuck with that, but instead decided to buy it at discount for me and my friends Lovecraft evening on Saturdays. The game starts promising enough with you entering the city of Oakmont and some decent storytelling surrounding the murder of a member of the city elite. We had lots of fun in this first section and while we were constricted to the small section within the city harbor the game seemed flawed but ultimately decent. Unfortunately, after this section, our opinion of the game continued to drop until we finally reached the end. The city itself is the first reason for its ultimate demise. I was under the impression that it would be a mysterious place, sparsely populated after the calamity that had befallen it, with some survivors either trapped or too stubborn to leave. However, the game seems to spawn people in front of you wherever you go, the barricaded "dangerous areas" being the one exception where the streets are truly abandoned. While there are quite a lot of different kinds of Oakmont residents, with different clothes depending on the district, you will see so many people/twins strolling around at once that you wonder if anyone actually died in the cataclysm. The buildings themselves are another disappointment. In the beginning, we were following a side quest leading us around big parts of the first district to gather notes about some weird occurrences that happened there. Here we happened to notice that most of the buildings are just copy-pastes of each other, with just some furniture moved around. Later we learned that this was not only the case for side content but the main content as well. Not even the impressive villa of the most powerful family of the city gets a different treatment, its clone is just on the opposite side of the street. And why do we need three nearly identical bars, when one interesting one would have sufficed? The next problem is the game’s story: I don’t think it’s very compelling. In their effort to have as much Lovecraft in the game as possible, a trap that a lot of Lovecraft games seem to fall into, the story ultimately feels very generic and barely worth your time. They go as far as having a gang called “the yellow kings”, whose leader messes with you for no other reason than to be mysterious. The related quest is a gigantic waste of everyone’s time, its main purpose is apparently the statement: “Isn’t Hastur mysterious and weird?”. “Giant waste of time” is a reappearing theme within the game’s story, with many decisions being made by the time the game finally ends being entirely or at least in part pointless except maybe for roleplay reasons. Do you kill this guy or his son? Does it change anything significant going forward? Not really, but hey one seems to be kind of a dick so you might as well. Do you side with the obvious Dagon cultists or with the dude causing a bunch of collateral damage? Well even if you side with the cultist, which by the way due to a bug was the only option for us, the alliance lasts for an entire staircase before ending in gunfire. Here less would have been more: Have fewer choices but have them make a bigger impact. Good gameplay can balance out a mediocre story, but here the game fails again. The gunplay is absolutely dreadful and unresponsive. With every mouse click for a shot, the game takes 1 ½ seconds to decide if you actually fire your gun. This, combined with the need to craft most of your ammunition, makes you waste a lot of your bullets just shooting walls or the floor. Frequent combat is indeed a problem in itself, while the creatures, even the non-aggressive vermin in the street, were interesting, even scary, at the beginning of the game, the game pushes combat on you during every quest making them very unthreatening and boring after a while. The typical case goes like this: First, you are given some sort of hint of how to proceed, the solution being to travel to one of the many “archives” in the city, for example, the newspaper archive or the city hall, going to the desk with the symbol and matching the story with categories like time, people and places. While this may sound fine at first remember that you will have to do this at least once per quest just with different desks and categories. Even the most interesting “archive” in the game, the library, is just another place for the matching desk and the changing categories don’t make up for the frequent visits. After that, you will receive a clue that the place you are looking for is in Lovecraft street, between Yellow King road and Arthur Jermyn lane. You look at your map, mark the spot and begin your travel. The travel takes you through streets being entirely populated by twins, canals that are entirely safe as long as you stay on your boat, which will always spawn on the nearest shore, and maybe some “danger zones” where monsters exist. You don’t need to engage with the monsters as there is more than enough time to loot some of the area’s chests and then just climb over the nearest barricade. In fact in my experience actually fighting the beasts is just a waste of bullets as the whole area doesn’t give you enough resources to make up for the tedium of combat and the bullets wasted. When you make it to your goal look for the one door marked with signs and enter. Once you take a few steps you can hear the maddening sound of non-optional combat. After you fought through however many enemies spawned from the ground, keep in mind that this is neither fun nor rewarding, you will then interact with clues in the room. We once got stuck because we missed a bottle in a corner of the room that added no additional information, so you have to be very thorough. Then you will enter “spooky vision” where your piece together which of the shown scenes happened first. This normally results in the next clue, rinse and repeat until you get to the decision of who you want to kill this time. If you are particularly unlucky part of your quest will involve “underwater fun time”, where you dive with your diving suit. Even disregarding that the same cutscenes play every time (who thought that this would be a good idea?) “underwater fun time” is where the game shows how bad things can be. The ground is littered with small geysers, your movement is even more unresponsive than during combat, making it hard to avoid the damage. Climbing up rocks is a nightmare, especially if there are geysers nearby, as it’s hard to judge what part of the climb is just for show and which one is the one you actually need to climb. Underwater combat at least gives you infinite ammunition and it works a lot smoother. This may be because the game doesn’t need to calculate damage because shooting a monster only stuns it for a short time before it will follow you again. So it would be a good idea to look behind you while you sprint away if your way here hadn’t taught you about the geysers. I would have loved for those underwater walks to just being mysterious sections of the game without enemies, where you take in the sunken parts of the titular Sinking City and wonder what the strange shape in the distance is and whose tentacles are waving over there. Sadly it wasn’t meant to be and so underwater is like land but worse. It’s no wonder then, that even finishing the game is worth a golden achievement, but that seems to go for a lot of later quests. I was hoping for it to all be worth it in the end, having an ending that would either leave us with some dread about the cosmic horror lurking between the stars or at least be so bad that it would be entertaining. As the 5-second ending cutscene played we realized that this was neither, just disappointment. TLDR: I didn’t like it very much. Neither the story nor the gameplay nor the city itself wowed me and our excitement about this game dropped at every turn.