The Sinking City - Open-world, Lovecraft, investigations

BTW, I don’t know if they made the game good/better or not. :)

But it has definitely gotten fairly robust post-release support. But Frogwares makes a lot of interesting design decisions, for instance, and in my mind (and others, apparently), they’ve got this weird habit of either breaking or ignoring and not carrying forward some of their better gameplay ideas. So…yeah. I haven’t played this title, just have been following it a bit.

Heads up, this is on sale on consoles again. On Xbox, it’s $24/$30 (for the Necronomicon ed) and on the PS4 it’s $14/$19 which is just crazy cheap. I think I’ll bite at that price on PS4- luckily, it’s single-player, so I can do that and not feel bad. Are the DLC missions worth the extra $5?

To answer my own question… no, I’d say the DLC wasn’t worth the extra money, at least so far. The description said it was about gathering books of magic, etc, and I’d hoped that there would be some new gameplay involved, but nope. You just go to various locations and collect them. Some of the locations are dangerous, sure, but it’s all pretty meh.

Other than that, though, I’m liking it a lot. The atmosphere is great, the writing not bad, hunting up clues is a lot of fun. The game doesn’t hold your hand much, has you make deductions on your own for the most part. The glitchiness and bugs reported at launch aren’t in evidence anymore. The combat is still not terribly good, but the game doesn’t really revolve around it (but you can’t really avoid what is there).

It is definitely better than the other Call of Cthulhu game that came out last year. I played that one via Game Pass (or GwG? I can’t remember.) for a couple of hours and it was really mediocre.

So the game has disappeared from the EGS and also has not shown up yet on Steam 1 year later. Developer is trying to get it worked out.

Speak of the devil (or elder god), I saw this was on sale this week on Xbox One for $14.99 and was wondering if it was worth picking up. Everything I’ve read seems to indicate it’s pretty average at best, but I have enjoyed Frogware’s stuff in the past and I do love a good Lovecraftian story.

So, uh, how does this happen? “Whoopsie, you can’t buy our game anymore.”

I mean…someone screwed something up, but I’m trying to figure out what.

I’m about halfway through, seemingly, and I’m enjoying it- see my comments just upthread. I bought it on PS4, but that’s no real difference. I definitely would recommend against the DLC- it’s just busywork collectibles from what I can tell. It’s a pretty good mix of actual detective-ing stuff and combat. The travel around the city has gotten a bit oold, but I’ve unlocked all the fast-travel locations, so I can just zap over when I want (though loading times are a bit long when doing that). The combat isn’t bad, but it isn’t great, either. If you’re afraid of it being just another rehash of The Shadow Over Insmouth, you needn’t worry- it’s its own story, that actually takes place after the happenings of TSOI, and actually takes the events in that story into account when setting up its narrative. Kind of neat if you’re into that sort of thing.

They split from their publisher Frogwares sometime back, and are now self-publishing. This caused some disruption for all their games, from what I understand.

Yeah, this is no accident, when this happens, it’s usually a publisher dispute.

Indeed a publisher dispute!

https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/frogwares-removed-the-sinking-city-stores-publisher-bigben-breaching-contract-terms

Full statement

Nacon BigBen sounds super ultra mega duper hyper scummy.

Since Frogwares is selling a “DRM free” copy of The Sinking City on their website, and since the game is half off right now, I decided to buy the Deluxe Edition for $32.49.

I have my doubts about it being DRM free however, as it is not as simple as downloading a file (or files) and then archiving it for later. This is nothing like buying a game from GOG, and I’m thinking I should have waited for it to show up at GOG, but that sounds like it could be many months away.

Holy cow, what a rigamarole. I first had to verify the amount of a temporary charge to my credit card by going to my credit card’s website, finding the exact amount they charged, and then entering that in like a kind of code verification. Then I had to download a Frogwares Launcher, then log in to it with Facebook, then check my email to get the game’s verification code, and copy/paste that in to the launcher for it to actually start downloading. Only they didn’t call it a download. It was called an install, and the game downloaded and installed all in one shot. This is the most convoluted DRM free scheme I’ve ever experienced, and I have no idea if I can even archive the game for future installs, or if I have to always do it through their launcher and use an activation code each time.

On the positive side, the download and install were quite fast.

And it has a Steam store page again!

Error is one of my favorite genres

I don’t understand what’s going on here. Frogwares, the original developer of The Sinking City, is dissuading people from buying the recent re-release because they weren’t involved in developing this version of the game? Apparently it’s an earlier, unpatched version? This is weird.

It sounds like they are not publishing the game on Steam, but someone else (the publisher they are in a fight, I guess), that would explain it, if they won’t see a dime of those sales.

But according to the article, looks like Frogware does own the rights on Playstation, where they have re-released the game. It’s like they have joint custody of the game with their publisher.

This is very common, especially with European made titles. Platform, distribution method (physical versus digital), and region are all separate aspects when drawing up publishing and distribution agreements.

I finally got around to playing this and it was…pretty fun? One nice aspect is that somewhere into the narrative, the protagonist realises how bullshit it all is and just becomes increasingly annoyed and sarcastic with everyone, in a way that is just the right side of the line straddling ‘entertaining’ and ‘obnoxious’.

Wow. Welcome back!

Hah thanks. The old login didn’t work, wasn’t sure if anyone would remember me :)