wow thanks, that was very helpful! I happened to skip to the bit where Tom is noting nothing much happens in the open world, its really kind of a deal breaker. Tom sounds just utterly bored by the games "meh"ess at the end.
Oh for a lovecraftian non violent investigation based open world game.
Well this game sure went DOA in the eyes of everyone shortly after release. Sure it was not great going by reviews, but it seemed there was enough there that a few serious patches might have made it a decent game.
I googled a bit and apparently there was a 1.1 patch/hotfix on July 5th, of which I can find no real notes on.
Also the developers seem super silent and all I could find them being mentioned working on is a Switch port back in mid June. Their facebook page is littered with people begging for updates/patch news.
I completely forgot about this game since it’s not on Steam.
The posted news on the next patch!
Tom its time to go back, they fixed everything and gave free cosmetic items!
Did anyone play this with the most recent patches?
Also they dev’s did a QnA.
Man, the reception to this was so lukewarm I had totally forgotten about it.
Now that I’m enjoying the same studio’s adventure game “Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments” (which I got for free on the Epic store), I’m a bit more interested in the Sinking City. I hope the studio returns to Sherlock, though, because I prefer a pure detective story to the Lovecraft mythos.
I remember hearing the devs basically abandoned this shortly after release, in a somewhat buggy state. Did that end up being true? It was on sale on Xbox a few weeks back, but I resisted buying it. I might do so if/when it comes up again if I hear they actually made it better.
Don’t know if it’s the original dev team or some other team, but the game has apparently gotten some major patching love since release.
Good to hear! Thanks for the info.
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.