TL,DR: Waste of time if you're looking for an immersive Mythos experience. Okay for a Friday evening play after a couple of beers. Maybe. IF you got this for free. AND have nothing better to do with your life. The 2018 "Call of Cthulhu" from Cyanide Studio is the better of two somewhat similar games, in my humble opinion.

Long version:

I couldn't quite put my finger on it for a while, but then it struck me: the game almost feels like one of those Lego adventure games, but with a Lovecraftian skin slapped on, and a lot more boring. The world pretends to be open, but isn't: There are no unique items or collectibles in the game, so there is utterly no point to explore until you get the quests which tell you to do so. Unless you're grinding for XP.

But what's worse, the game is just not... *believable* enough to be entertaining. Its mechanics are so much on the surface it simply leaves the player no space for immersion. By the end you're so bored you just want it to be over. The game is very shallow - which is ironic, considering the title.

* Story is artificially drawn-out, but even so it's still rather short if you disregard the time lost travelling and wasted underwater. The plot is also not great - just your usual HPL vaporware. Honestly, the best bit of storytelling was the "Brother looking for his sister in the asylum" side-quest. That one has meat on its bones. The rest, including the main plot, is just poor justification for making the player go through repetitive gameplay mechanics designed for a previous game by the same devs.

* Investigation segments where you have to put events in the right order are painfully simple and thus can only be categorized as another artificial time sink.

* Diving segments are bloody f**king godawful. Too slow, too pointless, too artificial, no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

* Location assets are so obviously copy-pasted it almost hurts. Once you've seen one manor, you've seen them all. The devs seem to have been cutting corners wherever they could. There is a main quest where a child is supposed to be pushing a gangster down a hole, but they obviously haven't made any kid models, so they used an adult instead.

* Monster variety is painfully low low. Spoilers: there's 4 types, you see them all during the first half an hour of play and will be bored out of your skull by the end of the game. And I refuse to count the slight variations as separate entities. This is cutting corners again.

* Having to manually place addresses on the map gets super annoying super fast. It's a pretty nice mechanic, but having to do so 50+ times is just plain awful.

* The fast-travel via phone booths system is so slow due to the fact you need to travel to them by foot/boat, that it's usually faster to quit to main menu then load, because it puts you next to the nearest booth and you can travel where you need to go.

* Oh yeah, and the desktop shortcut Steam creates for the remastered version actually launches the original non-remastered game. And save games are not compatible.

So, no. Not recommended. Personally, I'm sorry I wasted my time on this, but I rarely quit a game I've started unless it's a complete pile of garbage. But this came close.

I’ve never played the original Sinking City, so I went into the remaster with fresh eyes. After two hours, I uninstalled, and honestly, that felt like two hours too long.

The game tries to sell itself as a Lovecraftian detective experience, but what I got was a janky walking simulator with clumsy combat sprinkled on top. Movement feels sluggish, like the character is wading through molasses, and every animation looks like it’s one patch away from collapsing completely. Gunplay is awkward and unsatisfying — enemies sponge up bullets while your character shoots like he’s never actually held a gun before.

The investigation mechanics, which should be the highlight of a detective game, are shallow at best. You don’t really solve mysteries; you just walk around clicking on highlighted objects until the game decides you’ve seen enough to move on. It’s not clever, it’s not immersive, and it’s definitely not fun.

Performance is another disaster. I can run modern AAA games on high settings without a hitch, but this “remaster” made my GPU sound like it was auditioning for a horror game of its own. The graphics aren’t bad, but they’re nowhere near impressive enough to justify the poor optimization.

And then there’s the atmosphere. A Lovecraft-inspired game should ooze dread, mystery, and tension. Instead, I felt nothing but frustration as lifeless NPCs stood around staring blankly, the city felt repetitive and empty, and the supposed “cosmic horror” boiled down to muddy textures and a lot of filler walking.

I wanted eerie, unsettling storytelling. What I got was a clunky, half-baked remaster of a game that already had a mixed reputation.

Verdict: Two hours played, already uninstalled. If this is the “remastered” version, I don’t want to know how bad the original was.

First of all, i was expecting totally different mechanics and story based on trailers. But, anyways, I've accepted it as is. It is an interesting game in the core, but there are soo many things developers just didn't do right or they do not make sense. There are situations youa re jsut stuck and there are no clues to push you forward. Ok, there might be a clue but after few days of not playing it, you don't know where to go as simply you forgot. Also, driving a boat... well... it is jsut a driving... no action... I don't gave a time to cover all aspects and problems but this game had much bigger potenital. I eprsonally don't like it.

Kind of fun. I liked it except for the ending which was very anti-climactic. And in the end it seemed very drawn out, so just rushing through it to get to the end. Also UI for ending was clunky and I wasn't sure how to choose whether to save mankind or end it all. Wait for the sale if you're curious.

Good game. Makes your brain work.