I've had this game in my library for a couple years because I enjoy cosmic horror and the surrounding mythos and only now decided to give it a go with the remaster. Unfortunately, Sinking City is just... Riddled with issues from tedious gameplay to unforgivable instability.

Let's start with the technical issues. The first issue I ran into was performance on the remastered version. The system I'm running the game is very high end, (i7-14700k running at 5GHz and a 4090) and I can't even break 100fps at 1440p resolution. I am not saying this wasn't playable for me, but what this tells me is that people with lower end systems are definitely going to have issues given my system's relative performance in other, much, much higher fidelity games. The remastered version looks fairly nice, but there's clear issues with the optimization.

Second technical issue: Crashing. The game crashed twice in three hours of gameplay. One from trying to quit the game, once from trying to fast travel. I'm not sure what else I need to say but that's unacceptable.

Third technical issue: The game can't remember which version of it I want to run. The first time I launched the game I did so from the steam client and it asked me which version of the game I want, original or remastered. I clicked remastered, and played remastered for about an hour. The next time I booted the game I clicked the "Sinking City Remastered" button on my desktop and the game seemingly launched into the original version without a prompt from steam and confused the hell out of me when my save was gone and all of my sound tinkering was gone from the menu. After some troubleshooting I decided I simply can't run the game from the desktop icon and have to run it from the steam client.

Now if these were my only issues in three hours, I might have given the game the benefit of the doubt and continued playing... If I was having fun. But I really wasn't. I was trying to immerse myself in the lore and characters and the gameplay kept butting in and getting in the way. Reading notes and listening to characters talk was by far the most fun part of the game but unfortunately there's a lot of terrible, terrible gameplay in between.

Camera: The game is a third person shooter and the camera is glued to the main character's back with him in basically in the center of the screen. He simply takes up WAY too much screen real estate, like, 1/6th of the screen. It feels truly awful to navigate the game world with the character blocking everything you want to look at, which is... well everything. The game is pretty beautifully crafted and interesting looking but I found myself being forced to walk around with the camera item out to get a first person view of everything because the third person sucks so much. Then you're expected to look for clues all over place and constantly can't see them because, surprise, the character is in the way.

Between the game camera being so weird to operate and a subtle "wobble" effect that gets introduced to the character the moment your sanity bar gets drained a single point, I was actually feeling motion sick for the first time ever playing a video game. And you will constantly have the wobble effect because using the game's detective mode where you can see otherworldly clues (like marked loot crates or enterable doors,) just so happens to drain a bit of sanity.

Controls: Interact is left click. I already uninstalled the game and can't check if there's a way to rebind this but what in the world? A shooter where left click is both interact and shoot... Interesting idea. Beyond this nitpick, the game simply feels bad to play, something about the movement feels off. Could be related to the camera issue I mentioned earlier.

Crafting: The game has a last of us style crafting system where you get gunpowder, bullet casings etc. as your primary source of loot and you choose what to turn it into and it is an absolute CHORE. I completed one combat area and was immediately sick of it. Start the area with 7 bullets, two creatures attack me, they sponge all 7 bullets and I finish the last one with my shovel. Loot the area and open like 6 crates, get enough crafting materials for seven more bullets, open menu craft bullets, fight the next pack of enemies, run out of bullets, use shovel, loot, craft 12 bullets, fight 2 more creatures, have 3 extra bullets, loot, craft 15 more bullets...

Just give me the damned bullets if the materials for them are going to be extremely common and the enemies are going to sponge bullets like crazy.

Traversing the game world: The Sinking City is a MAZE of zigzagging streets, some of which are flooded (the sinking part,) and it is a horrible boring chore to get anywhere. The sheer number of streets and the awkward zig-zagging means you will CONSTANTLY be opening your map to check if you're coming up on your turn. What makes this worse is that you get a boat to cross the flooded sections and the boat's physics simply BREAK when you pause the game and open the map. When returning from the map your boat will sometimes simply refuse to go forward anymore and you have to trick the game by trying to reverse the boat and then go forward again.

On top of these issues with simply traversing, the game wants to be immersive. You need to manually place your own points of interest on the map, like quest markers based off of the descriptions in your journal. This actually would be fun and immersive if the marks didn't delete themselves from time to time!

You're given a series of twelve(?) notes right when the open world starts up describing various phenomenon and where the writer of the notes experienced them. Naturally, I read all of the notes and carefully marked where they were on my map for about 15 minutes. Those map markers then cluttered up my in game compass for the rest of the session (there didn't seem to be a way to mark them and disable them on the compass,) AND subsequently vanished after I loaded my game the next time. Oh God no.

So yeah. Despite me wanting to love the game, and legitimately enjoying it's world and themes, I cannot continue playing it or recommend it to anyone.

When the remaster was announced, I thought: this game doesn't need a remaster, it needs a remake.
In my opinion open world is excessive for this game. It should have been more like Sherlock Holmes: Crime and Punishment, or more of an interactive movie. The side quests are done lazily and get boring pretty quickly.
Main quest is intriguing, but a great idea is not presented good enough.
Don't recommend it to my friends.

首先重置版不能继承原版存档 然后你们是哪来的信心卖到200多块
作为恐怖解谜游戏越玩越困 探图做任务的过程十分无聊 支线就是去扫荡怪物出没地区的房子找证据 来来回回就几只怪 子弹还特别缺 难度调高一些打都打不死 还有背包容量上限 捡垃圾都一顿一顿的很不舒服
主线剧情打了一半 令人印象深刻的情节不多 推理方面也很简单 看过克苏鲁就知道该往哪个方向推理 街上虽然偶尔刷新奇装异服的邪教徒 但是也不会有人突然发癫 把怪物从房子里引出来都不见有反应 倒是主角当街开枪他们会害怕
角色动作十分僵硬 还有主角极弱的性能 我说主角作为退役海军应该要坚强点 结果最高难度看了一眼人类尸体san值直接掉完了 就这个样子也去参军的嘛 还有战斗力也是 根本就挨不了几下 跑也跑很慢 导致战斗环节十分坐牢 怪物的刷新机制也是 出了门就要重新打 在感染区把怪都清完了还会播放bgm 这点挺烦的
城市里建筑同质化严重 还有异常浓郁的黄绿色滤镜 搞得视野里都是雾蒙蒙的 不得不把光影效果拉到最低才能看清楚 只能说作为克苏鲁游戏把病态的城市氛围渲染的特别好 非常有病使我视线模糊
总之这游戏就算是克迷我也不太想推荐 比起隔壁福尔摩斯觉醒来差的太多 所有人讲话都一个调调 主角就是赶任务的工具人 本体玩法就很无聊 不是重制画面就能解决的