The Sinking City

Few games have a publishing history as genuinely dramatic as The Sinking City's. Frogwares, the Ukrainian studio behind several Sherlock Holmes games, released this Lovecraftian open-world detective title on 27 June 2019 through publisher Nacon (then Bigben Interactive). A little over a year later, in August 2020, the game vanished from every storefront — Frogwares had terminated its contract with Nacon, alleging unpaid royalties and improper handling of the game's intellectual property, and pulled the listing entirely rather than keep selling a game whose publisher it was now suing. What followed was messier still: Nacon briefly republished its own version on Steam in early 2021, Frogwares hit that listing with a DMCA takedown, and the two sides spent roughly three more years in dispute before Frogwares finally became the game's sole publisher in January 2024. What Steam sells today is the result: a UE5-rebuilt "Remastered" edition, the only version currently available on the storefront.

A genuinely distinctive setting, even in 2019

Set the publishing saga aside for a moment, because the game underneath it has a real identity of its own. You play a private investigator working the flooded town of Oakmont, Massachusetts, where a supernatural flood has drowned half the streets and a cosmic-horror conspiracy is unfolding beneath the surface — literally and otherwise. The detective mechanic is the game's most distinctive idea: rather than the game simply telling you what a clue means, you gather evidence and have to piece together your own conclusion about what happened, sometimes incorrectly, with real consequences for getting it wrong. It's an approach that draws consistent, specific praise across the entire seven-year review history, in positive and negative reviews alike — "the atmosphere, visuals and story are amazing," reads one representative recent review, from a reviewer who otherwise landed on a mixed overall verdict. That combination — genuine affection for the setting and mythos, real frustration with everything else — is the throughline of almost the entire negative sample checked for this piece.

What critics and players have consistently found weaker is everything wrapped around that core idea. Combat draws steady, specific criticism throughout the review history as clumsy and under-designed — "the environment is quite good, the combat is not," reads one typical complaint — and the investigation gameplay itself draws a related, if distinct, criticism for repetitiveness: one detailed, long-form review states plainly that "all the puzzles are identical," a complaint that recurs, in less blunt language, across a meaningful share of the sample. Several reviewers also draw an unflattering comparison to Frogwares' own prior game, Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, noting the two share structural problems — an open world that feels big and empty rather than purposefully designed, non-player characters who function more like set dressing than a living town.

The relaunch controversy

Here's where the game's unusual history genuinely shapes the current player experience rather than just being interesting trivia. When Frogwares relaunched The Sinking City as "Remastered" in 2024, it didn't simply add a new option alongside the original 2019 build — it replaced it as the default, and, per Steam news posts and community discussion tracked at the time, has moved toward removing the older build entirely from what's included with a purchase. That's drawn a real, pointed backlash from a specific slice of the player base: in the 100-review negative sample checked for this piece, "remaster" or "original" comes up in over a quarter of all reviews, and the sentiment is remarkably consistent. "Avoid the Remastered Version, play the OG included mode instead," reads one, going on to describe the new version as amounting to little more than "an Instagram Fog Filter" over the old one. "Where is the Unreal Engine 4 version of the game that I bought? Was it so hard to release this version separately instead of replacing the original?" reads another, capturing the core of the complaint precisely: this isn't really about whether the remaster looks better, it's about players losing access to a specific version of a game they'd already paid for.

Layered on top of that is a genuine, current performance problem. Reviews from as recently as August 2026 describe frequent crashes, stuttering — one detailed report specifically ties stuttering to firing the shotgun — and frame rates some players call unplayably low even on capable hardware. "The remastered update is and was a disaster. No updates, no fixes, complete trash," reads one blunt, recent review. This is worth taking seriously as a live, ongoing issue rather than a launch-week complaint that's since been patched: the timestamps on these reports run right up to the date this review was checked, with no clear sign in the review data of the situation having meaningfully improved.

Verdict

The Sinking City is a game whose real strengths — a genuinely distinctive, well-realised Lovecraftian setting and a detective mechanic that trusts the player to draw their own conclusions — have been consistently recognised across its entire, unusually turbulent seven-year history. What's kept it from a cleaner recommendation, both at launch and today, is a combination of steady mechanical weaknesses (repetitive investigation structure, clumsy combat) and, more recently, a relaunch that's frustrated a real slice of its existing audience by replacing rather than supplementing the version they'd bought, on top of performance problems that remain unresolved as of this review. The story behind the game — a smaller studio fighting a multi-year legal battle against its own publisher and winning back the right to sell its work — is worth rooting for on its own terms. Whether that's reason enough to pay a notably steep NZ$68.00 for a still-rough relaunch of a seven-year-old game is a harder case to make; the atmosphere and mythos are worth experiencing, but this is a title to catch on a sale rather than buy on principle at full price.

6 out of 10. A genuinely distinctive Lovecraftian detective game with real atmosphere and a remarkable real-world survival story behind it, undercut by repetitive investigation, weak combat, and a relaunch that's traded goodwill with part of its own audience for problems it hasn't yet fully solved.