Lovecraftian horror is about the things that creep and feed beyond the realm of human understanding. Or perhaps your acquired knowledge would weigh more heavily on the investigator, dragging him deeper into madness. Perhaps players lose an ally and gain an enemy. The game goes on and the wrong person gets convicted. If The Sinking City functions the same way, we’d like to see consequences to the wrong conclusion. Noire, where the game doesn’t stop you from progressing because you reached a conclusion other than the one the writers had in mind and the game goes on. So what happens if you miss a clue or piece them together incorrectly? Frogwares hasn’t spoken on this yet, but we hope it plays out similarly to L.A. Questlines are centered around open investigation and Frogwares has gone on record stating that, “…there will be no handholding…” The city of Oakmont, Massachusetts is an open world where investigators will have to uncover their own leads without the game’s guidance. It will be exclusively up to the player to piece together the clues they obtain to direct them to the next location. Keeping in mind that all we’ve seen so far is alpha footage, I’m impressed with The Sinking City‘s potential. From what we’ve seen of The Sinking City in Frogwares’ alpha gameplay video at Gamescom, it’s an open–world filled with well developed NPCs and side quests for us to explore a strong fit for themes of discovery and consequences. So far, the Lovecraft mythos games we’ve played are all fairly linear stories that don’t feel like living breathing worlds. Prior to that we’ve seen (at least) Lovecraftian elements in Bloodborne, Narcosis, Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics, and even a nod in South Park: Fractured But Whole. Board games are also seeing a lot of Cthulian themed games these days including the recently funded Machina Arcana second edition and expansion, a new printing of Deep Madness, and an upcoming expansion to Mansions of Madness. Lovecraft and his Deep Ones are on the rise and I couldn’t be more excited to see them take the main stage.

Just last week we got the tabletop inspired Call of Cthulhu and we’ll see more in the upcoming Mansions of Madness digital adaptation. H.P Lovecraft is becoming ever more present in the world of gaming both in video games and tabletop.

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