THE SINKING CITY is pure eurojank - you gotta dig fairly deep to find your own fun. Combat feels bad: guns feel weak, enemies are bullet sponges, and your ammo count is so low you run dry after one or two encounters on normal difficulty - even after increasing your capacity using a skill tree that only offers the most modest of upgrades (10% chance to do 50% more damage? with just the one gun? why). The story is thin and when the cases aren't swerving from one plot point to another without a satisfying denouement (most cases end with characters dying/disappearing from the plot entirely and completely forgotten) it feels like it's jangling keys at Lovecraft aficionados going "hey kids! remember THIS from THAT story? JANGLE JANGLE JANGLE!"

The civilian population is also similarly unconvincing: they walk around and do actions proper to their relative location (fishing when near water, getting into fights with each other over a nearby haul, preaching when standing on soapboxes etc) but honestly? If you removed them, nothing would really be lost; in fact, it might even have increased the atmosphere: wandering the deserted streets that are empty except for cosmic horrors out to gobble you up.

So after all that: why am I giving this game a thumbs up? Vibes. Vibes and compelling quest design. Regardless of the actual quests and rewards (and story), the quest DESIGN is marvelous: you're rarely following an automatic quest marker, you have to apply your own based on map directions and/or other context clues. Admittedly, the map directions tend towards "at the corner of Herbert St and West St" (I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE) and finding extra clues involve plugging in what you know into a library/newspaper/police record and getting an address in return but still: this quest design had me compelled for 30 hours until the (unsatisfyingly meh) conclusion, and I wish more open world games incorporated something like this! Instead of plopping a waypoint on a map and you just. Walk forward until something happens.

EDIT: Oh! I forgot to mention one of my favorite bits in The Sinking City: at one point in the story you'll find yourself at a wake and see a dead body with mourners gathered about the open casket. You turn in a quest, get a quest, and leave awkwardly out the back door. Later, you come back to the same wake and see that the body has been replaced with cake that is SHAPED EXACTLY LIKE THE BODY. Same mourners are still gathered about: only now they're daintily slicing cake onto tiny plates and taking dainty bites in between their tears. Hilarious, macabre, and dark as midnight.

Another favorite bit: I was checking the house of a newly-minted philanthropist trying to do good for the community, apparently trying to make up for his dad's past sins. Most of those sins are pretty obvious (dad was a crime boss! he did the organised crime!) but if you head to the back of the house you can see why else his son would want to distance himself from his dad's legacy: a trash can filled with the robes of the KKK.

There's so many little touches like this here and there in the story and I wish there was more of it (feels like too little content spread too thin over too large an open world - reminding me a lot of L.A. NOIRE) but I appreciated what little did actually pop up!