Sinking City has a lot of offer despite glitches

There have been a couple of attempts at bringing this mythical world to the digital screen and we may finally have something worth getting excited about.

The horror stories of American writer HP Lovecraft have remained popular for nearly a century since they were first released and are getting a new lease on life thanks to video games.

Sent in the 1920s, the best known of his stories involved the Elder God Cthulhu, a behemoth with an octopus-like head who is said to be the harbinger of the end of the world and first appeared in the 1928 short story The Call of Cthulhu.

It’s you versus a Cthulhu-like ancient deity in the flooded remains of a 1920s city in this game.

The Cthulhu Mythos is the fictional universe involving the titular Great Old One and related entities, and includes a lot of psychological horrors, sinister cults, and terrors that drive people to the darkest depths of insanity.

Some of the attempts at bringing the Cthulhu Mythos to the digital screen have been more successful than others, but it looks like we finally have something that can be said to be worthy of the name.

Your character is well voiced and makes it clear throughout his investigations he’s got no time for being stuffed around.

The Sinking City, developed by Frogwares and published by Bigben Interactive for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, is probably the closest anyone has come to making a decent Cthulhu Mythos video game — although it’s far from perfect.

Your character is US Navy diver veteran turned private investigator Charles Reed, who finds himself plagued with mysterious and disturbing nightmares and hallucinations and makes his way to the city of Oakmont, Massachusetts, which is apparently the source of the visions troubling Charles and many others.

The city of Oakmont doesn’t appear on many maps and has recently been hit by a devastating flood that appears to be supernatural in origin, and things have gotten extremely weird in town as a result — and it would seem the town was a pretty weird place to begin with.

The flooded city looks very impressive and atmospheric, especially on a 4K TV.

Mysterious creatures are attacking residents, sea monsters lurk in the ocean, people who look like fish live in the town, and a strange cult that may not be as benevolent as it seems are spreading their influence among the survivors for questionable but almost certainly nefarious ends.

While Cthulhu himself doesn’t appear in the game, another one of his relatives who can bring about the end of the world does, and the story itself is very good, full of twists and turns and a realisation that some unspeakable horror really is on the verge of being unleashed on mankind.

You can use your character’s mind’s eye to piece together evidence to work out how events played out.

Even without the cosmic horror wanting to destroy the world, there’s still plenty of sinister goings on in town, ranging from strange fishlike people to the Ku Klux Klan, necromancy and even an ancient Mayan priestess.

Oakmont is a large, open world that has been partially flooded, so your key methods of getting around are walking, a small motorboat, or (as you unlock locations) fast-travel between phone booths.

Not all the game takes place on dry land either, with a number of missions tasking you with donning a Bioshock-like diving suit and plunging into the murky depths of the sea as well.

The voice acting on your character is excellent; it really conveys the tone of a no-nonsense detective who hasn’t slept properly in some time and really doesn’t have time for shenanigans.

The audio generally is really well done too — Oakmont is a wet, squishy place that’s perpetually getting rained on, and this comes across clearly in the sound; it really helps create a sense of damp, slick and decay that adds noticeably to the atmosphere.

Despite the great world building, the good story and even some interesting mechanics, the technical execution lets the game down. It looks great, especially on a 4K TV, but there’s too many graphical glitches and short draw distances (meaning characters just suddenly appear on the screen) as well as an all-round lack of polish.

Weird character animations and the like might be mildly amusing as YouTube clips, but don’t belong in a major computer game based on a well-known story world, and their presence here drags down the experience.

Unspeakable horrors lie in the depths of the ocean, so naturally you have to venture there too.

The Sinking City does not hold your hand, either. You don’t get helpful quest markers on the map saying ‘GO HERE AND TALK TO THIS PERSON ABOUT THIS THING’.

Your character is a detective and meant to be able to work stuff out for themselves, so you might get told, “the person you are looking for lives in this suburb, but I don’t know where” — meaning it’s off to the town hall to search the records to get their address (“on this road, between this street and this street”).

While this certainly adds to the “being a detective” aesthetic, it does create some situations where I found myself totally stumped, until I took a break

The way you deduce what happened at a particular scene is quite interesting — you research the evidence then piece it together through a kind of mind’s eye walk-through — but there were a few times where it was pretty obvious what had happened but I found my progress being held up by a missing piece of evidence I’d overlooked before I could activate the walk-through part.

In some respects the game has the same issue Mafia II did — you’ve got this beautifully presented setting, but you can only interact with a fairly small part of it. There’s no shops, so you can’t buy anything, you can’t really talk to anyone in the street — even if they appear to be wearing an octopus for a hat, or fishing off a jetty, or wearing really nice clothes despite it bucketing down — and it just sort of becomes an intriguing backdrop for you to wander past as you head from point A to point B.

Inter dimensional horrors aren’t immune to .44-40 revolver bullets, fortunately.

The combat in the game is, frankly, awful. Charles’ movements are stiff and awkward — certainly not those of a former military man who knows how to use a gun — and the weapons just don’t seem to have any real heft or impact. Shooting something — even a nameless terror from beyond space itself — with a Winchester Model 1887 shotgun should do more than just make it flinch slightly, and anything that gets an entire magazine of .38 Super Auto cartridges unloaded into it is going to have a bad day, not be mildly irritated.

Despite its flaws, The Sinking City remains probably the best Cthulhu Mythos game anyone’s managed to make, and one I found myself spending quite a bit of time with as a result.

If you’re a Lovecraft fan, you’ll definitely want to play this — and be glad you did — but if you’re just looking for a generic adventure/horror game you may not be able to overlook the shortcomings to enjoy everything The Sinking City has to offer.

There is a cast of strange characters for you to meet and discover in The Sinking City.

Are you a Cthulhu Mythos fan?

Continue the conversation with news.com.au games and technology writer Royce Wilson on Twitter @RoyceWilsonAU