Sinking City Remastered (cw: spoilers)
Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2025 12:43 pm
After a five-year wait, I acquired and then finished "The Sinking City", a game for computers and video-game consoles.
I do not recommend it.
I have many complaints, but today I want to talk about the representation.
There are seven relationships where characters have speaking roles.
• Three of them are M/F. One of them, a man's wife is cheating on him with the fish people. Another, a man's entire family was wiped out by fish, somehow.
• Four of them are M/M. The narrative is written in such a way that we're supposed to regard two characters as sympathetic just because they gay men in the 1920s. One of them is a crime boss who tried to have his father killed. The other is a policeman, in a city where all policemen are demonstrated to be corrupt, incompetent, or both.
• None of them are F/F.
So there's this undertone going on where there's two queer characters, both male, who are supposed to be sympathetic merely for being gay and male in this 1920s pastiche. One of them is a fratricide and the other is a corrupt cop.
How are the women represented? Compared to the dozens of male characters who have speaking roles, five* are female.
• One woman is a professor who is insane and speaks incoherently. She exists to be kidnapped. Despite a quest to rescue her, it doesn't appear to be possible. There's a cut scene and she never appears again. She was pivotal to the plot and then she's not.
• One woman is a cult leader who is cheating on her husband with the fish people.
• One woman is a librarian with her mouth sewn shut. (It's a horror game, so I like this one, especially because we never find out why.)
• One woman is a religious cultist who arrived too late to participate in the mass suicide. You can tell her it's okay to go home and she will.
• Annnd one woman is a "Mayan mummy vampire" who speaks with an accent best described as "Transylvanian dinner theater". She doesn't belong in this game, or really any game for that matter.
(*There may be a sixth - a woman who was committed by her husband to an insane asylum, rather than divorcing her. I didn't find her, but I never resolved that quest-line, so I don't know if she has something to say.)
Among my many complaints, chief among them is how nerd-core the writing was. I've joked before that dull writers will often write smart people with annoyed attitudes ... because whenever dull people interact with smart people, it's always to annoy them. That's the writing, here. Too many characters cop an attitude. Your main character cops an attitude, even though he's supposed to be a worldly private-eye, and thus should know that he needs to be a smooth talker to get people to open up. Everyone he meets is an asshole, despite some of them being career politicians or crime bosses, at least some of whom should know how to be smooth.
I say "too many characters", because it's only the white, male characters who are assholes like this. The women and POC are mostly in subordinate roles, giving quests and needing stuff done for them. There's two exceptions. The woman cult-leader comes off as nice at first, but quickly becomes a scenery-chewing asshole when you expose the plans of her rebuked husband. The vampire woman dumps exposition — and, pointedly, frequently possesses a white male to have him do all the talking, which spares us from that terrible accent but also has us not interacting with her but a male actor; eventually there's a boss fight and you gun her down, one of the few such fights in the game.
Most of my issue with the game is the direction. The voice-actors are quite capable, they've just been given three words where two would do, and given dialogue written by fan-fictive Whedonesques who think they're being clever while dropping references to H2G2. The game opens with a disclaimer that we'll see "attitudes of the era" that might be racist or sexist. Sure, we do see one woman committed instead of divorced, but it's implied her husband gave her up because he was practicing bestiality, instead.
The Ku Klux make brief appearances but it's only in one room, which is filled with environmental jokes like "Borax Laundry: Get Your Whites Whiter". You could discover the remains of a family annihilation one minute, then stumble into three people eating with their hands from a cake that's in the shape of a gorilla in the next. Lovecraft extolled the strengths of "fear of the unknown", yet the four (yes, only four!) kinds of monsters have all their capabilities meticulously documented and explained in the first twenty minutes.
I entered this "Cthulhu Skyrim" with low expectations and I got even less.
There's lots more complaints I have, but really it was this edginess masquerading as maturity that I wanted to write about.
I do not recommend it.
I have many complaints, but today I want to talk about the representation.
There are seven relationships where characters have speaking roles.
• Three of them are M/F. One of them, a man's wife is cheating on him with the fish people. Another, a man's entire family was wiped out by fish, somehow.
• Four of them are M/M. The narrative is written in such a way that we're supposed to regard two characters as sympathetic just because they gay men in the 1920s. One of them is a crime boss who tried to have his father killed. The other is a policeman, in a city where all policemen are demonstrated to be corrupt, incompetent, or both.
• None of them are F/F.
So there's this undertone going on where there's two queer characters, both male, who are supposed to be sympathetic merely for being gay and male in this 1920s pastiche. One of them is a fratricide and the other is a corrupt cop.
How are the women represented? Compared to the dozens of male characters who have speaking roles, five* are female.
• One woman is a professor who is insane and speaks incoherently. She exists to be kidnapped. Despite a quest to rescue her, it doesn't appear to be possible. There's a cut scene and she never appears again. She was pivotal to the plot and then she's not.
• One woman is a cult leader who is cheating on her husband with the fish people.
• One woman is a librarian with her mouth sewn shut. (It's a horror game, so I like this one, especially because we never find out why.)
• One woman is a religious cultist who arrived too late to participate in the mass suicide. You can tell her it's okay to go home and she will.
• Annnd one woman is a "Mayan mummy vampire" who speaks with an accent best described as "Transylvanian dinner theater". She doesn't belong in this game, or really any game for that matter.
(*There may be a sixth - a woman who was committed by her husband to an insane asylum, rather than divorcing her. I didn't find her, but I never resolved that quest-line, so I don't know if she has something to say.)
Among my many complaints, chief among them is how nerd-core the writing was. I've joked before that dull writers will often write smart people with annoyed attitudes ... because whenever dull people interact with smart people, it's always to annoy them. That's the writing, here. Too many characters cop an attitude. Your main character cops an attitude, even though he's supposed to be a worldly private-eye, and thus should know that he needs to be a smooth talker to get people to open up. Everyone he meets is an asshole, despite some of them being career politicians or crime bosses, at least some of whom should know how to be smooth.
I say "too many characters", because it's only the white, male characters who are assholes like this. The women and POC are mostly in subordinate roles, giving quests and needing stuff done for them. There's two exceptions. The woman cult-leader comes off as nice at first, but quickly becomes a scenery-chewing asshole when you expose the plans of her rebuked husband. The vampire woman dumps exposition — and, pointedly, frequently possesses a white male to have him do all the talking, which spares us from that terrible accent but also has us not interacting with her but a male actor; eventually there's a boss fight and you gun her down, one of the few such fights in the game.
Most of my issue with the game is the direction. The voice-actors are quite capable, they've just been given three words where two would do, and given dialogue written by fan-fictive Whedonesques who think they're being clever while dropping references to H2G2. The game opens with a disclaimer that we'll see "attitudes of the era" that might be racist or sexist. Sure, we do see one woman committed instead of divorced, but it's implied her husband gave her up because he was practicing bestiality, instead.
The Ku Klux make brief appearances but it's only in one room, which is filled with environmental jokes like "Borax Laundry: Get Your Whites Whiter". You could discover the remains of a family annihilation one minute, then stumble into three people eating with their hands from a cake that's in the shape of a gorilla in the next. Lovecraft extolled the strengths of "fear of the unknown", yet the four (yes, only four!) kinds of monsters have all their capabilities meticulously documented and explained in the first twenty minutes.I entered this "Cthulhu Skyrim" with low expectations and I got even less.
There's lots more complaints I have, but really it was this edginess masquerading as maturity that I wanted to write about.