072
OAKMONT
CITY MAP
5 6 7
Strange etchings hint at a multitude of cosmic horrors,
tying together many strands of Lovecraft’s wide mythos.COVERSIDE
Rest in peace
A hotel, and more missionsA
s we leave the harbour we’re overcome by
another strange vision, a giant beast sucking
us up, slurping up the whole city. When we wake
we’re in the Devil’s Reef Hotel. We find a message
from another hotel guest pleading with us to
track down some ancient tomes – when we nose
around, we discover his room is that of an
obsessive, but he seems to have vanished. We
change clothes for something warmer (we’ll
unlock more by completing cases, and via DLC),
and make note of this book-hunt as a
potential side-case (one of many, it seems),
and gather evidence that will lead us to
many corners of the city. Before he sent
us on our way, Throgmorton handed us
what he knew about the case as distinct
pieces of evidence, and we’re able to
mark each clue where we want on the
map. Using what he told us about the
location of the Expedition
Headquarters we find the street it’s
on, mark it as a waypoint, and leave the
hotel. The Sinking City is not a game
that will ever simply hand you
waypoints; you need to make your own
deductions or sweet-talk the right
people into marking your map for you
(though you can at least fast travel from
phone booths in each district).Expedition impossible
Those Dagon cultists ruin everything!A
h. The door to the Expedition Headquarters is
bashed in. Clearly we weren’t the first
person to think of coming here. Eels writhing in a
nearby tank watch us as we pick over what
documentation we can find, though the
scraps on the floor prove nearly worthless.
Activating Mind’s Eye we see ghostly
crows pecking away at a wall. On further
investigation, the wall seems to vanish,
though before we can stop it our Mind’s
Eye shows us more ghostly visions,
this time of what appear to be
cultists lugging papers down to
the basement. A follower
murmurs the name of the one
they worship: “Dagon”. It
gives us the shivers, and our
Sanity plummets.
Downstairs we see another
cultist – but not a vision this
time, a real person with a gun. He
shoots. He misses! We shoot, and
we don’t. He drops to the floor.
Again, the vision-crows lead us to
where the papers were burnt and
we find one remaining thing: a
small scrap of an old newspaper
advertisement recruiting for the
doomed expedition.Papers, please
Reed by name, read by natureW
e need more information. Given the scrap
we found, we reckon the Oakmont Chronicle
will be a good place to start. (Again, this is
something we choose to do, not something
marked by some glowy waypoint. We’re told there
are multiple ways to progress to the next step of
the investigation.) A reporter at the paper has
heard of us, and we give a quick interview, being
careful which answers we choose to give. We tell
her about Reed’s wartime service, and how the
city’s draw for missing people across the US had
led us here. We don’t mention we’re also trying to
uncover the truth behind our own visions. We
search the paper’s archive – the key locations
throughout the city all have their own files to
check over. To get anything from archives like this
we need to zero in with three facts we definitely
know. In this case, we know the scrap we found
was in the advertisement section, that it
concerned the Grimhaven Bay district, and that it
was from after the flood. With that, we find out
the expedition’s organisers were recruiting at
Pier 3 at the harbour. It’s an evolution of the
Archive gameplay from Frogwares’ past Sherlock
Holmes game, and one that seems to reward
some proper detective thinking.
We quickly swing by the police station en route
to the harbour, but Captain Caleb Lyons makes it
clear we’re not welcomed by the force here.