075THE SINKING CITY
“A STRANGE, MANY-
TENTACLED THING
SWIMS BY JUST
OUT OF SIGHT.”
Dock to doc
Tracking the captain to hospitalW
hen you have a wound that bad, you’ve got
no choice but to get it treated immediately.
Opening our map, we mark that clue firmly over
where we know the hospital to be. Because it just
makes sense. Streets out that way are flooded,
but luckily zippy little boats are on hand to take us
safely across. If we spend too long swimming in
that water, things will get at us and our health will
slowly decrease.
On arrival at the hospital the doctor gives us a
pill to help with our headaches but it just makes
them worse. Our Sanity gauge plummets, and we
see a vision so real it actually begins to attack us,
whittling down our health, before it fades away. It
turns out nobody named Captain Sanders has
checked in, but knowing what we do about him
we’re able to deduce which of the patients is him
under a false name. He refuses to tell us much on
the expedition other than that the scientists
never returned from the depths, and those who
went looking for them came back half-mad. At
our insistence, he points us in the direction of an
old factory where we can secure a diving suit,
and tells us where to find his ship’s log in the
hospital storage. It contains the co-ordinates to
The Devil’s Teeth – the spot they dove from.A deeper mystery
Continuing the search below the wavesU
sing the map and a boat, we find the half-
sunken factory and secure a diving suit. Then
we head back to the harbour to take another boat
out to the diving site. (Good job Reed doesn’t suffer
from seasickness, eh?) Knowing Reed dived in the
Navy, we try to remain confident despite the
warnings. We follow lanterns and flares along the
ocean floor. A strange, many-tentacled thing
swims by just out of sight, then more tentacle
things emerge from the seafloor, trying to get at
us. Once again our Sanity plunges, before we
manage to take refuge in an underwater cave.W
ithinthecavernwefindthesurvivors of
the expedition, babbling nonsense.
They’ve been trapped down here, their diving
suits all cut up. At the back of the cave is a
huge statue of a creature, and some sort of
plinth. It’s clearly a place of worship.
Professor Hammond, who led the expedition,
appears to be missing.
Using our Retrocognition once again we
cast back to find out what happened, picking
the correct sequence of events to piece it all
together. It appears that when an artefact
was taken from the plinth, it gave the team
some sort of infectious madness; then
Professor Hammond and the artefact were
seized by what looked like the same group that
raided their headquarters. With the evidence
we’ve collected piling up we turn to our Mind
Palace, a menu where we can piece together
matching pairs of clues (again, an evolution of
a mechanic from the Sherlock Holmes games).
Using this we manage to deduce that this is a
similar madness to the one Albert suffered,
and like it did with Lewis it affects those
around the victims. That leaves us with a
dilemma – do we save those trapped downhere and risk them spreading a madness into
Oakmont, or do we leave them to die?
It seems the main cases in the game will be
filled with moral choices like this, which may
have an affect on what happens to this sinking
city of Oakmont further down the line.
We vow to let the authorities know how the
survivors can be rescued, and return to the
surface to report to Throgmorton. Perhaps
now he can point us in the right direction to
find out more about these visions we’re
suffering from. But something deeper and
more sinister seems to be going on...9
11
COVERSIDE
Finders, weepers
Idol curiosity leads to trouble
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