Developer Frogwares has announced that its promising Lovecraft-inspired, open-world detective adventure, The Sinking City, has been delayed. It will now launch on June 27th this year, rather than March 21st as originally planned.
Frogwares says that the delay is, in part, to ensure that players get “the best possible game” on release. However, it also readily admits that it simply wanted to launch The Sinking City in a “less crowded time frame”. The extra months between now and the new release date will be used, explains Frogwares community manager Sergey Oganesyan in the video below, to continue optimising The Sinking City, “making it a little bit better”.
The Sinking City, if you’ve not been following its development journey so far, is set in the 1920s and tells the story of Charles Reed, a private investigator plagued by hellish visions, who travels to Oakmont, Massachusetts in order to escape “the creeping insanity that afflicts him”.
Far from being a sleepy corner of America, however, Oakmont’s supernaturally flooded streets are, somewhat inevitably, home to all manner of cosmic horrors.
As was the case with Frogwares’ well-received Sherlock Holmes games, exploration and detective work are a major focus of The Sinking City – and this latest game even borrows a few gameplay features (such as the recently revealed Mind Palace) from those earlier titles.
Cases are completely open-ended, and feature no explicit objectives or waypoints, to properly emphasise the game’s investigatory core – which could be quite daunting (and, hopefully, extremely satisfying) given The Sinking City’s free-form, open-world structure.
The Sinking City will launch on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC when its revised June 27th release date finally rolls around.