WP: Thank you for taking the time to speak to us about your upcoming game The Sinking City.

SO: Hey, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about it!

WP: In your own words, what is The Sinking City all about?

The Sinking City is a third person action investigation game, heavily inspired by H.P Lovecraft and is set in his universe. The game tells a story of a 1920s private detective, who arrives in the fictional city of Oakmont, Massachusetts, to find it in total disarray and chaos.

Locals are trying to survive a brutal flood, which at first looks like a natural disaster. But as the flood is not withdrawing and the city inhabitants are slowly sinking into insanity we feel that some supernatural power is at play. Our goal is to solve the mystery of this city which oddly seems to relate to us in a strange way.

As a detective, we will be using our wits and intuition to conduct investigations, examine crime scenes, question suspects and deliver justice (or injustice, based on your moral compass☺) to those we consider responsible for something. And when push comes to shove, our hero can rely on his weaponry to try (try!) and keep himself out of harm’s way.

WP: As a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work I am excited to see your take on his universe. Are the majority of the development team fans of his work?

You bet! Most people in our company have read his works, and have a strong opinion on them. Our narration team, for example, really dig his underlying themes, such as fear of the unknown, fatalism, our place in the universe, the futility of our efforts, insanity, and, of course, cosmic fear.

Btw, we’ve actually made games in the past that featured the Cthulhu Mythos, like Sherlock Holmes The Awakened in 2007. This should tell you we have been fond Lovecraft for a long time, and The Sinking City is not something we decided to make out of the blue.

WP: You’ve explained in a dev diary video that your adaptation is more of an expansion of Lovecraft’s works as opposed to a rendition of a particular story. How beneficial has this freedom been?

You are absolutely right, The Sinking City is an expansion of the Lovecraft universe. What does that mean? It means we totally recognize events that happened in his novels, they are canon in our game as well. Characters of Lovecraft and his followers created also exist in our world.

That doesn’t mean they all will be present in The Sinking City though. I mean, some will be, like hybrids who moved to Oakmont from Innsmouth. Of course, certain INCOMPREHENSIBLE and ancient beings are also part of the game.

But what we ultimately want to do is use the foundation – the underlying themes I mentioned above – to tell our own story. This allows us to build our own world, create our own characters, write their own motivations etc. Our hands are untied because a lot of what we do is basically based on our interpretation of Lovecraft’s works.

On the one hand, this freedom is great for us for obvious reasons. On the other hand, we must make sure what we create actually fits the Lovecraftian world.