The Sinking City now surfacing in June

After strange aeons kipping in the bath, Cthulhu surely won't mind lying in another few months before getting up for The Sinking City. Developers Frogwares today confirmed that they have delayed the launch of their Lovecraftian open-world detective RPG by two months, pushing it back from March 21st to June 27th. They say it's to escape the crush of games that have come out recently and continue to come, and that it'll be nice to have a little extra time to polish it anyway.

The Sinking City is Lovecraftian but not Lovecraft, set in a half-flooded city which houses many of the fishfaces and tentacles familiar from the famed racist's work without being directly based on any story. It also seems more open about its weirder elements, a city where people don't feel a need to hide the fact that they've clearly got that Innsmouth look going on. Quite how much it leans into "and then there are Cthulhus and you're a mentalist and it's time to shoot elder gods" remains to be seen, but I hope not. Doing detective snooping in a strange city would be enough for me. Not yet.

"We decided that we want to release our game in a less-crowded timeframe," Frogwares community manager Sergey Oganesyan explained in a video. "With so many great games coming out around the same time, I'm sure this will also give you some breathing space for your playing time."

He added that "this additional time will also allow us to continue to optimise The Sinking City, making it a little bit better."

More time to make a game better sounds good to me, especially after Cyanide's recent Call Of Cthulhu dropped the ball. And given that Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games often have some interesting ideas but don't come together that well, and now they're trying to do combat too. Alice Bell liked some of what she saw in a preview last year, but less so other parts.

In the meantime, perhaps it'll lift your spirits to watch this trailer explaining its detectiving.