The Sinking City will make you a magical Sherlock Holmes

The Sinking City is a peculiar place, today's new trailer reaffirms. It's full of witches and crooks and depressed fish people, and it's also half-submerged. There's a mystery at the heart of this weirdness that its sleuth protagonist will need to uncover, and it will take more than conventional detective skills.

You're going to need to figure everything out for yourself, the trailer boasts. There are no objectives and the game won't give you hints about who to accuse when you're trying to solve crimes and supernatural mysteries.

Magic comes in handy. You're able to see visions of past events, letting you recreate crime scenes. It's an arcane detective mode, essentially. Sometimes you're just going to need to rely on hard graft, though. Records can be rooted through to find clues, and all of those clues can then be arranged in a mind palace. You can then connect the dots and determine the guilty party and their motivations. You could be completely wrong, of course.

It's all a bit Sherlock Holmes, which isn't surprising given that Frogwares has been making Sherlock Holmes adventure games for more than a decade. It looks like a few of the systems from the latest entries have made their way over to The Sinking City.

Originally due out on March 21, The Sinking City seems to have been delayed, with the release date on Steam reverting to 2019. The trailer doesn't mention a release date, either.

Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He's also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he's not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog.