Looking at your game list, if you liked Deadly Premonition, I would say you have a tolerance for non-optimal design, so this should be a breeze for you. I plan on playing The Sinking City through a second time at some point in the future when I have forgotten the side quests and will likely try to platinum it at that point. The combat wasn't great, but that shouldn't be the strength of any Lovecraft game*, so it didn't bother me much. I definitely enjoyed the investigation part of the game, and many of the quests were well done. Maybe don't get it now, maybe wait for a few patches or a price drop or a sale or an offer, but don't forget about The Sinking City. I think the writer himself might have approved of this video game. As a reader of Lovecraft, I recognized this land and its people immediately and had a mighty fine time regardless of the ugly fluff. It's a well-written, well-meant, brave Eldritch adventure and a Lovecraft theme park, that self-sabotages itself with sad attempts to add modern game elements. It lets you do your own investigation and draw your own conclusions. The Sinking City lets you be and feel like a Noir detective in a run-down prohibition era New England, and adds Elder Gods to that. It's ugly, but you can just see behind the rot, circumvent it just easily enough to get to the soul of the thing, which is mysterious and shiny and full of love for the collected writings of an old dead writer. There's firearms now, and combat, that nobody asked for strange pockets of meaningless shooting and crafting and collecting.
For some insane reason, it is now an open world game. The detritus of those past twenty years of gaming has been seeping into it. And yet, there is something wrong with it. Its bones are bare now, there is never a question what to do next. Imagine it could still do that, and at the same time had lost it's potential to frustrate and leave you stranded. Imagine that, after all these years, it could still give you that unique pleasure of figuring out the exact way the storytellers and puzzle designers wanted you to think that joy of making the connections yourself, without handholding, without a pulsing questmarker sapping away your agency. Fresh from the pet sematary of video games, it's a recognizable adventure, but dead and slimy and wondrous. I learned a lot and barely murdered anyone - A mini-review of "The Sinking City" Imagine someone brought back one of the old LucasArts adventures, but it's been dead and buried for a few years.