Shen’s first tiny apartment embodies the old-style Hong Kong public housing studios. Stroll into a night market and you’ll hear hawkers selling their goods. Pedestrians converse in Cantonese and, in a particularly deft touch, the crosswalk lights make the correct ClickClickClickClickClick noise. Neon and billboards blaze on the buildings overhead. Red taxis and green-roofed minibuses roar by. The city looks and sounds like it should. Sleeping Dogs feels most authentic when you’re walking down the street. The city is strange, wrong, a fiction – but it’s still undeniably Hong Kong. Its outdoor areas feel squeezed while its indoor environments expand to ludicrous dimensions. It’s recognizable at street level, but falls apart the moment the player calls up the map or looks out to sea. Sleeping Dogs provides a schizophrenic vision of Hong Kong. So how accurate is the Hong Kong we get in Sleeping Dogs?Įxtremely accurate, it turns out, and at the same time, not accurate at all.
But with Sleeping Dogs: The Definitive Edition launching recently and the release schedule finally cooling off, I thought it was time to revisit and see how the game measured up to reality. Real life crowded the game out and I shelved the idea. I bought Sleeping Dogs 72 hours after moving to Hong Kong, thinking I’d explore the city digitally at the same time as encountering it with my own eyes.
