Developer Frogwares delivers a competent third-person survival horror shooter that is solid, but can’t quite match the brilliance of its contemporary peers. The Sinking City 2, despite presenting itself as a sequel, forgoes the first game's emphasis on intricate investigation almost entirely in favour of a Resident Evil flavoured trip to the flood-ridden city of Arkham.
For the most part it's a smart shift in approach, allowing players to better soak in the Lovecraftian themes that lend themselves so naturally to horror within a more familiar, maze-driven map structure. The result is a more confident, if undeniably derivative, descent into the inky unknown.
One that's overall quality would still impress even without the real-world challenges Ukrainian based studio Frogwares has faced during this sequel's development. The Sinking City 2 might stand on the shoulders of other genre titans, but it’s an appropriately unsettling time where it counts.
Standalone story in a flooded Arkham
Despite centering on a protagonist who also has a love of boating around a submerged city whilst donning a trilby hat, The Sinking City 2 isn’t a direct sequel to the 2019 title. It is an entirely standalone story where you take on the role of a new investigator - who for some reason has similar hobbies and appearance - that finds himself entrenched within an unbelievably drenched city searching for answers.
Unlike the first game, which routinely had you boating around a flooded city, moving from location to location and speaking to witnesses chasing leads, The Sinking City 2 is far more approachable. Arkham, the new city suffering a murky crisis, isn’t one interconnected hub, but rather made up of various haunted house style areas, which you investigate one at a time while solving lock-and-key esque puzzles in true over-the-shoulder era Resident Evil fashion.
This change does away with the more clue-driven structure of the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes games and replaces it with a structure familiar to anyone who has played Capcom’s recent string of Resident Evil remakes, Dead Space, or last year’s Cronos: The New Dawn. This both helps and hurts The Sinking City 2, since everything great about it works to up the survival horror tension, yet isn’t exactly the most original.
Arkham's realisation and standout hospital
Where The Sinking City 2 definitely excels is in the realisation of Arkham itself as a location. Whether it’s the way rainfall hits the screen whenever hero Calvin explores outside, the general dilapidation of buildings, or the way the nightmarish enemies known as The Slither ooze out of walls and deceased bodies, this is the slipperiest survival horror game 2026 will have to offer.
From abandoned firehouses to rundown hotels, most locations are incredibly well realised, but the standout is the game’s second map, the Akeley Memorial Hospital. While exploring this environment, The Sinking City 2 truly settles into the type of survival horror game it wants to be. Filled with unique puzzles, rooms to plunder for resources, and ghoulish terrors to engage with, there’s a real sense of history and purpose. Akeley Hospital ranks up there with Resident Evil Requiem’s Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center from earlier this year.
It always kept me on my toes, forcing me to consider ammunition, craft more using scarce resources, all while solving puzzles that quite literally had me, at one point, piecing human faces together. As a multi-layered haunted house to get lost in, Akeley Memorial Hospital doesn’t disappoint.
Sadly, this area crops up relatively early on within Calvin’s adventure, and no other ever quite comes close to its brilliance - although the later Fish Market feels similarly unique. A more pressing issue is the general stiffness of its gunplay. Gun battles in The Sinking City 2 are always what I looked forward to least, especially when facing spider-like enemies prone to darting off, around and behind cover. In moments where the game actively forces you to engage with wave after wave of sludge-induced creatures, it’s hard not to see the cracks in the repetition.
Survival over shooting, and a worthwhile trip
The Sinking City 2 works far better as a survival game than an outright shooter. Piecing clues together from your in-game codex can be entirely optional, although you’d be missing out on the ability to instil Calvin with buffs that his Night Shade mask allows for. Linking up clues is less intrusive than before, but is still worth doing given how much more combat ready it can make Calvin.
One thing that was never in doubt was the reason I was doing anything. Calvin’s quest to reunite his wife’s spirit with her body is an engaging one, and the two’s relationship (as he regularly connects and converses with her across dimensions) is a definite highlight of the narrative. The story is less successful whenever it plunges Calvin into the realms of Cthulhu gods and ancient realms, which it does out of obligation due to the Lovecraftian source material, and not because it serves the central romance plot. As ink-drenched set dressing the worldbuilding is fine, giving The Sinking City 2 a different visual flavour to its survival horror peers.
In the end, The Sinking City 2 falls just shy of being a truly accomplished third-person survival horror experience due to how heavily it leans onto its contemporary inspirations. Frogwares has included some of its own ideas, but most are layered on top of an otherwise familiar gameplay approach and level structure. Both work well to make this second investigative outing to a flooded city a lot more accomplished and digestible, but not the total revelation it potentially could be. Calvin’s trip through Arkham is still a worthwhile trip for those who don’t mind so-so gunplay, with a standout environment in Akeley Memorial Hospital that gives me hope that The Sinking City might properly nail it the third time around. Rating: 3/5. The Sinking City 2 is scheduled to release on PS5, Xbox, and PC this Tuesday, September 18.
