Frogwares' Lovecraftian action-horror The Sinking City 2 is full of grim tenacity and pulp paperback charm, despite a few frayed edges. The game, out 18 August on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X and PC, is a pulpy action horror fuelled by scrappy ambition, Lovecraft fan fiction and wonderfully unhinged scenario design.
A game shaped by war
The game is also fuelled by the trauma and grit of developers who refused to let an invasion stop them making it. “As of writing, 85,183 air raid sirens registered across our cities,” reads an intro screen. “Work continued, and so did life.”
As Weird Tales magazine-cover gumshoe Calvin Rafferty steps out from his apartment, sirens and the public address system blare out over the flooded town of Arkham, heralding the final calls for evacuees. Through an open window, a couple resign themselves to abandoning their dead daughter’s toys. Rafferty’s decided to stick around, despite the floods and the strange infestation of worms that came with them. His girlfriend’s in a coma, and it’s “cursed pacts with interdimensional gods” serious. Hoping for a cure, he hops in the boat you’ll use to explore the first act’s semi-open city map, and makes for the Miskatonic library.
Combat and puzzles
Out is the first Sinking City’s clumsy but earnest exploration of Lovecraft’s provincial racism; in is shooting unknowable cosmic horrors in whatever passes for the face with a tommy gun. To be fair, it’s a great tommy gun. The influence of 2019’s Resident Evil 2 remake is immediately apparent from the identical UI of an achievements menu. Inventory space is tight, as are the corridors that diverge and fold back into themselves like puzzle boxes. Supplies are scarce but ambushes frequent. The distant howls of rabid fish men and worm-riddled zombies dare you to preserve bullets, while the score and every instinct scream at you to let loose like a startled skunk.
Frogwares cut its teeth on Sherlock Holmes games, a lineage evident here in some clever puzzles that offer a reason to veer off the main path. Things get rougher when the studio ventures into new territory. Enemies are so relentless that most combat is unavoidable, undermining the intricate map design by offering no reason to take advantage of shortcuts. Elsewhere, the plot’s central romance flops like a soggy fish finger due to some stiff acting and overwrought dialogue.
Gallows humour and tension
Generous doses of squishy gallows humour, elaborate secrets and expert tension pick up the slack. As does writing that skirts the grim glorification of overt war allegory to tell a story about refusing to leave what you love in the rubble, so long as the faintest signs of life remain. If you’re going to create, wrote Bukowski, you’ll do it “while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood and fire”. And there’s me thinking he was being dramatic.
