Although the studio skimmed the surface of it with the detective adventure prequel, The Sinking City 2 sees Ukrainian developer Frogwares dive fully into survival horror territory with its Lovecraft-inspired world. A sequel in name, it’s a completely standalone entry that doesn’t require playing the previous entry – mercifully, for me, as I never got around to finishing that one.
This time around we’re circa 1929 and in the well-insulated boots of one Calvin Rafferty, a man enamoured equally with the world of the occult and with his beloved Faye Bennett. After the two go poking into cosmic powers that they perhaps should have left well alone, Faye falls into a coma and Calvin loses any memory of what transpired, leading him on a quest to engage the same cosmic powers in the hopes of bringing her back. In the meanwhile, their home of Arkham, Massachusetts has succumbed to a mysterious flood that’s not only devastated the landscape but brought with it supernatural phenomena and parasitic creatures from another world.
The Sinking City 2 wears its genre influences on its sleeve, with all of the ammo-scrounging, ornate key hunting, inventory management and zombie-adjacent baddies stalking poorly-lit corridors. It’s mostly very solid, too, with some level design grievances in the mid-to-late game and some frustrations with Calvin’s lurching movement in tight quarters – but for anyone who cut their teeth on early-era survival horror these things are almost a comfort at this point.
It’s the game’s setting and atmosphere that do it the most favours, Arkham’s flooded, weather-beaten streets offering something different to the usual mansions, small towns and haunted forests. A riverside burg designed to accommodate the height of intelligentsia, you can feel the pandemic hubris frozen in time by cosmically-divine intervention. Each distinct chapter offers a slightly different take on the semi-open, looping design that The Sinking City 2 inherits from the greats. First you’ll be getting around by motorised dinghy, mooring at churches and pubs alike on the hunt for a McGuffin or two, then it’s the winding wards of a hospital, a fish market split in twain by a giant vessel and, well, I’ll hold onto the rest.
Visually, it’s an enormous step up from anything I’ve seen Frogwares produce so far. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5, the team’s second published UE5 game after the recent remaster of the first game, and it’s done well to marry artistry with technology to deliver on a very specific look and feel, refusing to fall into the trap of just throwing every available feature at the wall. Every street, building, corridor and bit of otherworldly architecture feels grounded and authored within the fiction, and there’s a mastery of wet-ness that benefits both the Lovecraftian, thalassic concepts and the pure horror of flesh-invading worms and unnatural creatures. God, I wish I could share some of the late-game imagery with you because it is delicious.
You won’t often have time to look too long at the well-crafted scenery though, as those Slithers and other monstrosities stalk every inch of Arkham. The former are worm-like creatures that inhabit the bodies of the dead, turning them into shambling biological weapons of increasing menace, and who share space with skittering gremlins made of teeth and legs, 10-foot walls of flesh and limbs, and the timeless, fishy Deep Ones. Like any good survival horror, facing down these nasties is a balance of knowing when and where to strike, as well as when to double back and preserve your very limited resources. Enemies tend to have very obvious weak points, but often will not go down easy – or just not stay down – so effective shooting and taking any opportunity to melee or ground stop is the key to staying on top.
Calvin’s growing arsenal of weapons universally feel great in the hand, though a limited inventory space and ammo means you’ll need to find your favourites and try to stick with them. I found the balance of monsters and items to be pretty fair across the whole game, at least on the standard difficulty. Although each chapter also tends to have at least one moment where you’re trapped in a small space with a particularly tough enemy or even huge groups of regular enemies, and these all feature a handful of item crates that routinely replenish their contents to get you through the battle – a merciful inclusion that prevents being soft-locked out of these elongated battles but also feels a touch cheap after scrimping and scrounging for so long otherwise.
Frogwares has managed to hang onto some of its investigative roots with semi-optional puzzle sequences that crib from the first game’s mind palace-style detective work. Difficulty options specific to puzzles mean you can take a little of the edge off of this stuff, but anyone who’s treated themselves to detective work in The Sinking City, the studio’s Sherlock Holmes series, and/or the Silent Hill brand of noodle-scratching will find themselves right at home here. One particular puzzle did cause some frustration and confusion – both for myself and a fair few other reviewers I’ve engaged with – but the vast majority are quite intuitive and satisfying to overcome.
An interesting pull from the world of modern action-adventure games, and not necessarily survival horror, is the inclusion of Faye as a constant companion despite her corporeal deficiencies. Early on, Calvin manages to attach her spirit to a magical mask that he wears on his belt, meaning she remains present throughout the game and engages with him in conversation at opportune moments – like a Mimir a la God of War or that bangle in Forspoken. Thankfully, the game’s writing does a decent job at believable banter that doesn’t skew too corny and serves gameplay well enough. The mask also acts as a replenishable resurrection item and a vessel for skills unlocked via collected Dream Essence.
It also helps bind together the game’s themes of love, sacrifice and self-preservation as – without giving too much away – eventual revelations begin to cast doubt on the mission. Calvin and Faye don’t have their intact memories from the start, so the deeper they uncover the more their relationship is tested, as are their notions of significance, and a lot of the familiar Lovecraftian themes bubble to the surface. I enjoy the idea of a love story as a cautionary tale, explorations of morality that look at what happens after moral boundaries are crossed, and the cost of freedom to everyone but the free. That all comes through wonderfully in the text, and although the loss of the original game’s much richer cast of characters and more narrative-heavy trappings mean the impact of the world itself is lesser this time around, it’s a clear choice to present Calvin and Faye in near-isolation and it works.
Above all, there’s a real earnest-ness to The Sinking City 2 that I appreciate. It skips the camp self-awareness that something like Resident Evil uses to keep the player at arm’s length from its often ridiculous scenarios, instead trusting the player to engage with it in good faith. It helps that it’s effectively paced, rarely lingering on anything too long and always dangling some kind of story or gameplay carrot that pushes you forward. I think if I’d had the option to, the 10-ish hours it took me to see the game through would have been done in one session.
I’m genuinely surprised by The Sinking City 2, not because I had no faith in Frogwares turning out a completely competent game, but that it’s so deftly taken to a genre as fertile and fraught, in equal measure, as survival horror. There’s a very obvious reverence for both the games and prose that have inspired it, but the team has done the hard bit and matched that reverence with craft, completely in spite of its own very real challenges. I would be very happy to see the studio tackle this setup again, as I am very happy to be well underway with my second playthrough of this one.
Reviewed on PS5 Pro | Review copy supplied by publisher
Great
- A well-told story with a clear and concise vision
- Gorgeous visuals that make considered use of UE5
- Well-paced, classical survival horror level design
- The majority of the puzzles are great
Not great
- The monster wave encounters don't gel all that well with the rest of the game
- Only a couple of interesting characters outside of Calvin and Faye
Born into the world of video games through SEGA, and in particular Sonic the Hedgehog, Kieron’s gaming tastes now consist of the latest, shiny AAA thing, an indie darling or two, and an embarrassing number of hours of Balatro.