The Sinking City 2 Review

A bold survival horror reinvention that trades detective work for tense combat, clever puzzles, atmospheric exploration, and Lovecraftian horror.

For more than a decade, Frogwares has carved out an identity in investigation-centric games, including its Sherlock Holmes games and the original The Sinking City. Investigation was at the heart of the studio’s games and was supported by its distinctive mind-palace and detective systems, which focused on collecting evidence, finding connections, and reaching conclusions. 

That mentality defined the original The Sinking City, giving players a huge open area to explore where combat was usually secondary to exploration, deduction, and mystery. Fighting foes was often something you had to get through rather than something you looked forward to. But Frogwares has made a fairly drastic departure with The Sinking City 2. It’s not just a bigger version of the first game, with the number two in the title.

In essence, the developer has taken the basis of its past work and reconstructed it around the survival horror genre.

The result is a game that feels far more like Resident Evil and Silent Hill than the detective adventure that preceded it. The investigation is still there, but it’s been moved to optional content, and the core experience now centers on combat, puzzles, exploration, resource management, and horror. That’s a change so dramatic that The Sinking City 2 may nearly feel like a reboot rather than a traditional sequel.

Whether that's a good thing or not really depends on what you wanted out of the first game. But if you loved its open-world detective work most of all, this sequel might feel like it has abandoned the defining aspect of the series. If you always thought the Lovecraftian setting deserved a more focused horror experience with better fighting and tighter locations, the new direction from Frogwares makes substantially more sense.

One of the great things about this method is that you don't need to have played the original The Sinking City to know what's going on. The Sinking City 2 introduces a new protagonist, Calvin Rafferty, who finds himself stuck in a horrific nightmare after an occult ceremony goes wrong. Calvin comes back from the ritual with huge holes in his memory, his partner Fay's spirit stuck in the Dreamlands, and something else in her body.

His goal is obvious: find out what happened to Fay and get her back somehow. It's a common horror notion, but the Lovecraftian atmosphere makes it weird enough. The story takes place in a flooded 1920s Arkham, a city of abandoned streets, crumbling buildings, weird animals, and esoteric riddles that always feels like something has gone dreadfully wrong.

The deluge is more than decoration.

Water has been a distinguishing element of Arkham, shifting location as the game proceeds. Calvin must find new ways to navigate and reimagine familiar environments when formerly accessible locations are flooded. Boat travel is present, but on a much smaller scale than in the previous game, and is mostly used to travel between important sites.

That said, the game’s story isn’t perfect. Calvin is a useful protagonist, though his personality and demeanor are rarely especially memorable. He is very talkative, commenting on his observations and reacting to his environment. That gives him a little personality, but sometimes it is contrary to the mood of horror, especially in moments where stillness would have been better.

Calvin is comparatively safe and bland, though, when stacked up against the iconic characters of some of the genre's best games. The supporting performances also don’t always match the game’s best environmental work. Sometimes the facial animations and voice acting feel stiff, which makes it a little harder to emotionally connect with the bond between Calvin and Fay.

The tale is good enough to carry the adventure forward, but the setting, puzzles, exploration, and horror mechanics make the voyage worthwhile, not the strength of its character development. The biggest gameplay change is the switch to old-school survival horror. Instead of throwing players into a large open area loaded with investigations, The Sinking City 2 has interconnected, semi-open locations that are far denser and more intentional. It’s one of the sequel’s smartest moves.

Locations have locked doors, shortcuts, secret rooms, places you can’t go to at first but can later, and environmental changes that force you to go back to locations you’ve already been to. Open a shortcut, and you can turn a perilous trip into a much safer path. If the water level rises, you can radically change the way a familiar place works.

This provides exploration with a fulfilling sense of purpose.

Instead of merely going across a giant map to another objective, you are continuously learning the layout of each location. You start to learn your way around, remembering where the closed doors are, noticing things that look out of place, and seeing how one part connects to another. It offers the basic survival-horror sensation without losing the broader world-building of The Sinking City.

Resource management is just as critical. Inventory space is intentionally constrained, and ammunition, healing items, crafting supplies, and other resources are in short supply. So you can't just take whatever you see and carry it around forever. Every item has to fight for a limited amount of space, especially in the early parts of the game.

This is one of the most significant decisions in The Sinking City 2: whether a fight is even worth having. Sometimes the best thing to do is to run. Using up crucial shotgun rounds on an attacker you may easily dodge could leave you dangerously under-equipped for a far more challenging confrontation later. So the game favors patience over constant attack.

Retreating is part of advancement too – it’s a valid thing to do. You can leave the area, go back to a safe room, rearrange your inventory, pick up extra ammo or healing items, upgrade your gear, and try the encounter again. That preparation loop is a big part of the game's survival horror identity. Safe chambers are especially nicely interwoven into the story.

These are not just random points where you can save the game; they are linked to the Dreamlands and to Calvin's connection with Fay. You may manually save at certain points, and the autosaves happen often enough that the experience never feels unduly harsh. The puzzles do likely the best job of carrying on Frogwares' legacy in The Sinking City 2.

Detective work is no longer the main focus, but the developer’s investigative skill still pays off in the game's environmental challenges.

You might need to decipher information, search rooms for clues, spot patterns, interact with items, or learn how seemingly unconnected pieces of information connect. Some puzzles are deliberately bizarre, and the Lovecraftian backdrop is where it shines. The most interesting thing about the game is when it asks you to understand something that does not quite make sense in standard logic.

Many puzzles don't feel like mere hurdles between combat engagements, but rather inspire you to truly look around. Optional investigations also let the detective mechanics survive in a diminished form. You can still gather evidence and link clues on an evidence board, but these investigations are no longer required to complete the main tale. By following them, you may find extra resources, upgrade currency, safer routes, and other useful discoveries.

Meanwhile, the combat is vastly improved over the original. Calvin has a variety of guns, upgrades, and attachments, along with limited ammo. Many infected creatures have glowing weak areas you can target to stagger them. If you succeed in destroying these weak places, you can use the opportunity to stomp foes to death, thereby saving on ammo.

This adds a little more depth to shooting than just aiming at an enemy's head till it falls over. Feel free to point out weak spots and make every shot count. The problem is that once you discover how the adversaries work, some of the tension is gone. Survival horror is best when you don’t know what a creature is capable of, and The Sinking City 2 occasionally discloses its battle tactics a little too early.

Another negative point is the variety of enemies.

The bestiary grows as the game progresses, yet the early parts of the game are littered with identical monster kinds. A few supernatural beings can affect the environment itself. Certain foes can alter flood levels or mess with Calvin's perspective with hallucinations, phantoms, weird sounds, and more. One of the battle system’s strongest points is the boss encounters.

They don't come up too often, so they still have an impact, and a lot of them demand that you find holes while juggling the resources you've got. A key feature is the Shoggoth, added as a Kickstarter stretch goal. With its large mass, amorphous shape, and unpredictable assaults, it can control the battlefield and even damage parts of the environment, making it a totally different task than regular foes.

The pacing is casual, but it fits the survival horror structure. Frogwares doesn’t make The Sinking City 2 into a real RPG, instead using Dream Essence as a resource to gain passive talents. They can boost weapon damage, survivability, reload speed, and other helpful traits. The system's limitations are purposeful. You can only equip a specific number of skills at a time, with further slots being unlocked as you level up.

That means you are literally building a small build instead of building a huge skill tree. That's good restraint. The game still doesn't want you to make every encounter into an opportunity to grind experience; it wants you to survive. Progression creates the illusion of improvement without making the tension of limited resources feel meaningless.

Optional investigations can also yield more upgrade currency and supplies, giving players an extra reason to explore rather than dash through the main objectives. Additional content builds on this system. The Premium Edition features Holloway Manor, a two-hour side investigation set in a crumbling estate. Completing it awards players the Bucking Bronco Revolver, which they can use in the main campaign.

Technically, The Sinking City 2 is a major step forward for Frogwares.

The game is built using Unreal Engine 5 and features improved facial animation, more dynamic cutscene direction, and significantly more detailed surroundings. The environmental design is extremely strong. The heavy atmospheric detail helps with flooded streets, abandoned interiors, enigmatic buildings, hospitals, occult locales, and so on.

The semi-open gameplay also gives developers the flexibility to make specific locales feel more crowded, rather than populating a giant map with vacant regions. The game runs fine on PS5. The PS5 Pro's performance mode targets 60 frames per second and is generally stable, with no severe frame-rate drops or technical pauses.

The base PS5 version performs fairly well too. Weapon fire feels more immersive with adaptive trigger support, even if the changes between specific firearms aren't that dramatic. Audio is vital to the game's ambiance. Environmental sounds, distant noises, monster effects, and warped hallucinations help build suspense, especially in tight spaces.

The hospital and other indoor settings can feel incredibly claustrophobic, and the sound design makes these environments uncomfortable. The outdoor parts tend to be more atmospheric than scary, though the shift from exploring a relatively safe space to abrupt supernatural horror can still work. 

The soundtrack is lacking. It works in several sequences and could add more atmosphere, but a more memorable or scary score could elevate the experience. The Sinking City 2 occasionally reaches the same psychological intensity as games like Silent Hill, but the music stops just before delivering that final push.

The Sinking City 2 is a sequel like no other. Its best asset is also its biggest potential flaw. Frogwares turns a detective franchise into a survival horror game. Investigation is now optional; the massive open-world framework has been replaced with interconnected environments; combat has been significantly improved; and resource management is now at the heart of the game.

That change will surely frustrate those who want more of the original's investigative gameplay.

But for anyone who looked at the original The Sinking City and thought its Lovecraftian environment needed better combat, tighter exploration, greater puzzles, and more meaningful survival systems, its sequel feels like a nice step forward. Environmental design, resource management, riddles, boss encounters, and dramatic locales are its best aspects.

Its weaknesses include recurring enemies, somewhat predictable combat, stiff acting, a slightly generic protagonist, and music that doesn’t always reach the heights of the genre's best. But the total product is outstanding, particularly given Frogwares’ openness to completely rethinking what its series may be.

The game delivers a focused survival horror experience that doesn't feel unnaturally extended, with around 12 hours for a more linear playthrough and much more if you explore and engage with optional activities. In the end, The Sinking City 2 may not unseat the greatest names in the genre, but it doesn’t have to.

It's a conventional survival-horror premise, blended with Frogwares' skill in investigation and puzzle design, delivering something that feels like a smaller-scale Resident Evil with a unique Lovecraftian character. It’s not a flawless sequel, but possibly the clearest sign yet of how much Frogwares has matured as a developer.