Review: The Sinking City 2

Developed and published by Frogwares, The Sinking City 2 is a sequel to the 2019 hit investigative horror game The Sinking City. While it may be a sequel, the game changes direction drastically by ditching the core of the first game’s investigation and switching the horror elements to a new survival-horror format. The original The Sinking City caught me off guard because when I played it, I was surprised by its great world and cool investigative gameplay, despite all of the issues. With the new one embarking on a new chapter, we will now have to see whether it lives up to the expectations of the first title or not. This is our review of The Sinking City 2 on PC via Steam, in which we explore a flooded city and take down terrifying eldritch monstrosities.

The Sinking City 2 is set in the flooded city of Arkham, which used to be an intellectual hub, built on the Miskatonic River. The cause of this mysterious flood was never uncovered, and it brought with it Slither, a parasitic creature that slowly consumed all of humanity that was left in the flooded ruins of the city. The game puts you in the shoes of Calvin Rafferty who is an occult adventurer who, along with his wife Faye Bennett, used to hunt down cursed items and forbidden lore. One similar adventure leads to disaster as Calvin wakes up with no memory of what happened, and Faye in a supernatural slumber. In order to bring her back, Calvin heads to the flooded city of Arkham and tries to figure out how he can help bring his wife back to him.

Arkham is a gorgeously designed haunting city, with flooded streets and dark interiors. The main Arkham offers multiple locations for you to explore, which you will reach by boat. Since the whole city is flooded, you will be travelling everywhere by boat. Once you arrive at a location, you will park the boat at a pier and explore further on foot. Each location is further joined with additional buildings and structures offering more spaces to explore. At key story locations, you will visit special closed locations which are huge in their own setting, but there is no freeroam in them. These locations include a huge medical complex known as the Akeley Memorial Hospital, or the Arkham Fish Market.

Coming to the gameplay of The Sinking City 2, it combines different mechanics into a single game. You have semi-open world exploration, puzzle-solving, survival horror combat, and investigation. Unlike the first game’s open-world setting, The Sinking City 2 takes on a more contained, chapter-like format, where you arrive at a location and explore multiple rooms, halls, and places inside or around that location. If you played the first game, you would notice another major difference in the second game: the investigation is now an optional mechanic, and it is only good for optional rewards. You can complete a full playthrough without these upgrades, but for greater difficulties, you will need to complete at least some of these investigations and unlock some upgrades to make the game a little more manageable.

If you are a survival horror fan, you will instantly find similarities with different titles like The Evil Within and the Resident Evil series. Each level is now a self-contained chapter, instead of the open-world mission design of the first game. This means that the boat exploration is gone as well, with upgrades, optional content, and puzzles all tied to a single chapter, and you will need to complete them during that particular section of the story before moving on. If you directly compare it with the first game, I loved the investigation-driven gameplay because it gave the title its own unique identity in this genre. With its second part, the title directly competes with games that have been in the genre for years.

Combat in The Sinking City 2 is fairly decent but a little slow-paced. You will need to conserve your ammo and resort to melee attacks where possible. I love how enemies in the game react differently to shots hitting different parts of their body. For the normal enemies, I managed to save a lot of ammo just by shooting once in their leg, and when they fell down, I would get up close to them and stomp their brains out. This was satisfying. However, bigger enemies require different strategies. Thanks to Calvin’s agility, you have some advanced moves up your sleeve as well. You can dodge incoming attacks, attack from another angle, and you can also stun enemies by attacking and destroying their weak points. Stunning gives you a short window to deal damage to them uninterrupted.

Weapons can be assigned to the quick access menu along with other useful items. You start with a basic pistol, but additional powerful weapons can be found with story progression. Despite the game offering a decent arsenal, the ammo stocks are always low, and you have to make sure every shot counts. You can increase a weapon’s effectiveness by finding and using weapon parts. While the combat works fairly well, there were certain instances where I wished it was a little faster. This happened mostly with the smaller enemies, which are faster than we can aim and look around. The aim tends to get a little slower when the gun is aimed. However, the control layout is excellent and is very easy to remember, which adds to its effectiveness as well. Naturally, the enemies will damage you, and you will need to keep a good amount of health items handy. To use an item, you will need to open your inventory, scroll to the item, and then use it. This is similar to the Resident Evil franchise as well.

Manual saving is also now limited to special safe rooms. The game offers autosaves at key locations, but there is no on-demand saving in the game. Here, you can also access your stash, where you can store extra items for later use. Since inventory space is limited, you will need to manage your inventory space, and the stash allows you to access all stored items at any safe room in the game. Another interesting mechanic in the game is the brand-new Night Shade, which is a mask that was originally Faye’s, but is now in Calvin’s possession. This Night Shade grants two bonuses to Calvin. One, it gives a one-off revival if you suffer a fatal blow. Once used, you will need Night Ore to recharge it once again, which is an in-game resource, either crafted or found in the world through exploration.

While investigation is a secondary and optional gameplay mechanic now, it is not completely useless. If you do decide to complete these smaller, side puzzles, investigations will reward you with Dream Essence, which is used to buy new talents in the game. The more investigations you complete, the more Dream Essence you earn, and ultimately, more talents can be acquired for you. Each talent has a talent point price. The game also offers a basic crafting mechanic which allows you to find resources and craft healing items and ammo for your weapons. This is a crucial mechanic, and one that will save your skin in a lot of scenarios where ammo or health items are rare to find in the environment. Exploration is also rewarding, as you will find something such as a resource, ammo, or even a puzzle which could lead to an even bigger reward.

If you find a clue or evidence, you can drag it onto the special menu, which is now called Investigation Space. Here, you can drop additional clues and evidence in the future as you find them in the world. Once you find related clues, you can join them together and form groups. Once grouped, the case will continue to build as more clues and evidence are added to it. Once you have all of the evidence, you can deduce and solve the mystery. Solving the mystery will reward you with Dream Essence. Each location in the game has multiple mysteries that you can solve. You can easily consider them as side quests that happen in a location along with your main mission. These are separate from puzzles, because some of the puzzles are required for main game progression as well. Similar to combat, you can also set the difficulty level of these investigations to make them easier. The investigations do not carry the same weight as The Sinking City, but the bonus talents make them worth checking out.

The Sinking City 2’s enemy design is exceptional as well. Players who played the first game will instantly recognize the spider-like creature, the Stygian Harvester, or the much bigger and tankier Acheronian Juggernaut. This time around, both monsters have exceptional design. In addition, players who complained about the limited number of enemies to kill in the first game will find a lot of different types of enemies to kill. The most common enemy in the game is the typical zombie-like humanoid called Slither Pawn, which is just a normal human being infected by the Slither colony brought with the flood.

When killed, the Slither colony inside them will come out and look for another host, and you will need to quickly stomp them, or else you will have another new pawn to deal with at hand. This adds another level of tension in combat, because you do not have to deal with the already present enemies but worry about additional ones joining the party as well. If you love Lovecraftian horror, you are going to love the enemy design in The Sinking City 2. The sequel also addresses one of my main issues with the first game. Weapons feel meaty this time around. Each hit that lands feels heavy, be it a pistol or an explosive. Weapon kills are satisfying, and you can feel the impact of each kill or explosion properly.

The game does not overly depend on jump scares to scare the player, because its environment itself is tense enough. This is achieved by literally having no NPCs to interact with in the game. They are so far apart that the world of the game feels almost empty. Every location you visit is infested with eldritch monsters that will attack you, and some of the enemies can also manipulate your mind to make you lose your sanity and enter another state of mind. The environments are eerie, the halls are dark, and the rooms are filled with blind corners where you can expect anything to happen. All of these combine to deliver such a tense and atmospheric experience that even if an enemy is not stalking you, you will experience unrest based on the environment alone.

The Sinking City features a long list of challenges called Eldritch Feats, which grant Eldritch Points. These Eldritch Points are used to unlock special talents, costumes, and cheat codes in the game. Naturally, these require multiple playthroughs because certain challenges require you to perform special tasks like completing the game without using the talents or completing the game without opening the Stash. Challenges like these contribute to the post-game content in the game, along with a New Game+ mode that allows players to carry over their talents, talent points, and items. The hardest difficulty is unlocked after a full playthrough as well. There are multiple collectibles in each chapter as well, apart from investigation clues, which will force completionists to explore every nook and cranny of each level. A codex keeps track of everything.

A full walkthrough of The Sinking City will take you around 18 to 20 hours, depending on how much time you spend in each level. You can also tailor your experience throughout the game. If you find a particular aspect of the game to be difficult, you can just lower the difficulty. The game offers you four difficulty settings for its combat, with the lowest one even offering immortality and Invincibility. The same goes for investigation. If you choose the easier option, it will show you useful cues, and important things in a document will be highlighted so you can quickly spot them and tie together multiple pieces of evidence and clues. The Sinking City 2’s experience is not limited to just difficulty as well. It also offers a host of accessibility options so that players with special needs can also enjoy the game.

It has a special accessibility section where players can tailor the game to make certain aspects easier to manage. It offers multiple options like aim slowdown, auto-reload, aim input mode, run input options, and camera inversion settings. There are no visual accessibility options, however, so players requiring these options must proceed with caution, as they might find it a little hard to play the game if they require special visual modes to play video games.

Coming to the technical side of The Sinking City 2, the game ran fairly well for the entirety of its playthrough. While completionists will need to complete the game multiple times, for this review, I only completed the game one time. During this time, it did not give me any sort of game-breaking bugs or framerate stutter. Despite running on a fairly decent laptop, a Lenovo Legion with an RTX 5070 GPU, Intel Core 9 Ultra processor, and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, I was able to run the game on Ultra settings with RTX turned off and 2K resolution. The frame rates remained in the high 60s mostly, and the loading times were insanely quick. I do remember a few dips in frames below 50 FPS, but they were short and caused by some background updater or software like OBS Studio running in the background. This is impressive performance from the game. I played the entire game with an XBOX Series 2 Elite controller, despite the developers recommending a DualSense controller for complete immersion, and it ran just fine for me.

I enjoyed my time with the game, and while I miss the premise and gameplay style of the first title, it is still a fairly enjoyable horror survival game on its own. However, I will confess that the game did not impress me as the first game did. Despite it being on the smaller side when it comes to scale, I enjoyed its open-world investigative gameplay more than a linear survival horror experience offered by The Sinking City 2. The Sinking City had its own personality. The second game feels like it is inspired by survival titles like Resident Evil 2 Remake and The Evil Within. It is still enjoyable nonetheless, but I prefer the original’s scope and direction more than this one.

The biggest problem for me is that The Sinking City 2 sometimes feels like it could exist without the Sinking City name. The original had a very specific identity built around investigation, exploration, and its open-world structure. The sequel takes those elements and pushes them into the background, replacing them with a more conventional survival horror formula. The result is a game that is arguably more polished, but less distinctive.

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Final Verdict:

The Sinking City 2 is a good survival horror game, but it is a very different sequel to the original. Frogwares has traded the investigation-driven open world for a more focused and conventional survival horror experience, and while the change works surprisingly well, it also removes much of the personality that made the first game stand out. The atmospheric environments, terrifying enemies, satisfying exploration, and decent combat make The Sinking City 2 an enjoyable horror experience, but longtime fans may find themselves missing the investigative identity of the original. If you approach it as a standalone survival horror game rather than expecting another The Sinking City, there is plenty to enjoy.

Final Score: 8.0/10

Disclaimer: A PC Steam review code for The Sinking City 2 was provided by Wire Tap Media on behalf of Frogwares for this review. For a detailed breakdown of our scoring and review process, please refer to our Review Policy.