The Sinking City 2 Review Roundup: Frogwares' Eldritch Horror Sequel, Judged

The original The Sinking City was a game full of contradictions. Oakmont captured the feeling of a decaying city slowly collapsing under something deeply unnatural, but the open world itself often felt empty. The detective mechanics encouraged players to study clues and draw their own conclusions, while the shooting was something many wanted to get through as quickly as possible. Frogwares clearly listened to that criticism, and with The Sinking City 2, the studio chose not just to improve the original formula, but to almost completely rebuild it.

The sequel no longer tries to be a detective adventure in an open world. This time, it is a full survival horror game with tight spaces, scarce ammunition, locked doors, keys, puzzles, backtracking, and monsters that are often better avoided than killed.

In other words, Frogwares finally made its own Resident Evil. The difference is that instead of corporations, viruses, and bio-organic weapons, The Sinking City 2 offers ancient gods, occult rituals, and classic Lovecraftian horror.

"1. The Sinking City 2 Review Roundup: Frogwares' Eldritch Horror Sequel, Judged","1.1. A New City and a New Protagonist","1.2. Arkham Instead of an Open World","1.3. Where Did the Detective Work Go?","1.4. Monsters Are Now the Main Problem","1.5. Combat Still Needs Work","1.6. Resident Evil Meets Lovecraft","1.7. Kelvin Needs More Personality","1.8. Is The Sinking City 2 Worth Playing?"

A New City and a New Protagonist

You do not need to know the story of the first The Sinking City to understand the sequel. The games are connected mainly through their mythology, atmosphere, and Lovecraft-inspired setting.

This time, the story takes place in Arkham during the 1920s. The city is slowly flooding, residents are trying to escape, and entire streets are becoming impossible to live in. Still, protagonist Kelvin Rafferty has no intention of leaving.

His reason is personal.

Several months earlier, Kelvin and his lover Faye obtained the Book of Dreams, an occult artifact capable of establishing contact with ancient entities. Predictably, the experiment ended badly. Faye fell into a coma, and her soul failed to return to her body after traveling into another reality.

Looking for a way to save her, Kelvin heads to Miskatonic University, hoping to find the occult knowledge required for a ritual. It quickly becomes clear that Arkham's flood is far from the worst thing happening in the city.

The story fits comfortably within Lovecraftian tradition. A human being touches something that was never meant to be understood and gradually discovers just how insignificant humanity is in the face of forces beyond ordinary reality.

Arkham Instead of an Open World

One of the biggest changes in The Sinking City 2 is the removal of the traditional open world.

That decision works in the game's favor.

In the first game, Oakmont looked impressive at first glance, but its artificial nature became obvious after prolonged exploration. Most buildings were just scenery, NPCs wandered the streets without much purpose, and entire districts mainly existed to connect one quest location to another.

The sequel takes a different approach. Arkham is divided into several large, densely designed areas. These locations are still spacious, but now almost every corridor, room, and locked door serves a purpose.

Players gradually learn each area's structure, unlock shortcuts, find keys, return to previously inaccessible rooms, and memorize safer routes. The longer you spend in a location, the better you understand its internal logic.

The structure will feel immediately familiar to Resident Evil fans.

At the same time, one of the strongest qualities of the original game remains intact. Frogwares still excels at environmental design.

Arkham is unpleasant to look at, which is exactly why you want to keep looking. Flooded streets, decaying walls, traces of occult rituals, hospital rooms, abandoned buildings, and strange background details constantly tell small stories of their own.

The Sinking City 2 often manages to scare the player without relying on jump scares. Sometimes a suspicious shadow, an unexplained sound behind a wall, or a light at the end of a corridor is enough to create tension.

The opening hours are less successful. The first flooded streets rely too heavily on a repeated gameplay loop: reach a location by boat, find a way past an obstacle, solve a simple puzzle, and move on.

Once the game moves into more enclosed locations such as the hospital and fish market, the level design becomes much more interesting. There are more routes, more keys, better puzzles, and far more memorable environments.

Where Did the Detective Work Go?

This is where fans of the original game may feel the biggest disappointment.

The detective mechanics, which were among the most distinctive parts of the first The Sinking City, have been heavily reduced.

Kelvin still has a system for working with discovered clues, but there are very few proper investigations. You no longer spend much time reconstructing events with supernatural abilities or trying to decide who is telling the truth.

In a way, the change makes sense. Kelvin is not a detective. His goal is simple and personal: save Faye.

At the same time, The Sinking City loses one of the mechanics that made the original stand out from other horror games. The first game tried to combine investigation with Lovecraftian adventure. The sequel follows the rules of survival horror much more closely.

Frogwares tries to compensate with puzzles. Some of them clearly borrow from Resident Evil, requiring players to study the environment, connect clues, locate key items, and return to mechanisms they discovered earlier.

There are also smaller atmospheric touches. Radios are scattered throughout Arkham and play strange standalone stories, almost like a nod to Alan Wake and Night Springs. Some of them even hint at events later in the story.

Monsters Are Now the Main Problem

In the first The Sinking City, combat often felt like an unwanted interruption between investigations. In the sequel, it becomes one of the game's core systems.

Flooded Arkham is full of creatures, and the game quickly teaches one of the most important survival horror rules: seeing an enemy does not mean you have to kill it.

Ammunition is limited, inventory space is tight, and every encounter becomes a question of resources. Sometimes spending a few bullets to clear an important corridor is the smart choice. In other situations, dodging an enemy and running past it makes far more sense.

Infected citizens are especially dangerous. Killing them is not always enough. The parasites inside their bodies need to be destroyed as well, otherwise the corpse may rise again.

There are also ranged enemies and larger creatures that resemble some of the horrors seen in the first game.

This creates a familiar survival horror loop: exploration, danger, resource spending, scavenging, unlocking a new door, and eventually returning to an earlier area.

The inventory can be expanded, weapons can be changed, and Kelvin has access to character upgrades. However, the skill system does not feel important enough to dramatically alter the way the game is played. Many upgrades provide relatively small bonuses, such as faster weapon switching or slightly improved ammunition crafting.

Resource management matters much more.

Clearing every room is expensive. Leaving too many enemies alive is risky too, because the player regularly needs to revisit previously explored locations. A few bullets saved early can become a serious problem later if a familiar hallway suddenly becomes crowded with monsters.

Combat Still Needs Work

Despite the major improvements over the original, combat remains one of the more inconsistent parts of The Sinking City 2.

This becomes especially noticeable during scripted sequences where the game places too many enemies in confined spaces. In a narrow corridor, one failed dodge can lead to Kelvin being trapped between several attacks with almost no room to recover.

Some encounters also feel unfair. A defeated enemy may still complete an attack animation, while certain creatures pursue Kelvin so aggressively that creating distance becomes unnecessarily difficult.

Mini-boss fights are another weak point. Many of them take place in small arenas where the game throws waves of enemies at the player while providing extra ammunition nearby.

The issue becomes more noticeable in the final portion of the game, where combat encounters become increasingly frequent. Instead of building toward a more inventive climax focused on Arkham's mysteries, the game sometimes settles for throwing another group of monsters at the player.

Resident Evil Meets Lovecraft

The Sinking City 2 makes no effort to hide its influences.

If you have played Resident Evil, much of the structure will feel familiar almost immediately. Locked rooms, limited inventory space, key items, repeated visits to previous areas, ammunition management, environmental puzzles, and the constant choice between fighting and running are all here.

What prevents the game from feeling like a simple clone is the setting.

Instead of laboratories and viruses, there are occult books, mad cultists, and creatures that the human mind was never meant to understand. Instead of a familiar modern apocalypse, there is a gloomy American city in the 1920s that is slowly disappearing beneath the water.

Notes describe rituals and personal tragedies, architecture becomes increasingly unnatural, and the story gradually moves beyond any rational explanation.

At its best, The Sinking City 2 successfully combines two distinct ideas: tense survival horror and cosmic dread.

Kelvin Needs More Personality

The story itself works less effectively than the atmosphere.

The biggest problem is Kelvin Rafferty. He has a clear motivation, a personal tragedy, and a specific goal, but it is difficult to form a strong emotional connection with him.

He occasionally makes jokes and shows flashes of personality, but for much of the game he travels through Arkham alone and reacts surprisingly calmly to the horrors around him.

This is especially noticeable because Faye is supposed to be the emotional center of the story. In theory, their relationship should provide the foundation for the entire adventure. In practice, the game does not always do enough to make the player care about the relationship as much as Kelvin does.

As a result, some major story moments lack the emotional impact they could have had.

There is an interesting contrast here: Arkham itself often creates a stronger emotional response than the person through whose eyes we experience it.

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Is The Sinking City 2 Worth Playing?

The Sinking City 2 is an unusual sequel because it largely abandons the formula of the original.

Frogwares keeps the Lovecraftian universe, the attention to grim environmental detail, and the constant sense of approaching catastrophe, but builds a very different game around them.

This is now a survival horror game heavily inspired by Resident Evil, complete with limited resources, interconnected locations, puzzles, backtracking, and frequent monster encounters.

Not every change works equally well. The removal of full detective investigations will disappoint some fans of the first game. Combat can occasionally feel unfair, mini-boss encounters become repetitive, and the later sections rely too heavily on fighting. Kelvin also lacks enough personality to make the personal side of the story as powerful as it should be.

Arkham, however, is excellent.

Exploring it is uncomfortable, tense, and consistently fascinating. You want to open every door, read every note, and inspect every dark corner, even when you already know something horrible is probably waiting there.

The Sinking City 2 does not try to become the first game, only better. Frogwares effectively starts over and turns the series into a Lovecraftian alternative to Resident Evil.

Based on the result, that direction suits The Sinking City far better than trying to balance an open world, detective mechanics, action, and horror all at once.