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On August 18, 2026, video game developer Frogwares finally released The Sinking City 2, this long-awaited sequel to 2019’s The Sinking City shifts the series’ genre from a Horror-Adventure detective game and dives right into the realm of Survival Horror, promises players a thrilling and hair raising experience as they attempt to save their wife in a city filled with Lovecraftian creatures and reanimated corpses while you yourself are next to defenseless and need to salvage every piece of ammo. So, is this title worth playing, or should gamers instead dive into the depths? Let’s dissect the game piece by piece and make the decision for ourselves.
Stunning Survival Horror Gameplay
The gameplay of The Sinking City 2 is that of a typical modern Survival Horror game. The player will need to navigate their way through various buildings filled with zombie-like enemies (who aren’t always active the first time you enter a room) as they collect key items to progress through other rooms and solve complex puzzles along the way.
This game is separated into multiple chapters, but could best be described as being split into three acts. The first is centered around exploring the city itself as you take your boat and explore various buildings that you can enter and explore; the second takes place within a large hospital as an unkillable foe stalks the halls, and the third takes place within a fish market that will have you temporarily propping open doors and trying to find a path through the area with each door open.
Each act of the game will give the player a taste of a different style of Survival Horror game design in a way that feels like playing the greatest hits of this generation. While the game may be trying to do a lot, all of these are handled well, as no section overstays its welcome and is always throwing something different at the player and speeding them towards the end.
Puzzle design in The Sinking City 2 is unfortunately pretty basic; most note-based puzzles throughout the game exist simply to give you a combination to unlock something (Whether that be numbers-based or symbol-based), and the only time the game really deviates from this type of design is in an optional sequence during the hospital chapter where they must solve a riddle with two truth tellers and one liar.
Perhaps the biggest standout feature of The Sinking City 2 is how deceptively difficult the game can be, as even though I consider myself a veteran of this genre of gaming, I found myself close to death or cornered into a dangerous situation multiple times during my playthrough.
Throughout the entire game, I was either very low on or out of ammo at nearly all times. Every corpse that gets reanimated by evil worms can chop through your health in seconds, and there are a lot of them, far more than you can possibly take down. This creates a tense atmosphere where the player always needs to choose between standing their ground or running to the next room. Knowing that the room you’re in could possibly have a key item to progress makes the choice all that much harder, as you know you’ll eventually need to come back.
The only saving grace in this world is the safe rooms located in each area, which serve as a place to both catch your breath and potentially switch out your talent skills. To say that the game wears its Survival-Horror genre influences on its sleeve would perhaps be understating it, as the healing items the player has access to in this game are healing herbs of a greenish color similar to the healing items of a different very popular horror game franchise.
Speaking of mechanics similar to other Survival Horror games, I feel like we need to address the biggest elephant in the room about The Sinking City 2’s game design.
Derivative to a Fault
I have an unspoken policy about not mentioning or making comparisons to other games when I write reviews, however in the case of The Sinking City 2 I feel it is impossible to talk about this game without mentioning other Survival Horror titans like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, as the gameplay of this game has almost completely abandoned the normal Frogwares adventure game style in favor of copying the style of these other games.
Almost every game design decision on display in The Sinking City 2 feels like it’s derivative of other hit Survival Horror games from this console generation. While I described this design as playing the greatest hits of the genre in the previous section of this review, it can just as easily be interpreted as copying their homework.
Even the game’s first chapter, which has a much bigger focus on exploring the city and navigating through various side buildings to solve puzzles, can easily be compared to the recent Silent Hill 2 Remake and how that game attempted to be an open-world survival horror title. Though if that comparison were to be made, I would have to say The Sinking City 2 handles the concept better.
All of these comparisons and shared gameplay systems would seem like a negative if not for one vital key: The Sinking City 2 is a really good game. If the game were mired with flaws, then there would surely be people yelling from the rooftops about how trying to copy the titans of the industry is a flawed idea to begin with.
As the medium of video games grows older and larger, I think frequently about the famous Picasso quote “Good artists copy; Great artists steal”. And how that relates to the medium. As gaming grows larger and multiple subgenres are formed, I wonder how much originality matters when it comes to reviewing a piece of art.
Does The Sinking City 2 bring anything new to the table for the Survival Horror genre? I cannot in good faith say that it does. Frogwares has not reinvented the wheel for this title, and has instead opted to make a game similar to other horror titles that the development team clearly has a passion for.
If you are someone who simply wants to play a great new Survival Horror title, then The Sinking City 2 is the game for you. In contrast, however, if originality and creativity are something that you value highly, then this game will not give you anything to sink your teeth into. Which is a shame, as this studio’s previous titles were anything but derivative.
A Loss of Identity
While The Sinking City 2 is a great Survival Horror game which can stand up to the other titans of this generation, it is hard not to feel like something was lost in this transition. If one were to list out the similarities between this game and its predecessor, the list would be incredibly small.
Investigations and putting together clues in your Mind Palace, a game mechanic which has become a trademark feature of Frogwares games, has been reduced to a small, almost ignorable mechanic where the player must simply connect notes which they know are related to each other in order to earn a few extra skill tree points per chapter.
This investigation mechanic is why I first fell in love with Frogwares games like Sherlock Holmes: Crime and Punishment, so seeing it be reduced to only its bones hurts in particular. Not enough to severely harden my opinion on The Sinking City 2 but enough to make me frown whenever I engage with investigations.
Perhaps the biggest example of how The Sinking City 2 has deviated from what made the first game unique can be seen with the game’s boat. The boats in The Sinking City 1 were a necessity for moving around the city but infamously controlled horribly. The boat was a clunky block that got stuck on the smallest of objects and was a pain to control. The only saving grace was how the player often only needed to use it for short periods of time.
Boats return in The Sinking City 2 and get major focus in the first chapter, as if to highlight just how much better they are to control than in the first game. It was incredibly satisfying to sail across the flooded streets of Arkham and stop in various buildings to gain items or solve puzzles, and it’s a way of incorporating a mechanic that was part of the first game’s identity into this new Survival Horror framework
Then you get past the first third of the game and never set foot in a boat again.
Because each chapter after the first takes place within a single building, the boat gets no use after that. At best, you’ll see the protagonist enter and leave the current area in it in between chapters. Exploring the city itself is no longer part of the game, as it instead favors classic Survival Horror level design.
I can think of no better metaphor for what kind of game The Sinking City 2 is than having a main aspect of the previous game be around and improved upon for the first third, only to be thrown out and used only as set dressing for the rest of the game.
To be clear, I still think that The Sinking City 2 is a great game; it’s just impossible to deny that its identity feels lost as the developers have copied industry trends exactly, with very little of the previous game’s DNA being visible in this one.
Closing Thoughts
In my personal opinion, The Sinking City 2 is my least favorite game from Frogwares. The complete loss of identity between the first and second game, in addition to the game not doing anything we haven’t seen done in the Survival Horror genre before, can easily sour the experience of longtime fans. However, the worst Frogwares game is still an easy 8/10 title, as what is here has been made to perfection and still gave me a satisfied feeling from start to finish. It is hard to say whether or not I recommend The Sinking City 2 to others, but perhaps that ambiguity is exactly what a game about Lovecraftian deities deserves.
The Sinking City 2
Bottom Line
The Sinking City 2 is a game that bring nothing new to the table and doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, which can be very disappointing as this title comes from a studio who has always been one of the most unique in the industry. Despite that, The Sinking City 2 is a very well crafted Survival Horror experience that fans of the genre should take the time to enjoy. Its fast-paced gameplay, fun set pieces, and Lovecraftian horror elements allows the title to stand alongside the titans it is derived from.
