The Sinking City 2

The first Sinking City was an open-world detective game that kept apologising for its combat. This one removes the apology. Arkham is smaller, tighter, built out of loops that fold back on themselves, and the thing shambling toward you down a flooded corridor is no longer an interruption between clues — it is the reason you are counting your bullets.

It is a Resident Evil, and it is not embarrassed about that

The structure is openly borrowed and well understood: a district is a knot of locked doors and blocked stairwells, you find a way around, you open a shortcut back to where you started, and the space stops being frightening because you now own it. Then the game takes you somewhere new and the tension resets.

What Frogwares adds is that the shortcuts are frequently by water. Arkham is drowned, so a good part of the map is navigated by skiff, and a route you opened on foot does not necessarily help you when the tide is up. That single wrinkle keeps the loop from reading as imitation.

Resources are genuinely lean. I finished with fourteen rounds of pistol ammunition and I had not been careless — by the last two districts I was running past things I could have killed, because killing them was not worth the invoice.

Deaths

61

Pistol rounds at the credits

14

Optional investigations completed

9 of 12

The detective work survived the genre change

This is the part that could have been cut and was not. Investigations here are still real — you read a ritual residue, you sift a scene, you decide for yourself what happened, and the game does not confirm it. Crucially, none of them gate the main path. They unlock a safer route, a stack of supplies, a better gun.

That is a smarter incentive than it looks, because it converts curiosity into survivability. The players who investigate are the players still holding ammunition at the end, and the game never once tells you this.

Some of the deductions are also legitimately unpleasant in the way Lovecraft adaptations usually flinch from. The hospital sequence in the middle third does not have a monster in it and it is the worst thing in the game.

Where it slips

The combat is better than the first game and it is still the weakest thing here. Enemies telegraph clearly and the shotgun has weight, but the moment two of them arrive at once the animation priority falls apart — you get caught in a stagger loop with no way to buy space, and several of my sixty-one deaths were that rather than a mistake. In a game this stingy with ammunition, a cheap death costs a real amount.

Performance is also demanding beyond what the art asks for. Frogwares targets 1440p and sixty frames on a 4070 Ti at medium, which for a game with this palette — mostly brown water and dark interiors — is a lot to require. On a 4070 with upscaling I sat in the fifties through the larger districts and it was never comfortable.

The ending is the third thing. The setup is excellent, the middle is patient, and the final hour explains more than it should. The game spent twenty hours trusting me and then wrote a scene where someone says the theme out loud.

The verdict

Twenty-three hours, and easily the best thing this studio has made. The detective heritage turned out to be the ingredient the horror needed rather than the thing holding it back, and the resource pressure never let up long enough for me to get comfortable.

Worth noting what it took to get here: this is a Kyiv studio that has now shipped through a full-scale invasion of their country, self-publishing after a public falling-out with their previous publisher. None of that belongs in a score. It belongs in a paragraph.

Play it in the dark. Investigate everything. Do not sell the ammunition.