The Sinking City 2 review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

As a sequel, The Sinking City 2 is kind of a failure. It’s pretty much nothing like the first Sinking City game. It feels as if Frogwares just took a handful of things from that first game and plopped them into a completely different game for no apparent reason other than they wanted to keep the series name alive (and I wouldn’t have thought that a mediocre, 7-year-old game had that much cachet to warrant being kept alive).

Take away the name and just view The Sinking City 2 as an original game, though? Then it becomes a lot more interesting.

This is because even if The Sinking City 2 is a terrible follow-up to the first Sinking City, it’s a pretty solid entry into the survival horror genre. It’s full of monsters and creepy hallways and limited ammo and a constant sense of mounting dread. It’s a whole lot closer to Resident Evil or Silent Hill than anything Frogwares have ever done before.

I’ll admit that as someone who mostly liked that first game – while also acknowledging that it was pretty janky – I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of the makeover. There was something charming about how low-budget it all seemed. The graphics may have been middling, and the story pretty silly, but it was still fun to see Frogwares’ usual Sherlock formula applied to the Lovecraft mythos. It was a straight-up mystery game that, really, wasn’t all that mysterious, but it was still fun.

By comparison, I don’t think you could call The Sinking City 2 silly or fun. It takes a much more serious approach, and ratchets up the tension significantly. Rather than investigating a town where everyone looks oddly fish-like, you’re sneaking through a flooded city full of terrifying worms that reanimate the dead, trying to scrounge together ammo to stay alive. There’s some investigating, to be sure, but it’s clearly no longer the focus.

It’s also, of course, much more visually impressive – and, by extension, a whole lot creepier. I don’t think anyone would’ve been frightened by the first game, whereas every dimly lit hallway and half-opened door in The Sinking City 2 exudes a sense of menace.

It’s probably worth noting that the conditions in which the game was developed almost certainly played a role in the turn towards the darker feeling. Frogwares are Ukrainian, and right off the bat they note that the game was developed in their home country while Russia’s illegal attempted invasion is ongoing. You have to assume that such adverse conditions made it a lot easier to visualize the horrifying world in which The Sinking City 2 takes place.

In other words, if you’re just hoping that The Sinking City 2 will be a continuation of the first game, you’ll probably want to avoid this one – because it’s most definitely not that. If, however, you’re a fan of polished survival horror, it’s definitely a game that you’ll want to look into.

Frogwares provided us with a Sinking City 2 PC code for review purposes.