I’m a sucker for survival horror, esp. the third-person kind where ammo is precious, the mood sticks to every corner, and patience actually pays off. Give me a slow, methodical fight once in a while, or a puzzle that nudges you to think rather than rip your hair out, and I’m sold—though I admit I can be fickle about what counts as “good.” That mix is present in The Sinking City 2, and I approached it with more than a little hope. Frogwares has been circling titles that could break out for years; they’ve come close before but something always slipped away. The first Sinking City promised a lot and delivered unevenly, so the expectation was that the sequel would stitch the best parts together. To some degree it does — but then it pivots into a different kind of horror, one where the studio’s relative inexperience shows and prevents a clean triumph.
Developer: Frogwares Publisher: Frogwares Platforms: PC, PS5, XSX Official site: Steam Release date: August 18, 2026 Price: €49.99
VIDEO TRAILER
The opening puts you in the shoes of Calvin, a new lead with a very bad week. He and Faye poked into a non-human realm that does not do favors for mortal minds; Faye wakes up in a coma and Calvin becomes a man driven to find a cure. That is the hook: leave Faye in bed, get into a boat, and head into Arkham. The city is dying—literally sinking—and evacuation is underway. Most people are gone; a handful remain, boots forever damp, willing to face whatever has crawled up from the deep. The place is infested: sea beasts lurk in alleys, and enormous worms have become a grotesque civic problem, reanimating corpses so they lurch after you.
Boats still exist, but their role feels diminished since the map isn’t as open as before. The game sets itself in a 1920-ish atmosphere; newcomers won’t need prior knowledge, and vets of the original won’t find many transferable tricks, either. Why? Because Frogwares traded the oddball detective tone of the first game for a purer survival-horror framework — think RE2 or Dead Space, i.e., tighter corridors, resource tension, and clearer combat beats. That shift makes the sequel more immediately recognizable to genre fans but also puts the studio in direct competition with much larger, more seasoned teams. They’ve grown since the first game, sure, yet growth here brings trade-offs: some of what made the original feel different has been pared away, and that loss is felt.