The Sinking City 2 Traded Its Open World for Ammo Scarcity — and Became a Better Game for It

When Frogwares released The Sinking City in 2019, the Ukrainian studio was best known for Sherlock Holmes adventures — methodical, talky, built around the pleasure of deduction. The first Sinking City kept that DNA: an open-world Lovecraftian mystery where players wandered a drowned Massachusetts city gathering clues and cross-referencing archives. It was ambitious, uneven, and creaky at the edges. Seven years later, Frogwares has shipped The Sinking City 2 on PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series S/X, and the studio made a choice that sounds like creative self-destruction: they dismantled nearly everything that made the original recognizable.

The sequel is set in 1929 Arkham — H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional Massachusetts city, drenched in supernatural floods that don’t obey tide schedules. You play Calvin Rafferty, an occult detective who wakes from an interrupted ritual in the Dreamlands to find his partner and lover, university professor Faye Bennett, locked in a supernatural coma. The goal is to locate ritual artifacts and perform a ceremony called “The Call” before the eldritch forces consuming Arkham swallow Faye entirely. The story delivers on its Lovecraftian premise with unsettling set pieces and a cast that includes a Miskatonic Library scholar who has blinded himself to commune with something called the Slither, and a mermaid named Lorelei who inhabits the Devil’s Reef Hotel with equal measures of menace and dark humour.

The structural pivot is where The Sinking City 2 separates itself. Gone is the sprawling open world prone to backtracking and meandering investigation loops. The sequel is semi-open: tightly-paced, linear at its spine, with exploration branches that reward attention without punishing players who miss them. Combat has been rebuilt from scratch — Calvin has a stamina meter that governs both his shots and his dodges, melee finishers trigger off weak-spot damage and land with brutal weight, and ammunition is genuinely scarce. Inventory space is strictly limited. The pressure of managing bullets, medicine, and crafting components while something with too many limbs pursues you through flooded hospital corridors is the point. Frogwares didn’t add survival-horror mechanics to an open-world detective game; they built a survival-horror game and threaded the investigation through it.

The technical leap is visible in the first district. The Sinking City 2 runs on Unreal Engine 5, and Frogwares made deliberate use of Nanite’s virtualized geometry to render collapsed architecture and waterlogged interiors without the level-of-detail pop-in that undermined the original. Lumen global illumination means gunshot flashes cast accurate soft shadows in dark corridors, and wet pavement reflects lamplight in real time. Character models built on MetaHumans avoid the plastic-skin uncanny valley that haunted many UE4-era horror games. Districts load on PS5 in under ten seconds. These are not marketing bullet points — they are the difference between a game that immerses and one that reminds you it’s a game.

The reception has been correspondingly strong. GamesRadar+ called it “a Lovecraftian fusion of Resident Evil and Silent Hill that boasts its own delightfully gruesome pleasures.” OpenCritic aggregates reviews to a score of 81, rated “Strong.” On Steam, early adopters have pushed the game to 95 percent positive. Bloody Disgusting positioned it alongside Resident Evil Requiem as one of the best horror games of 2026 — notable company for a studio that, three years ago, was best known for making Sherlock Holmes wear deerstalker hats on mid-range hardware. Frogwares has already patched stability and visual bugs with update 1.0.1, committed to a free HDR patch, and confirmed that a Nintendo Switch 2 port is planned for 2027.

The Sinking City 2 is available now on PS5, PC via Steam and GOG, and Xbox Series S/X. A New Game+ mode is included at launch for players willing to wade back through Arkham’s flooded streets with the knowledge of what the darkness is actually asking for.

Tags: PlayStation 5, survival horror, Frogwares, Lovecraft, The Sinking City 2, Unreal Engine 5