The Sinking City 2 Review – Heed The Call
The Sinking City 2 is a title I was pretty hotly anticipating… up until I found out that unlike developer Frogware’s earlier titles, it would be shedding quite a lot of their house-style detective gameplay via a sidestep into the survival horror aspects of its predecessor. Anyone who spent time wringing out their socks as Chucky Reed in The Sinking City’s flood-embattled Oakmont would be well aware combat wasn’t exactly a strong point of that game and for me was something I tolerated as a minor annoyance to get to the juicy Mythos mysteries. Take into consideration the dev team have also struggled under an actual war going on around them and much like my Arkham LCG token bag, the odds were very much stacked against them. Despite every obstacle in the way of The Sinking City 2 coming to fruition, it’s warming to say not only is this Frogware’s ‘best’ game in a number of ways, it’s also an enjoyable ride through the Cthulhu Mythos that shouts out of the Void what we stand to lose when Double A devs are perpetually an endangered species in the current landscape.
Shedding the open-world approach of the original game’s Oakmont, The Sinking City 2’s Arkham instead opts for far tighter confines. Rather than an expansive map with a scant handful of locations worth interacting with as in the original, SC2’s Arkham focuses on a slimmer number of bespoke areas linked by everybody’s favourite method of travel, cruising through fetid waterways in a tinny. There’s a gentle easing in though, as the initial investigation area acts as a bridging point between the two styles, hinting at a wider scope before narrowing to larger singular areas across the span of roughly a dozen hours. Much like Resident Evil, to which it clearly pays homage in a number of ways, The Sinking City 2 wields its tight playtime to encourage repeated playthroughs, something this reviewer is already eager for.
Mythos fans are in for a treat – I say Mythos rather than Lovecraft, because for a while I’ve felt Lovecraft has become secondary thanks to the efforts of designers like MJ Newman, Kevin Wilson, Richard Launius, Corey Konieczka, Nikki Valens and even Frogwares themselves to weave cosmic horror with less racism and more accessibility for modern audiences. Purists might find that upsetting, but I couldn’t give less of a shit given I’ve spent more time playing Arkham Horror and Eldritch Horror across many editions than I did reading through Lovecraft’s collected works; Cthulhu is for the people. From the outset, the vibes are firing on all cylinders – rising tides, the city of Arkham itself, weird rituals, occult elements and central to it all are hapless protagonists Calvin and Faye, our hip and adventurous leading couple who are definitely in over their heads. Things kick off in media res as a prior trip to the Dreamlands went rapidly south, rendering Faye into a catatonic state. With the clock ticking and the waters rising, Calvin desperately searches the waterlogged remains of Arkham for a solution. More Indiana Jones wannabe than gumshoe, Calvin has just the right mixture of derring-do, insufferable smugness and lack of self-preservation to make him an endearing character to inhabit, although it’s painfully clear Faye is the more capable of the pair.
There’s a familiar rhythm to The Sinking City 2 that builds upon lessons taught by many of the most prolific entries in the survival horror genre. Drop Calvin in a set piece that is both interesting and ripe for scares – period industrial buildings, cult-y church, isolated 1920’s hospital, unhygienic fish market, creepy college, fetishy hotel – where he can sort through a variety of logic and ‘pick-up-and-deliver’ puzzles, find a cool new weapon that would have been great at any prior point, all whilst trying to keep an increasingly grotesque array of enemies from ripping the skin off his face and sucking his innards out. Along the way, Calvin can also complete smaller optional tasks and connect ‘Clues’ he finds in the menu to earn ‘Dream Essences’, the Ability currency of Sinking City 2. Connecting clues is a nice holdover from Frogwares’ earlier detective focused output, even if it is simplified in comparison to the deductive reasoning the original game demanded. For reasons that will become clear in a paragraph or three, Abilities weren’t something I dabbled too much in during my first playthrough but I can’t wait to check out their impact in subsequent runs.
Scattered around are resources for crafting both ammo and healing items, something I found myself doing regularly just to clear up inventory space which, while upgradeable, is still at a premium throughout all points of the game. Carrying just one or two weapons early game eats up almost all of the available inventory space, something mitigated by the fact Sinking City 2 is rather generous with its Safe Room placement. While juggling key items is thus refreshingly accessible, the propensity of the game to have enemies spring back to life or repopulate a once-cleared area is pretty bloody cheeky if you ask me. It’s emphasised again and again that running is a viable option, and in one particular section of the game is in fact mandatory, yet having to do so when criss-crossing a fairly sizeable location a number of times in order to solve puzzles or lug items around interferes heavily with the excitement that comes from connecting the dots and knowing exactly what you have to do but feel hampered in doing it. To paraphrase Frank Reynolds, when there were enemies in my way “I started blasting”. At least on the wussy combat difficulty level I played on, Sinking City 2 neatly pulls off that trick where it feels like you only ever have just enough ammo and resources to handle the situation. Peaks and Valleys baby, that’s entertainment!
Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so gung-ho in my approach if the enemies weren’t so shootable. The most basic humanoid enemies are inhabited by the Slither, writhing eel-like entities that jump down your gullet and work you like a meat puppet. They especially love to dive back into downed enemies and bring them back for round two, which is why I spent an inordinate amount of time making Calvin smush them like I was the AI from Dungeon Crawler Carl. NEW ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED! Sweet Squish Music. The Slither are about as disgusting as they sound, and I mean that literally – the sound design of their sickening squelching as they rapidly wriggle towards the nearest cavity is unsettling at best and maddening at worst, more so when it’s past midnight and you’ve got your headphones on. By the time you hit the Fish Market, anyone with the scantest sense of Mythos lore knows what’s (swimming) up. I’m not sure the combat itself is all that enjoyable – enemy weakpoints take a touch too long to materialise and Calvin stood there stomping the ground instead of aiming the bloody shotgun a few times too many for my liking – but leaving anything alive felt like a moral failure.
Structurally, Sinking City 2 is a one-way road – it’s imperative that everything in an area be done before moving on, as each location becomes inaccessible once the next is reached. Leaving any lore or items behind means saying goodbye to them for good, or at least until a future playthrough. Certain reviewers hadn’t even connected the dots about (literally) connecting the dots in the Investigation menu, leaving a huge amount of Dream Essences on the proverbial table. Patchable? Likely, and I do rather enjoy the mental image of my very slow detective Calvin only just figuring out the connection’s hours or even days later, primarily because he was controlled by a real-life dumbass. Given there’s been five years since Sherlock: Chapter One, it’s unsurprising that Sinking City 2 is Frogwares most visually impressive title to date, not just on a technical level but in the way they capture a devastated city on the brink of complete and total collapse. It might have something to do with the fact that many of the Ukrainian developers needed only look outside their windows to see that very scenario. It would be remiss to go this whole review without mentioning the circumstances under which The Sinking City 2 was produced, but this is a title completed under extraordinarily arduous conditions and almost entirely remotely by a team unable to meet face to face. The full-scale Russian invasion of the Ukraine will be entering its fifth year very shortly and Frogwares crafting an entire AA game that happens to be their most cohesive and accomplished title across that period is nothing short of stunning.
I will be replaying The Sinking City 2. Frogwares have made that decision easy enough by crafting a game that throws me in a setting I enjoy the heck out of, paced well enough that I can wrap future runs up in a night or two. Compound that with robust post-game support it’s hitting all of the checkboxes I’m drawn to in games these days now I’m at peak ‘Dad Gamer’. Give me a well-told story I can run through a few times as opposed to something more epic that I can barely get through once and you’ll have my heart – Frogwares certainly does. I dove into the The Sinking City 2 with a good amount of trepidation, and whilst I do hope Frogwares get the chance to revisit their earlier style at some point, in the end they made the right Call…(of Cthulhu).
The Sinking City 2 was reviewed on a PS5 console with code kindly supplied by the publisher. Throdogoth l’ Ukraine!
