The Sinking City 2 review

The Sinking City was exactly the kind of ambitious but flawed game that deserves a sequel. Good ideas, middling execution? Give ’em another shot, I’m sure they’ll do better second time around. What was ambitious was that it was a detective game but also a horror game about H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos set in a flooded open world where sometimes you have to get around by motorboating, and not in the fun way.

Fine idea, but it suffered from the classic open world problem of not enough butter spread across too much toast, quickly repeating patterns that become so familiar they were robbed of mystery and spookiness, which are things you rather need in a horror game about a detective.

The Sinking City 2 wisely bins most of that, and is instead pretty much pure survival horror in a series of constrained locations. It’s Resident Evil right down to puzzle locks and zombies who sometimes come back stronger after being shot, only set in the 1920s. Which is no bad thing. Resident Evil: Roaring ’20s Revelations is a solid videogame pitch, and now we don’t have to wait for Capcom to make it.

Arkham—the city from Lovecraft’s stories, not the asylum where Batman locks up Condiment King—has flooded, which is a problem for many people, but notably for hat-wearing occult adventurer Calvin Rafferty. A brand new protagonist, the only references to the original Sinking City in this sequel being easter eggs, Cal’s out to revive his partner in occult adventure and also life, Faye Bennett. She’s in a supernatural coma after a trip to the Dreamlands.

By the time the game starts Arkham’s evacuation is almost complete. It’s just you and a handful of other weirdos who refuse to leave, still hanging around to discover that the worm-like creatures who showed up with the flood have started clambering inside corpses to puppet them with homicidal intent.

This sets the scene for act one, where you boat across Arkham in search of a ritual to wake Faye, dock at abandoned buildings to shoot zombies and other gribblies, solve arcane puzzles, and scrounge for supplies. The combat’s improved, with an actual dodge move and enemies desperate to be baited into charging so you can sidestep then get in a cheeky melee to save ammo. I do wish it had that 180-turn button the RE games have, but it definitely feels snappier.

The problem with the original’s stealth being janky has also been solved—by ditching it completely. Cal stands resolutely upright while shooting monsters made of arms because crouching’s for wimps I guess. The sanity meter’s gone too, which seems more of a loss, though the idea madness can be measured like hit points did run a bit counter to the themes.

Given that Frogwares was responsible for the Sherlock Holmes games, it’s interesting to see how much the investigation side of things has also been downplayed. Though you still have a mind palace, it’s mostly for linking clues that lead to combination-lock codes and other puzzle solutions rather than murder suspects. Cal may dress like a detective, and be knocked unconscious about as often as a noir private eye, but he doesn’t do any actual detecting.

Another borrowing from RE is the inventory grid you have to make space in for weapons, consumables, quest objects (a key shaped like a fish takes up as much space as a handgun), and crafting items. More than once I left a larger gun in a safe room to make space, then immediately found multiple caches of ammo for that specific gun.

Or I’d accidentally fill the inventory with crafting guff and not have room for something I needed. It’s a pain, and as in most games with crafting systems bolted on, the crafting doesn’t add anything except literal filler. How about instead of finding healing herbs and chemicals then combining them to make medicine, I could just, y’know, find medicine?

After the first area you travel to a hospital, and a couple of other staple survival horror locations after that. To my surprise you never return to the flooded streets, never have a chance to clean up sidequests you skipped, never open additional places to explore or find out more about the NPCs you left behind. I expected to see more than a sliver of the Dreamlands too, but instead the whole story ends in a rush, and then you’re back at the start for a New Game Plus that doesn’t let you keep your inventory upgrades.

There’s a decent survival horror game you can wrap in under 15 hours here, one I mostly enjoyed while I was playing it, even if the finale had me asking, “Is this it?” An improvement over the original then, if an incremental one. Maybe the third time’ll be the charm.