The Sinking City 2

If you take actual notes while you play, this is your game. If you want a shooter with tentacles on top, walk away now, and I mean that with zero judgment either way. The Sinking City 2 is Frogwares doing what Frogwares has always done, which is build a detective game where the notebook does the heavy lifting and the pistol is mostly a formality. That split decides whether you love the next thirty hours or bounce off them in three. The setting is a drowned Arkham in the 1920s, and the flooding is a design constraint rather than set dressing. Whole districts sit under water, which means the map is broken into pockets you have to work around instead of sprinting across. You pick up a case, you get an address or a name, and from there the game largely stops helping. You read documents, you cross-reference archives, you find crime scenes and reconstruct what happened by ordering events yourself, and then you sit down with the deduction system and connect conclusions that the game will happily let you get wrong. Nobody drops a glowing waypoint on the answer. If you skim dialogue and dump every note into a menu you never reopen, you will get stuck, and it will be your fault rather than the game's. What works is the trust. Very few open-world games are willing to let you draw a bad conclusion, close the case on it, and live with the consequences, and this one leans into that with moral choices that mostly refuse to hand you a clean option. The atmosphere backs it up. Frogwares has never had a blockbuster budget, and instead of faking one it goes heavy on dread: water damage, bad weather, buildings that feel abandoned in a way that is not decorative, and a soundscape that does more work than the visuals do. The horror lands because it is patient. When something genuinely wrong shows up, it registers, because the game has not spent the previous two hours throwing monsters at you to keep your attention. What does not work is exactly what you would expect. Combat is functional and no more than that. Encounters exist to add pressure to exploration rather than to be enjoyable on their own, the enemy variety is thin, and if you go in wanting shooting to carry the pacing you will be disappointed within an hour. Adjustable difficulty is there, and I would use it. Turning combat down so the investigation can breathe is a completely legitimate way to play this. The open world also repeats itself. Side content tends to reuse the same building blocks, so districts blur together if you try to clear everything before advancing the main thread. Play it in cases rather than in checklists. There are rough edges in animation and pacing too, the kind a bigger studio would have sanded off. The Steam crowd has landed on Very Positive, and that tracks with the kind of player this attracts: people who came for the investigating and made peace with the rest. I would point it at anyone who liked the first game and wanted the mystery half sharpened, anyone who plays adventure games with a real notepad next to the keyboard, and anyone who wants cosmic horror that respects their attention span. If your ideal night is clearing a map of icons, this is not the one.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on The Sinking City 2.