Frogwares built a beautiful, creepy Lovecraft horror game in a drowning Arkham. A few rough edges, but it earned more of our time.
Frogwares provided a copy of the game for these impressions.
Verdict Worth a Look
I never played the first Sinking City. But when the trailers for The Sinking City 2 dropped, I thought it looked really, really good, so I went in hopeful. What I found is a beautiful, strange and genuinely creepy game with some rough edges I couldn’t ignore. I’m intrigued. I’m not sold yet, but I want to see where it goes.
The Sinking City 2 is beautiful, creepy and genuinely intriguing.
CMoney, OnPoint 4 Gamers
What it is
The Sinking City 2 is developed and published by Frogwares. It came out August 18, 2026, on PC and Xbox Series X|S, and its list price on Steam is $49.99. It’s a third person survival horror game set in 1920s Arkham, a port city slowly going under from a supernatural flood. Frogwares describes it as deliberate, tense and light on resources. You manage your inventory, work through puzzles, and double back through shortcuts for supplies and upgrades. Optional investigations never block your progress, but they can earn you safer routes and better gear.
The story is personal. A ritual gone wrong has trapped the soul of the woman you love in the Dreamlands, something has taken her body, and you have to push through a drowning city to get her back. The enemies come straight out of Lovecraft, like the Slither, which animate the dead, and the Deep Ones rising out of the black water.
Made under fire
Before you start, the game shows a message from Frogwares. The Sinking City 2 was made in Ukraine from January 2023 to August 2026, and most of the team stayed in the country the whole way through air raid alerts, power cuts and teammates being drafted. That’s pretty incredible. Shout out to that team. Sometimes having something to work toward is what gets you through hard times, and they finished it.
How I set it up
I’m not a puzzle guy. I can deal with them once in a while, but that’s not where I go to challenge myself for fun. So I eased up the puzzle side and kept combat on Normal, because in a horror game I want to feel the fear.
On PC, the shader compile took a long time before I could even get going. This is one area where PC really needs to get it together.
What works
For the most part, this is a pretty stunning game. Arkham looks beautiful, and the attention to detail shows. It gives me Resident Evil in the water vibes, and there’s an off-kilter weirdness to it that I like.
My favorite moment came from going back where I didn’t have to. I returned to an area I’d already cleared and caught a creepy radio broadcast from a local host named Mushroom Jack. If I’d kept moving, I never would have heard it. Rewarding curiosity like that is cool. I also cracked a safe by putting the clues together, and that felt good.
The creatures do their job. The worms are disgusting, some of the monsters made me jump, and seeing the Slither puppet the dead was disturbing in exactly the way this game wants.
What holds it back
Every so often the lighting glitches visually, and it bugged me. It’s not a dealbreaker, but combined with that long shader wait, this one isn’t as polished as I want a game that looks this good to be.
Verdict: Worth a Look
The Sinking City 2 is beautiful, creepy and genuinely intriguing. I do like it. The story of a man trying to save the woman he loves while the city gets evacuated around him could go a lot of different ways, and I want to see which. It hasn’t grabbed me the way my favorites do, but it earned more of my time. If you’re into Lovecraft and slower, tense horror, it’s Worth a Look. If you’ve played it, let me know where it lands for you.
This is not a review, so there’s no score here.
Want to see it in action? Check out our impressions on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF-AkfmA5bI
