The Sinking City 2 trades the detective's notebook for a shotgun, and mostly wins

The core loop owes an obvious and unembarrassed debt to early Resident Evil. You explore tense, semi-contained environments, solve environmental and mechanical puzzles, manage a thin inventory, and fight monsters you often cannot afford to fight. Ammunition is scarce, healing is scarcer, and a lot of the tension comes from the constant arithmetic of whether a creature is worth the bullets or whether you should just run past it and hope the geometry is on your side.

Combat is deliberately stiff and weighty rather than slick, and that is a design choice more than a flaw, though it will not feel that way to everyone. Rafferty is not an action hero. Aiming is jittery under pressure, enemies soak up more than you want them to, and some monsters are not meant to be killed at all, only outlasted or avoided. When it works, this produces exactly the clammy panic the genre lives on. When it does not, it produces the more familiar frustration of wrestling a shotgun that feels a half-second behind your intentions.

The investigation elements survive, but in a reduced, more guided form. You still piece together what happened, still read the environment, still follow threads, but the freeform deduction of the first game, where you cross-referenced clues and drew your own conclusions with minimal hand-holding, is largely gone. In its place is a more curated, more legible path through the horror. For newcomers this is a mercy. For veterans who loved being trusted to get lost and think, it is the sequel's biggest loss, and the loudest complaint among long-time fans is that the thing that made The Sinking City distinctive, the detective work, has been sanded down in favor of a genre Frogwares does not own.

Structurally, it is far more disciplined than its predecessor. The pacing is tighter, the encounters are more deliberately placed, and the drowned districts of Arkham are built to funnel and unsettle rather than to fill an open map with busywork. There is meaningfully less padding. A launch-day New Game Plus adds replay value for the people this game clicks with, and the whole thing is short enough to sustain its dread without the sag that open-world horror almost always suffers.

There is friction beyond the combat. Traversal through flooded streets can be fiddly, some puzzle solutions are more obscure than clever, and the moment-to-moment interface still carries a little of that mid-budget Frogwares jank the studio has never fully shed. None of it is ruinous, but this is a game with rough edges, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What holds it together is that the friction usually serves the mood. Feeling slightly overwhelmed by the controls is, unfortunately or not, on-brand for a man drowning in an eldritch nightmare.

Arkham is the star, and it is superb. Frogwares has always been better at oppressive Lovecraftian place than at almost anything else, and a flooded, rotting 1920s town gives them their best canvas yet. Water is everywhere, black and patient, and the art direction wrings genuine unease out of drowned interiors, swollen wood, guttering light, and the sense that the city itself is quietly giving up. It is a world that looks like it smells of damp and decay, which for this genre is the highest compliment.

The creature and body horror is committed and frequently disturbing, leaning into the wet, the fleshy, and the wrong. Sound design does as much work as anything on screen: the ambient groan of the environment, the muffled acoustics of half-submerged rooms, and the audio cues that tell you something is close before you can see it. This is a game that understands horror is mostly about anticipation, and it stages that anticipation with real craft.

The presentation is not flawless. This is not a top-tier budget production, and it shows in some stiff animation, uneven facial work, and the occasional technical seam. But the atmosphere is so cohesive and so specific that the seams rarely break the spell. Frogwares has turned limited means into a strong, unmistakable identity, and that is worth more than raw fidelity.