The Biggest Surprise Is How Different It Is From the First Game
2019's The Sinking City was primarily an open-world detective adventure — players gathered evidence, reconstructed crime scenes, questioned characters, and drew conclusions without always being told which answer was correct. Combat existed, but it was never the game's strongest feature. Frogwares itself now describes that original as an open-world detective game with horror "around the edges," and for the sequel, the studio deliberately moved exploration, pacing, and combat to the center. That's a deliberate genre shift, not a cosmetic upgrade. The sequel is also a standalone story rather than a direct continuation, following new protagonist Calvin Rafferty, an occult adventurer trying to save his partner Faye Bennett after a failed ritual leaves her soul trapped in the Dreamlands.
Frogwares Traded the Open World for Something Much Tighter
This is where the Resident Evil comparison gets strongest. Rather than another sprawling city to roam freely, Frogwares built the sequel around several more concentrated environments — Arkham's flooded streets, Akeley Memorial Hospital, the Fish Market, Redemption Church, and other interconnected interiors. Game director Alexander Gresko has said abandoning the open-world structure let the team make individual rooms and spaces more meaningful, giving players something to discover, fight, or investigate rather than spreading content thin across a huge map. That should sound immediately familiar to survival-horror fans: a locked door here isn't an obstacle you'll forget about. It's a promise that you're probably coming back.
Resident Evil's Influence Is Impossible to Ignore
There's no point dancing around the comparison — reviewers haven't. PC Gamer described the sequel's design as significantly closer to that style of survival horror, and GamesRadar called it a Lovecraftian fusion of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The similarities run deep: limited resources, inventory management, weapon upgrades, locked pathways, puzzles, revisited environments, and constant decisions about fighting versus conserving ammunition. Frogwares has been explicit that ammunition is scarce and some monsters are tough enough that retreating and rearming can be smarter than forcing a fight. The interesting question isn't whether the similarities are real — they clearly are. It's what happens when Resident Evil's survival-horror framework gets dropped into a completely different kind of nightmare.
Arkham Is the Thing Resident Evil Can't Give You
This is the strongest case that the game isn't simply imitation. Resident Evil typically builds its horror around biological experiments, viruses, corporate conspiracies, and mutated organisms. The Sinking City 2 runs on cosmic horror instead — supernatural flooding, occult rituals, impossible architecture, Deep Ones, reanimated corpses, and forces whose motivations aren't meant to be fully understood. The enemy roster includes the Slither, worm-like creatures that animate dead bodies — players can stomp exposed worms after killing a host to stop them from taking over another corpse, a design reviewers have noted borrows conceptually from Dead Space — alongside Deep Ones emerging from the water and shadowy entities capable of bending space. That gives Frogwares something genuinely valuable: a recognizable survival-horror structure, applied to make players afraid of completely different things.
Resident Evil Wants You to Understand the Monster — Lovecraftian Horror Doesn't
Survival horror often becomes less frightening once players learn its systems: how many bullets an enemy needs, where the safe rooms are, which hallways are dangerous. Eventually fear turns into strategy. Lovecraftian horror runs on almost the opposite premise — some things aren't supposed to be fully understood. That's where The Sinking City 2 has real room to distinguish itself: players still learn practical survival systems, but the world itself can stay hostile, strange, and fundamentally unknowable underneath. You can learn how to kill a monster without ever fully understanding what it actually is, and that tension between mechanical mastery and narrative uncertainty is a distinct kind of dread that Resident Evil's more explicable threats don't really offer.
Investigation Didn't Disappear — It Became Optional
This might be the smartest change Frogwares made. The studio hasn't abandoned its detective roots entirely; investigations are now largely optional. Players can examine ritual remains, decode journals, and piece together disturbing clues, but optional cases don't block main-story progress — completing them instead reveals safer routes, supplies, weapon upgrades, or additional lore. Detective work has effectively become part of the survival economy: you investigate not because the story demands it, but because the knowledge might keep you alive longer. That's a meaningfully different relationship between investigation and survival than the original game had, and it's where Frogwares' background as a studio behind numerous Sherlock Holmes titles becomes a genuine advantage rather than dead weight. Combining that investigative DNA with a modern survival-horror structure is the combination that could eventually give the series its own identity, separate from its influences.
The Flooded City Changes How the Familiar Formula Feels
Arkham isn't just visually wet — the flooding shapes how the city gets navigated and gives many locations a sense that civilization has already lost. Streets can be crossed by foot or skiff, with collapsed seawalls, abandoned buildings, and submerged areas breaking the map apart. Survival horror depends heavily on spatial familiarity — the Raccoon City Police Department works because players gradually learn its corridors, the Baker estate works because familiarity itself becomes threatening. Arkham can build that same relationship while adding something extra: the city isn't just full of monsters, it's actively disappearing beneath the water while you're in it.
The Enemies Are Designed to Make Ammunition Feel Valuable
A core survival-horror principle is that a weapon shouldn't make a player feel automatically safe. Frogwares has kept ammunition deliberately scarce, and enemies are durable enough that exploiting weaknesses or occasionally retreating beats forcing a straight fight. The Slither are the clearest example — creatures that can inhabit dead bodies, meaning corpses themselves become part of the ongoing threat rather than simply set dressing. That reinforces the genre's classic resource-management loop: every bullet has to answer a question. Do I actually need to kill this thing, or do I just need to get past it?
It's Not Trying to Match Resident Evil's Blockbuster Scale
It's worth being clear that Frogwares isn't trying to outspend Capcom. At $49.99, The Sinking City 2's Standard Edition is priced below many contemporary big-budget releases, with Deluxe and Premium tiers above that. That positions it in a broader, valuable middle tier of horror games — not every release needs Hollywood-level cinematics, massive marketing budgets, or enormous development teams. The genre's structure can work particularly well for smaller studios, because fear often benefits more from constrained spaces and carefully controlled pacing than from budget alone.
The Smaller Scale Comes With Rough Edges
None of this should read as an advertisement. Reviews have generally landed from the mid-70s into the low-80s depending on platform — Metacritic currently lists 75 on PC, 79 on PS5, and 84 on Xbox Series X, while OpenCritic sits at 81 — putting it in respectable but not genre-leading company, noticeably below scores like Resident Evil Village's 87. Several reviewers have flagged real issues: stiff facial and voice performances, limited enemy variety, and an inventory grid where quest items compete for the same space as weapons, occasionally leaving players with nowhere to stash a key item they need. Frogwares' own support page has also acknowledged PC-side issues including visual glitches when changing settings mid-game and unstable DLSS behavior. Resident Evil has set an extremely high technical bar, and The Sinking City 2 isn't trying to match it on polish — its case has to rest on atmosphere, ideas, and identity instead.
Some Fans May Prefer What the Original Was Trying to Do
There's a real trade-off worth acknowledging. What made the first Sinking City unusual was precisely that it wasn't Resident Evil — its sprawling, sometimes messy investigations were genuinely distinctive, even when they were frustrating. Several reviews of the sequel have picked up on this exact tension, noting that the new version is considerably more linear and that player choices no longer affect the story the way they once did — the second game is, in some ways, close to the opposite of the first. Frogwares built a better survival-horror game. Whether it had to become a slightly less unique Sinking City game to get there is a fair question to sit with.
Early Reception Suggests the Gamble Is Working
It's only been available since August 18, so this shouldn't be treated as a final verdict — but the early signs are encouraging. Steam user reviews have landed in "Very Positive" territory, and outlets have generally praised the tighter survival-horror direction even while flagging rough edges: DualShockers scored it 9/10 and placed it alongside Resident Evil Requiem as one of the year's best horror games, Console Creatures matched that 9/10, and other reviews have called it Frogwares' most confident and polished work to date, even while noting it doesn't quite reach the technical heights of the genre's biggest-budget entries. That reception suggests Frogwares' gamble — abandoning much of the original's structure — may have opened the series up to an entirely different horror audience.
Resident Evil's Success May Be Creating Space for More Games Like This
The modern survival-horror revival has built an audience that understands this design language fluently: limited ammo, safe rooms, inventory pressure, backtracking, puzzle keys, weapon upgrades, interconnected maps. That familiarity creates room for other developers to take those conventions somewhere new. Dead Space took them into science fiction. Silent Hill leans toward psychological horror. The Sinking City 2 pushes them into cosmic horror. That's why "alternative" is the more accurate framing here rather than "competitor" or "killer" — the game doesn't need to replace Resident Evil. It needs to serve players who love that structure and want to experience it through a different kind of dread.
There's an Extraordinary Development Story Behind It
Frogwares is a Ukrainian studio with more than 90 staff, and much of The Sinking City 2 was developed in Ukraine while Russia's full-scale invasion continued around them. Gresko has acknowledged the extraordinary circumstances surrounding development, describing challenges the team could never have anticipated while continuing production regardless. That context doesn't mean the game should be graded on a curve — but it does make the fact that Frogwares simultaneously changed genres, rebuilt its technical foundation, and produced what several reviewers consider its most accomplished game to date genuinely remarkable.
Horror Is Better When Resident Evil Isn't the Only Game in Town
The Sinking City 2 clearly owes something to the survival-horror revival that Resident Evil helped drive — the inventory, the resource scarcity, the locked pathways, the backtracking, the puzzle-driven exploration. None of that is a weakness on its own. What matters is what Frogwares builds on top of it. And Arkham gives the studio something Capcom's games don't: a drowned 1920s nightmare where detective work leads to ammunition, corpses don't always stay corpses, and understanding the mystery might only reveal how insignificant the person solving it really is.
The Sinking City 2 doesn't need to beat Resident Evil to matter. Survival horror is healthier when one franchise doesn't have to carry the entire genre by itself. If Frogwares can keep taking a structure players already love and filling it with stranger mysteries, flooded cities, and increasingly unknowable monsters, horror fans may finally have another series worth putting on the same shelf.
