The Sinking City 2 review: "A Lovecraftian fusion of Resident Evil and Silent Hill that boasts its own delightfully gruesome pleasures"

I've unwisely let my inventory fill up, even as The Sinking City 2 bleeds my ammunition. I'm back-tracking, but the road back to the safe room is long, and more writhing, water-logged, bloated undead lunge at me through half-flooded spaces than were there previously. Before I can make it to safety and combine resources from my item box to concoct more ammunition or healing items, a new enemy type unceremoniously appears and throws me across the room. Screaming, I unload any remaining bullets into whichever part of its fishy skin looks to be a weak spot. The Sinking City 2 truly has the survival horror juice to be in conversation with modern Resident Evil and Silent Hill entries.

The Sinking City 2 is clearly influenced by both those horror series. At times, it feels like a love letter to iconic survival horror moments, and it wisely lifts some of their best features – from Resident Evil 2 remake's color-coded maps for the item-hungry, to an early section set in the flooded streets of Arkham that reminds me of wandering through Silent Hill 2 remake's urban early hours. Inventory management, safe rooms, and item boxes are present – including crafting recipes that share resources between ammo and health, meaning you have to make agonizing decisions about what you most need to press further into the unknown. Yet, The Sinking City 2 uses its Lovecraftian, cosmic horror theming to push beyond its contemporaries.

Sinking feeling

So much of what makes the best survival horror games great, after all – is the not knowing. It's what made considering when to use the titular gun in Resident Evil Requiem such a thrill in its early hours, after all. Yet, I'm now so familiar with Resident Evil and Silent Hill games that even in new entries I largely know what to expect.

The beauty of The Sinking City 2 on a first playthrough is that I don't, despite the familiar genre touchstones. This may be a sequel, but its predecessor was an open world detective game that mechanically shares very little with this one. In fact, for all of that game's neat ideas it was rather clunky – especially whenever it forced you into combat. While The Sinking City 2 has a respect for classic survival horror, it feels wonderfully modern to play, with reactive movement and solid gunplay that makes it easy to jump from other genre contemporaries to this – more of a Resident Evil 2 remake-like than a Resident Evil 2-like.

The set-up is simple. When something goes wrong during a dream ritual conducted by occultist partners and lovers Calvin Rafferty and Faye Bennett, only Cal wakes up. Searching for a cure for his slumbering love thrusts him into probing the dark corners of Arkham as it's gripped by a supernatural flood that brings horrors from the depths. The only non-evacuees sticking around, Cal included, have some serious issues.

Faye still has a strong presence on the story, and the pair's largely positive devotion to one another almost feels subversive for survival horror – closer to Rick and Evelyn from the '90s Mummy than any relationship in Silent Hill. It also means that despite the cosmic weirdness haunting Arkham, Calvin is gung-ho and ready to accept whatever new threats appear with a sort of morbid curiosity. These bodies alive now? They alive now.

The Slither – a gross cross between big slugs and eels – power the many base zombie-ish foes Calvin will have to navigate through on his quest for forbidden knowledge. Worming their way into dead bodies, they re-animate them and then stumble, sprint, and tumble towards you, with even basic enemies able to cause devastating damage if you fall into their clutches.

Headshots are not the way forward here. Instead, once active, The Slither will form up as pus-filled mounds on flesh, meaning weak spots can appear on any part of an enemy. On normal difficulty, they twitch around enough where it can be quite hard to take out even a couple of Slither, let alone a group. This is a great mechanic for the most part, though at times waiting for a new pus boil to emerge can feel a bit artificially annoying. Plenty of moments throughout The Sinking City 2, ammo and health feels scarce enough to the point I have to seriously consider which enemies are worth blasting out of my way or simply trying to dodge my way around.

Because, even when felled, The Slither can keep coming. Even now, I don't fully understand how this works, but the wormy abominations that burst forth from a defeated enemy can dart across to a new corpse to animate, making some areas feel like slaughterhouses with how many Slither keep coming. A stomping melee attack can be used on enemies who fall to the ground (shooting their legs is always an option), but can also crush Slither, potentially stopping them from continuing to find new hosts.

But, there's also so many Slither writhing on the floor of some areas that the active ones can be hard to spot. Does crushing inactive Slither before enemies appear help at all, or is only the ones already in bodies that are a problem? Joyously, I don't know for sure, and while exploring some of The Sinking City 2's denser areas which have plenty of item-juggling back-tracking I was always delightfully on edge. I probably screamed more at this than playing Resident Evil 4 remake or Silent Hill f. I wouldn't consider this better than either in totality – but good old fashioned survival horror squealing certainly means something.

Maze runner

The bulk of The Sinking City 2 revolves around exploring a sequence of big areas that pleasingly spiral into complicated spaces filled with themed keys, puzzles, and a large amount of optional upgrades to find. Some of these tip the fedora to its predecessor, a detective mind-map allowing you to pin clues obtained from written notes in order to suss out, say, how to activate a mysterious obelisk behind a church, or how a collection of stuffed fish relates to a safe code.

It's always worth going out of your way to fully explore each side-area and obtain upgrades, from precious inventory expansions to whole new weapons. But, they often involve well-designed moments of back-tracking.

Almost every moment spent retreading steps throws something new at you, from spooking you with exploding bulbs or lightly forcing you to re-navigate around new rubble, to new waves of enemies emerging that you'll likely want to duck past as you make one final sprint to nab your goodies from an area you know you can leave behind you once the deed is done. If there's nothing in the way, you can be sure there will be something on the way back. Rather than rote, the well-timed dialing up of pressure is wonderful, and often audacious enough to have solid horror impact rather than feel annoying.

By the time you near the end of The Sinking City 2's largest areas in the middle of the game, each one teems with ridiculous threats snapping at your heels. I'd definitely recommend finding a difficulty where this works for you rather than gunning your way through (after all, that's what the many Resident Evil-like post-game unlocks can be used for – allowing unlimited ammo for certain weapons and the like).

The Sinking City 2's zones feel quite delineated, each spotlighting its own ideas more distinctly than I'd imagined during my early hours playing. Cal's boat, used to navigate flooded streets throughout which he has to investigate small areas to raise floodgates, a mechanical nod to the first game, is only used in the very first area of the game. A later hospital, meanwhile, adds biopunk-style face locks to explore a different theme beyond just horrors from the deep. For the most part this works well, though areas can at times feel a bit divorced from what came before, and I'd like to have seen a bit more wrung out of some of these ideas – especially the boat. But, perhaps that's better than overstaying its welcome.

The Sinking City 2 works less well whenever it throws you into a mandatory gauntlet of enemies or a boss battle. These moments can feel deadly at first, but you quickly get used to cruising for constantly appearing item boxes for more resources and filling enemies with lead – and they almost take the sting out of the tail of some of these otherwise intimidating foes. I understand Frogwares wouldn't want to risk players softlocking like in Resident Evil: Code Veronica, but I wish there was a way for these narratively dangerous moments to feel as dangerous as the, well, regular bits where I'm huffing and puffing through hallways as monsters moan and gurgle down my neck.

They're not problems suffered by The Sinking City 2 alone, though. Most survival horror games struggle with power curves and sticking the landing. But, it's the terrific moments of unease that'll stick with me, nervously pushing through Arkham's ruins as I struggle to understand what Cal is even trying to survive. Considering I really did not like its predecessor's combat sections, I was nervous when Frogwares announced it was pivoting to full survival horror here. But, my dark dreams have been answered – despite the odd misstep The Sinking City 2 works phenomenally well, bursting with forbidden ideas that its survival horror contemporaries could do with learning from. I have a new favorite survival horror series to follow.

Want more horror? Check out the best Resident Evil games and the best Silent Hill games for more to keep you up at night!

Should you play The Sinking City 2?

Play it if...

You love modern-style survival horror

Definitely in conversation with recent Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, The Sinking City 2's dense maps filled with locks and puzzles feel great to work through in much the same way as the genre's latest and greatest.

You're a cosmic horror fan

While blasting back at the unknowable isn't 100% in-keeping with Lovecraft literature, the unsettling vibes of cosmic horror remain intact here. If you know your stuff, there's plenty of neat references to the lore throughout, as well as fresh twists.

Don't play it if…

You like detective games, not survival horror

Considering its predecessor is all about open world detective work, you'd be forgiven for expecting that here. Instead, The Sinking City 2 centers on playing through a sequence of survival horror areas, with very light detective theming compared to the original.

You don't like Lovecraftian-style, eldritch horror

The Sinking City 2 has its own spin on Lovecraftian lore, but it still centers on unknowable, watery abominations from the deep. If slippery, watery slug things re-animating dead bodies doesn't vibe with you, this is unlikely to change your mind.

How does The Sinking City 2 compare to the first game, and other Frogwares games?

The Sinking City 2 gameplay is very different to The Sinking City and Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games, but there are some similarities. Both this sequel and its predecessor, for instance, are set in cities dealing with a supernatural flood. But, while The Sinking City 2 has a detective theme for puzzle solving, it's only a side activity, and the bulk of the game revolves around traditional Resident Evil-style survival horror set within a sequence of levels.

With that said, this feels like the developer's most polished and confident work to date. The Sinking City 2 feeling different isn't a bad thing at all, but it's worth keeping in mind if you are looking for something more in-line with their previous titles.

How does The Sinking City 2 compare to other survival horror games?

The Sinking City 2 has a lot of its own twists on survival horror that come through its Lovecraftian theme, but largely the game feels like a fusion of modern Resident Evil and Silent Hill games, close in action to Resident Evil 2 remake and Silent Hill 2 remake respectively. At times this feels a bit lower budget, but for the most part it stands strong against those other great games, as The Sinking City 2 is a slick game to play through.

With blue and red color coded rooms on the map with in-character annotations, limited inventory space, safe rooms, and item boxes, previous survival horror game knowledge will serve you well here. But, enough feels fresh that The Sinking City 2 doesn't feel like a genre retread, either.