The Sinking City 2 Survived 85,183 Air Raid Sirens to Ship Today. It's Also One of the Best Horror Games of the Year.

The Sinking City 2 opens with a splash screen before you even reach the title menu. It tells you that between January 2023 and today, 14 members of the development team were drafted. 17 had their homes damaged. Eight had children. Eleven got married. And the studio counted 85,183 air raid sirens, power cuts, and water shortages across the whole development cycle. Then the game starts, and it's genuinely one of the best horror releases of the year. Both of those sentences are true at the same time, and I don't think you can properly review this game without holding both of them.

---

A Studio That Wouldn't Be Told No Twice

Frogwares is a Kyiv-based studio, founded in 2000, best known for two decades of Sherlock Holmes detective games before it pivoted to Lovecraftian horror with the original Sinking City in 2019. That first game was a mixed bag: an ambitious open-world investigation title set in the flooded city of Oakmont that never quite landed with critics. It also came with a fight attached. Publisher Nacon, formerly Bigben Interactive, allegedly fell behind on payments and, according to Frogwares, misrepresented itself as holding IP rights it didn't have. Frogwares pulled the game from sale in 2020 rather than keep selling it under those terms, took the dispute to French courts, and won. In January 2024, Frogwares became sole publisher of its own game on every platform, including Steam.

They announced Sinking City 2 within weeks of that win. Then they built it, in Kyiv, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine was already two years old and showed no sign of stopping.

The Nacon fight is worth sitting with for a second on its own, because it's the reason Frogwares had the legal footing to make every decision that came after it. Frogwares accused Nacon of falling behind on payments while presenting itself publicly as though it held IP rights the contract never actually gave it. Rather than let that stand, Frogwares pulled its own game off Steam in 2020, in the middle of the original Sinking City's active sales window, and told players outright not to buy the version still listed under Nacon's name. That's not a small thing for a studio with limited runway to do. It's the kind of move that only makes sense if you genuinely believe you're in the right and you're willing to lose short-term revenue to prove it. Four years later, a Paris court agreed with them.

What Development Actually Looked Like

I'm not going to try to summarise this better than the people who lived it. Here's a Frogwares developer describing it directly, in an interview given around launch: "We had days where someone would be part of the team, and then the next day we'd hear they had been called up to serve and needed to start handing over their work to the rest of us. You'd be in a meeting one minute discussing some trivial design question, and the next, half of us would be saying, 'Hold on, the air raid sirens just went off'. We've had people disappear for days because, overnight, their home or apartment building was hit directly or indirectly, damaging their homes." Read that twice. That's not a studio talking about crunch, or a rough patch, or a difficult publisher. That's someone describing what it's like to lose colleagues mid-sentence to an actual fucking war, then go back to designing a boss fight.

The practical knock-on effects went beyond the obvious. The team couldn't meet in person to actually sit down and play the game together, so they never built a shared, in-room sense of what the game felt like, only fragmented video calls that the same interview describes as "awkward and not particularly productive." Losing people wasn't just emotionally brutal, it was a production problem repeated over and over: for days, for weeks, sometimes permanently, to conscription, to power and water outages, or worse. And because Frogwares was self-funding this after the Nacon dispute, there was no publisher relationship to lean on, no outside financing, and critically, no ability to simply go hire in survival horror expertise the team didn't already have. Every other studio making a genre pivot this ambitious gets to poach talent from studios that already know how to do it. Frogwares couldn't. Nobody with money was funding a Kyiv-based studio's genre experiment in the middle of a war, so they built their own playbook from scratch: what they call a tension-beat method for structuring the game's pacing, developed because they had to teach themselves survival horror design under conditions that would have justified any studio quietly shelving the project and calling it force majeure. They funded a chunk of it directly through a Kickstarter that hit its $108,035 goal in hours, because it turned out their audience had been paying attention to all of this the whole time. They shipped it today, August 18, at $49.99, on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.

The Game Itself

Sinking City 2 is a genuine reinvention, not a rehash, and I mean that as real praise rather than a polite way of saying it's different. Where the original was an open-world detective game about following clues through Oakmont, the sequel is a tighter, linear survival horror set in a new city, Arkham, Massachusetts, in 1929. New protagonist too: Calvin Rafferty replaces Charles Reed entirely, and this is a standalone story, not a continuation, with only minor easter eggs connecting it to the first game. Calvin wakes to find his partner Faye Bennett in a supernatural coma after a ritual involving something called the Book of Dreaming went wrong, and the rest of the game is him fighting through a city that's flooded, crawling with reanimated dead, and infested by something called the Slither, trying to find a way to bring her back before whatever's happening to her becomes permanent.

Combat is built around genuine scarcity rather than power fantasy. You're carrying handguns and shotguns with names like the Shale Mary and the Breakwater rather than an arsenal that trivialises encounters, and a Talent progression system unlocked through in-world resources called Dream Essence gives you just enough build customisation to feel like your choices matter without turning Calvin into someone who can casually walk through Arkham's horrors. Reviewers who've played it on both PC and PS5 report it holds a steady frame rate even during the heavier boss encounters, which matters more than it sounds like it should for a small studio's first real stab at the genre.

The atmosphere is where this game earns most of its praise, and rightly so. Arkham itself is described across multiple reviews as the game's actual highlight, ahead of even the combat: a glum, moody, half-drowned American city rendered in muted colours, with large worms crawling near the waterline that reanimate the dead as they go. One reviewer specifically called out the soundtrack for doing as much heavy lifting as the visuals in keeping you on edge between encounters, and a couple of the boss fight sound design choices are apparently rough enough that one review recommended muting the audio entirely for the final two. That's a genuinely odd note to end on for a game this well received, but it's the kind of specific, lived-in detail you only get from people who actually finished it rather than played the first two hours and filed copy.

Reception has been strong across the board, and it isn't just critics being generous to a studio with a sympathetic backstory. Rock Paper Shotgun's preview called it a game that "might finally" give the genre a Cthulhu-flavoured entry to rival Resident Evil and Silent Hill. DualShockers went further, ranking it alongside Resident Evil Requiem as one of the best horror games of 2026 outright, and specifically praised the chemistry between Calvin and Faye's voice actors for making the central relationship feel genuinely real rather than a horror-plot excuse to keep moving forward. On Steam, where the backstory means nothing to the review algorithm, it's sitting at 95% Very Positive across 225 reviews within hours of launch. That's not sympathy voting. That's a genuinely well-made game.

Where It Actually Falls Short

I want to be straight about this rather than let the wartime story do all the work for me, because that would be exactly the kind of dishonesty this site exists to avoid. Several reviewers flagged real problems independent of the production story. TheSixthAxis noted the level design offers "practically no alternative paths or hidden areas to find," turning exploration into something closer to following a corridor than the investigative freedom the original game was built around. But Why Tho was more pointed about the writing: Calvin and Faye read as naive and occasionally grating early on, and the game never quite makes them reckon with the fact that their own choices likely caused the disaster consuming Arkham in the first place. Neither complaint is nothing. A survival horror game that trades investigation for linearity needs its characters to carry more of the weight, and reviewers who found Calvin and Faye thin are pointing at a real structural tension in what Frogwares chose to prioritise.

None of that erases what they built. It just means the game earned its praise the normal way, through actual design work, not through a pass given because of what the team went through to make it.

Why This One's Worth Your Money

I've written today about a studio getting hollowed out by three rounds of layoffs under a media conglomerate that acquired it for exactly the thing it's now dismantling. Frogwares is the other end of that same spectrum, and putting the two stories next to each other tells you something real about where creative risk in this industry actually sits. Independent, self-published, no parent company to answer to, no shareholders to justify quarterly numbers to, and no guarantee anyone would still be alive at the studio to finish the job. They finished it anyway. There's no press release "sustainability" euphemism to translate here, because nobody above them was ever going to make that call for them.

Buy it because the game is good. That's the actual bar, and it clears it comfortably: a legitimate, well-reviewed genre pivot from a studio that had never shipped a survival horror game before this one, sitting at 95% Very Positive within hours of release. But there's no reason to pretend the other part doesn't matter too, and I'd be full of shit if I tried to review this like it happened in a vacuum. Every copy sold is a direct, uncomplicated vote for a studio that had every excuse in the world to fail to ship this, and refused to take it. Go buy it. Then go read the splash screen again once you've finished, because it hits different on the way out than it does on the way in.

The Sinking City 2 is available now on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. $49.99. 95% Very Positive on Steam at launch.
Buy on Steam