In the fall of 2001, Stuart Gordon released his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon. Interestingly, it was actually based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, yet it delivered a solid horror experience that likely caught Shinji Mikami’s attention. When creating Resident Evil 4, he seemed to borrow heavily from the film’s plot, tone, and many of its visuals. Fast forward to 2019, Frogwares released The Sinking City, a hopelessly middling open-world, Innsmouth-like mystery game wrought with the worst gunplay and combat ever designed. After years of a drawn-out legal battle with publisher Nacon over unpaid royalties and copyright ownership, Frogwares has regained control of its Lovecraft-inspired horror IP and is taking the sequel in a new direction. Resident Evil may have reinvented itself by copying its homework from Dagon/Innsmouth, but now the roles are reversed: The Sinking City 2 takes its cues from Resident Evil!
Calvin lives in Arkham (no, not that one), and he’s had a problem ever since the local cult started summoning a cosmic fish demon. Sinking City 2‘s story is very simple and is less focused on an elaborate plot than its predecessor. There’s no conspiracy surrounding an erudite ape-man, no class warfare between humans and fish monsters, and the protagonist isn’t a shell-shocked veteran with a troubled past and a thousand-yard stare. Calvin isn’t even a traveller who gets swept up in a web of mysteries. Surprisingly, he’s lived in Arkham, watching the water levels rise for quite a while, yet never made a move to leave until the streets were buried a story deep underwater. The only driving mission for the story is Calvin trying to break the magical spell that’s kept his girlfriend in a coma, which means he’s about to get a crash course in Lovecraftian occult.
Sinking City 2 feels a lot like an apology for the first game. A lot of the same ideas are recycled, while streamlining some plot elements to let the gameplay do the talking. Like Oakmont, Arkham is a once-thriving fishing town that’s been flooded, and people get around on boats while dealing with pesky sea monsters and whale corpses congesting the city blocks. The best parts of the first game were its atmosphere and visual design, and those have carried over to the sequel, where the developers have also fixed its biggest issue: the gameplay.
The Sinking City was a messy open-world adventure game that had no direction and would set players loose in hostile zones filled with monsters where the biggest enemy was the ineffectual gunplay. All of this has been thrown out the window. The Sinking City 2 has fully embraced a Resident Evil-style approach, but with a stronger focus on optional objectives and Frogwares putting their adventure game skills to work with genuinely well-crafted puzzles. From the UI design to the gameplay, it’s clear they’ve studied the RE Engine era of Resident Evil to help their Lovecraftian series resonate with players. While it is annoyingly derivative, there is no mistaking that The Sinking City 2 is much better off for it.
While Arkham isn’t exactly a fully open city like Oakmont, it’s still a substantial chunk of real estate that connects several main areas and optional locations. Sometimes Calvin stumbles upon shortcuts that loop back to earlier areas in a Dark Soulsy or Metroidvania-style fashion, or he might find a key that opens a door in a place he just recently passed through. Exploring through Arkham, solving puzzles and going deeper into the world, is cohesive and unfolds logically and satisfyingly. Exploring and solving optional puzzles becomes almost necessary to earn upgrades to Calvin’s abilities, although they do feel tacked on and forced. Sometimes it seems like Calvin was built with mediocre mechanics just to make upgrading him to a more capable version seem necessary.
Getting into scraps is a huge improvement over the first Sinking City, but it still doesn’t quite reach Capcom’s standard, even when compared to their subpar remakes. Weapons feel like they have enough bite, but the problem is mostly with the enemies, their behaviours, and how they react. The idea is that most of Arkham’s dead residents are possessed by snake-like creatures, making them zombie-like and giving them an erratic gait. The issue is that their animation feels unconvincing, appearing unfinished and stiff. Not in a rigor mortis, corpse-like way, but more like the restricted movement of a limited character rig. Shooting their extremities doesn’t match the kick of the weapons, and most foes have glaringly obvious weak points that don’t match the tone of the game at all. The Sinking City 2 wants to be taken very seriously, but undermines the intelligence of players by having trite design choices like big glowing, “shoot here, idiot” weak points on low-tier enemies.
Thankfully, there is no sloppy yellow paint slathered all over the map to guide dim players. Regretfully, The Sinking City 2 breaks a separate, yet equally bad sin of an overly chatty protagonist who talks to himself and, by proxy, to the player. He’ll mutter to himself the thing he needs to do or point out something in the environment. At times, he even goes so far as to recount the plot and events in an awkward, overly expository manner. The Sinking City 2 is already a coherent and focused survival horror that has a solid foundation and decent writing. It didn’t need to go so far as to undermine itself with such clunky and haphazard additions that make it harder to take seriously.
At its core, The Sinking City 2 is a garden-variety third-person horror game that’s elevated by its sense of atmosphere. The visuals are excellent, and the feeling of frantically trying to survive in a dilapidated flooded city festooned with Lovecraftian horrors is palpable. It does a good job setting players loose and letting them fend for themselves when Calvin isn’t overexplaining what to do. At times, it feels like it borrows too much from other successful games. The item crafting and map system is one-to-one taken from modern Resident Evil. For some, this is a good thing, but it also stops The Sinking City 2 from establishing its own identity.
The first entry may have been a downright frustrating experience, but it did have more unique qualities that made it stand out. While it did fall into some poorly executed, dumb action game moments, these were overshadowed by the stronger adventure game elements. Chatting with characters, exploring crime scenes, piecing together the truth, and getting caught up in something much bigger was unforgettable, especially with player choices shaping how events played out. All of this was gutted in exchange for something more commercial and probably more palatable to the average gamer. Considering the conditions the developer was enduring while developing this game, it’s probably a miracle it came out as good as it is.
