It also highlights the pre-order bonuses and what Deluxe and Premium Edition owners can look forward to. Those who buy before launch will receive three weapons – the Shale Mary handgun, Breakwater shotgun, and Tektite Tommy submachine gun, which make up the Chthonic Arsenal. If you buy the Deluxe Edition for $54.99, three unique outfits await as part of the Arkham Field Kit.

You also get a Resource Pack with crafting resources, ammo and healing items alongside three Dream Essences (used for unlocking Talents) for an easier start. Finally, the $59.99 Premium Edition offers the same benefits while throwing in 24 hours of advanced access and the standalone Holloway Manor side quest, where you’ll explore a creepy mansion and acquire the Bucking Bronco revolver, which is usable in the main game.

The Sinking City 2 launches on August 18th for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Check out our impressions of the recent demo here.

The latest trailer showcases some of the horrors that Calvin Rafferty will encounter throughout 1920s Arkham. Besides the Slither, who reanimate corpses and attempt to “convert” you in the most gruesome way possible, there are also Deep Ones that pose a greater challenge. You may also happen upon Shadows, which defy description.

And unlike the first game, this is a proper survival horror, where conserving ammo, using the environment and running away are the key to survival. Not that Calvin won’t be solving any mysteries, though, especially since connecting clues in your journal can help unlock upgrades that will make life easier. They may even open new paths.

For more details on The Sinking City 2, you can check out our hands-on preview here, which details two missions, including one in the early game. You can also check out this developer diary for more information on investigations.

The Premise

While the first game focused on private investigator (and former WW1 veteran) Charles Reed, who ventures to Oakmont, the sequel stars a new character, Calvin Rafferty. He ends up in the flooded city of Arkham, searching for a book to save Faye, his companion, who’s in a coma after a ritual gone wrong. He starts in the Annex of Miskatonic University, where strange creatures roam about, but hey, at least his fedora and leather jacket remain unruffled. A later section sees him visiting Akeley Memorial Hospital – a drier but much more dangerous location – and despite some success, he draws the attention of cosmic forces that he can’t even begin to fathom.

A Moody Atmosphere

Compared to the first game’s remaster, Unreal Engine 5 feels more suited to The Sinking City 2’s creepy atmosphere. Beyond the morose palette, you can see it in the Slither, writhing worms casually flopping around on the floor (and sometimes indicating the way forward) when they’re not puppeteering the dead, the detailed water that Calvin sloshes through at the best of times and falls unceremoniously into at the worst. Even finer details like the scattered books littering the university’s floors or the ruined streets with billboards, broken street lamps and damp walls feel natural. Then there are the cutscenes, especially when you run into a linguist and witness his grisly…modifications first-hand. These are on a completely different level from the original in terms of cinematography and motion capture. Performance still needs to be optimized on PC, but as it stands, it feels like Frogwares has nailed the art direction.

Survival Horror Bent

If the over-the-shoulder perspective, limited ammo, tight corridors and Dead Space-like stomp didn’t clue you in already, The Sinking City 2 is aiming for more of a survival horror vibe. This is especially important from a pacing and level design perspective, since it maintains that atmosphere of dread, as you wonder what lurks around every corner. Of course, these are elements (among others) that will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s played the Resident Evil remakes. Considering investigations are more optional than before, it may take some adjusting for fans of the original.

Rewarding Exploration

Rather than an open world, Frogwares opted for a semi-open-world approach, and this doesn’t necessarily apply to every area. The best example is Arkham, where, after gaining access to a speedboat, you can navigate the flooded streets in a non-linear order. However, there was only one place I could really go in the demo, though some locations definitely seemed explorable (perhaps in the final game). Even in plot-essential locations, it’s a good idea to wander around and look for Emergency Relief Crates (ERCs) since they contain weapon attachments and inventory expansion items. You’ll need an Activator Pen to open it, and reaching an ERC isn’t always straightforward, but it’s well worth the hassle, and may even clue you in more about the place.

Compact Environments and Backtracking

Regardless of the more open traversal in some areas, it definitely feels like the development team is focusing on more compactly designed levels. Buildings often have multiple unlockable shortcuts. You’ll also discover keys or other puzzle items that warrant backtracking through previously explored areas (the map helpfully fills these in blue if you’ve found everything relevant). Oftentimes, there may be some risk involved – humanoids and skitterers appearing where they weren’t before – which really adds to the tension and feeds into the risk vs. reward nature of combat. Which is a good time to discuss…

Locational Damage

Compared to a Resident Evil remake, The Sinking City 2 handles over-the-shoulder aiming in an intriguing way. Instead of chasing headshots, you’re encouraged to shoot the boils on Slither-controlled humanoids, which can emerge just about anywhere – ribs, arms, legs, etc. They’ll deal significant damage and even slightly stagger the target for a time, allowing you to run past. However, if you get lucky and can bring them to a knee, they’re ripe for some good ol’ fashioned stomping. Later humanoids offer tougher challenges, especially in Akeley, spewing projectiles from afar to match your increased firepower. You also have the little creepy critters that scurry about, lunging at you when least expected. A good stomp or two can take them down, if you can catch up to them.

Dodging and Environmental Traps

While the action definitely ramps up later in the game – as evidenced by Calvin having a Thompson and a shotgun, along with more ammo – dodging and leveraging the environment are still vital. Dodging can be one of the easiest ways to avoid the skitterers, who are also susceptible to walking into bear traps in Arkham (which can also hurt you if you’re not paying attention). In the same vein, you’ll want to leverage exploding canisters, even if Calvin gets caught in the blast radius. There’s definitely more action to be had than the original, but that doesn’t mean ammunition will be spilling out of cabinets.

The Runes Have It

You also have Runes, which offer talents that provide passive benefits. For instance, the Basic Talents include faster weapon reloads, less damage taken from humanoid enemies, dealing a little more damage for a period upon switching weapons, and so on. One option I particularly like is striking harder when your flashlight is off – like the game is daring you to brave the darkness. You’re limited at the beginning by the number of slots available and must also consider the Rune’s shape. Regardless of both, you still need to unlock more options because that’s how higher-level Talents become available (with the highest tier, Expert, only becoming available after finishing the game, interestingly enough). Dream Essences are also required to unlock new Runes, and you won’t always find them lying around. Time for the next best option…

Building a Case

Not all investigations are mandatory, but evidence is still valuable. On top of providing puzzle solutions – which are thankfully a little bit more complicated than “Here’s the combination code for this lock” – they also offer extensive lore. If you can figure out how to link related evidence together, you’ll receive some Dream Essence as a reward, thus opening up even more Runes to unlock. It’s a simple incentive, but honestly, the real reward is seeing where these investigations end up. Based on the optional investigation in Arkham, I’m intrigued by what other horrors may await in the full game.

Crafting

The one element that wasn’t really available in the demo is crafting. You’ll find chemicals, scrap metal, gunpowder and healing herbs, but the actual system for combining them remains up in the air. Based on the demo, this can’t be done on the fly, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the crafting station is a fixture of the save rooms alongside the stash. The latter has limited slots, by the way, so even while dumping any unneeded materials and items in, you’ll eventually need to use some of them for the sake of space.

All in all, The Sinking City 2 was a pleasant surprise for me. Obviously, it needs more work, especially when it comes to squashing bugs and optimizing performance, but the demo felt immediately more interesting than its predecessor, both in combat and the action-adventure loop. Whether the plot will turn out well remains to be seen, but thus far, Calvin’s potential meeting with The Great Dreamer could prove a survival horror dark horse in 2026.

The city has suffered a massive flood, and motorboats for commuting on the streets aren’t uncommon. Amid all this, occult investigator Calvin Rafferty must explore its depths (and beyond) to find a cure for his girlfriend, Faye. It’s easier said than done, especially when creatures like the Slither roam about, possessing and puppeteering the dead.

Those will be the least of your problems, though, especially with a shadowy entity and some fish-like beast to fight off. Of course, between the survival horror elements that require conserving resources and managing inventory space, you’ll take on different cases and solve puzzles.

In a press release, game director Alexander Gresko said, “Our idea to take a chance with The Sinking City 2 and create something more in the survival horror genre has really come together. The leaps and progress we’ve made are clear to all of us on the team, and now we’re eager to see how it resonates with players, both new and our existing fans.

“While the genre shift has allowed us to really grow creatively, we’re holding onto the investigative roots we’re known for. We’ve prioritized combat, survival, and exploration, with investigation as a beneficial layer for those who want that aspect of the game.

“And of course, we’ve made sure to wrap everything in a memorable, mature narrative, which our fans know and love us for. This time around, the story is more personal to our protagonist, while still delivering our signature Frogwares take on gray morality and Lovecraftian themes.”

The Sinking City 2 is all the more significant for the Ukraine-based developer after the challenges faced following Russia’s invasion of the country in 2022. Nevertheless, the pivot to Unreal Engine 5, a bigger focus on horror, and making the investigative elements optional for those who want to focus on action, mean it could be a real step up over the original. Stay tuned for more updates and a concrete release date in the coming weeks.

Of course, the ongoing invasion of Ukraine has also played a part in the delay (with days of power loss due to drone and missile strikes, among other issues), alongside the shift to a survival horror format. As lead game designer, Alexander Gresko explained, “Switching to survival horror for the first time has been a whole new kind of challenge for us in itself, too.

“We’ve been making investigation adventures for more than twenty years, but survival horror asks for a completely different kind of design thinking. Tension, pacing, combat, etc. We’ve always loved the genre as fans, but once you start building it yourself, you realize how much you still have to do. It’s exciting, but it definitely makes development slower.”

Even with the delay, Frogwares isn’t committing to a firm date, as head of publishing Sergi Oganesyan said the studio would rather “be certain than announce something now only to move it again. Rest assured, we’re currently aiming for the first half of 2026, so it’s a matter of months, not years.”

On the bright side, it will showcase a “lot more gameplay” in the coming months, per senior social media manager Anna Bieniek, with 13 new screenshots available. Check them out below.

The Sinking City 2 is currently in its final stages of production and is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. Developed on Unreal Engine 5, it unfolds in the flooded city of Arkham in the 1920s and once again borrows from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Learn more about its gameplay here.

The Sinking City Remastered is definitely a demanding game in terms of the raw horsepower required to max out its visual effects. On my system – an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB of GDDR5 RAM and an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT – I was obviously not able to max out the graphics while still hanging on to a reasonable frame rate. With everything cranked to its highest and FSR set to native anti-aliasing, the game would crawl along at between 30 and 40 FPS. However, just the act of switching FSR to Quality mode and disabling ray tracing instantly doubled my frame rates.

"Overall atmosphere and the investigative gameplay is one department where The Sinking City didn’t really need much in the way of improvements, and the remastered release makes this clear by making minimal changes in this regard."

The higher-resolution textures, as well as support for modern features like FSR/DLSS – depending on your graphics card – as well as frame generation means that The Sinking City Remastered can certainly have moments where it looks absolutely gorgeous.

However, there are still some places where the game can look quite rough. Characters, for example, are expertly modelled and animated, especially in conversations. However, just about every instance of facial hair on a character ends up looking like a cartoonish mess of coloured blobs. This is despite the fact that some of the smaller nuances of a character’s model tends to have had great attention paid to it. A perfect example is protagonist Charles Reed, whose eyes are red because he hasn’t been able to get a proper night’s sleep for quite some time. This is communicated purely through visual storyetlling, and never gets brought up in a bout of exposition-laden dialogue.

Overall atmosphere and the investigative gameplay is one department where The Sinking City didn’t really need much in the way of improvements, and the remastered release makes this clear by making minimal changes in this regard. The city of Oakmont remains one of the most interesting takes on a world inspired by the horror stylings of H. P. Lovecraft, melding together elements from several of his stories into one larger tableau that is an absolute joy to explore.

"The Sinking City Remastered can certainly have moments where it looks absolutely gorgeous."

The setup to the story is about as Lovecraftian as you can get; private investigator Charles Reed is drawn to the city of Oakmont because of repeated nightmares he has been having where he starts hearing strange voices calling him to the depths as his ship is stranded in some sort of limbo between the ocean and the sky, while a gigantic leviathan floats overhead.

Things don’t get much easier for Reed once he lands at Oakmont, however. Outsiders aren’t really trusted much in the city, which happens to have its own problems with water levels rising, strange monstrous creatures showing up, and the Grand Families taking part in their own political machinations. Reed is able to discover that many at Oakmont are seemingly having the same nightmares and visions as him, which culminates in him getting his major case: figure out what happened to an expedition that was exploring the connection between the flood that ruined much of Oakmont, and the visions that many are having.

It’s a fairly classic Lovecraftian setup and leans in quite hard on what has essentially become Frogwares’ forte at this point: investigative gameplay. As Reed, you have to take on cases, find clues, and figure out what’s happening. To help you with this, Reed is equipped with a supernatural ability called the Mind’s Eye, This ability lets him him track more mundane things, like the trail of someone that was running away, as well as more complex things, like giving Reed the ability to recreate scenes from the past that he must put together in chronological order.

"It’s a fairly classic Lovecraftian setup and leans in quite hard on what has essentially become Frogwares’ forte at this point: investigative gameplay."

The investigative aspects of The Sinking City Remastered are the parts that shine the brightest in what ends up feeling like an otherwise dull gem. Much like a real-world private investigator would have to do, Reed will need to find clues at the local newspaper’s archives, talk to the police to try and get access to their records, talk to witnesses, discover smaller clues, and ultimately connect all the dots in his head to get a clear picture of what’s going on.

While investigations can often feel like intricate puzzles that are really fun to solve, the other main part of the gameplay in The Sinking City Remastered – the combat – still feels like it shouldn’t have been there at all. Every now and then, you’ll have to get into a fight, be it against other people, or more commonly, against otherworldly horrors that can eat up your sanity just as quickly as they eat up your health. To take them on, Reed can get his hands on a number of weapons, from a simple pistol to start out with, all the way up to a rifle, a shotgun, and a submachine gun.

While the controls don’t quite feel as janky and awkward as they did in the game’s original 2019 release, the changes made in the remastered version don’t really help justify their presence in the game much anyway. Combat encounters can swing wildly in difficulty, where some feel like they were simple point-and-click affairs that were only there to eat into your precious piles of ammo, or incredibly difficult fights where your enemies end up feeling like bullet sponges.

"The investigative aspects of The Sinking City Remastered are the parts that shine the brightest in what ends up feeling like an otherwise dull gem."

The unfortunate thing is that the combat often tends to interrupt some of the more fun parts of The Sinking City Remastered, and it tends to be a bit of a pace killer when you’re hot on the trail of a suspect but have to be distracted by this strange creature that you either have to kill, or sneak around while hoping that it doesn’t see you. The game manages to keep its creepy, tense atmosphere just fine most of the time, and combat feels like a completely unnecessary addition to the game.

The progression system feels similarly unnecessary. As Reed continues his investigations, he will inevitably earn experience points, which eventually translate into Knowledge Points that can be used up on unlocking new passive abilities. These tend to be fairly simple, like giving Reed more health, the ability to carry more bullets, or flat damage increases for some weapons. The lack of anything that might aid the investigative gameplay stops the progression system from feeling like it was a natural addition to the game. Rather, it feels incredibly tacked on.

The Sinking City Remastered fixes quite a few of the issues we had with the original release; most of the visuals have been improved by leaps and bounds over what we last saw in 2019, and the overall movement and combat doesn’t feel nearly as awkward as it used to. However, there are still places where the game lacks some polish, be it the awkward facial hair on characters, or the completely unnecessary combat and stealth sequences. Despite this, however, The Sinking City Remastered is once again one of the better games out there that manages to tackle the horror themes of H. P. Lovecraft.

This game was reviewed on PC.

Developed on Unreal Engine 5, the remaster includes enhanced environments with more details and objects, a full lighting overhaul, reflection improvements and 4K textures. Upscalers like Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR are also supported alongside Temporal Super Resolution. You can also leverage the new Photo Mode for screenshots.

Of course, those who own the original on previous-gen consoles and PC can upgrade to the remaster for free. As for the future, The Sinking City 2 is in development, and Frogwares has plans for the franchise. In a press release, publishing director Sergiy Oganesyan said, “We plan to do big things with The Sinking City, starting with the sequel and then beyond.

“So, after our rather well-known struggles with the original, it feels amazing to have this positive moment be part of the game’s twisted history and for us to be the ones to fully decide it. Making it free to all our existing fans is our way of giving back to them for having supported us all this time through thick and thin.”

The Sinking City was first launched in 2019 and focuses on private investigator Charles W. Reed, who suffers from disturbing nightmares. He arrives in Oakmont to unravel their meaning and is caught up in a plot involving the Great Old Ones. Check out our review of the original here.

A trailer isn’t available, but you can check out various screenshots below. On top of all the benefits from the jump to Unreal Engine 5, The Sinking City Remastered will feature “enhanced” locations with more details and objects, 4K textures, better reflections, and support for DLSS, FSR and TSR. And, of course, there’s a Photo Mode to help players capture all this beauty.

There’s no release date, but stay tuned for official gameplay of the remaster in the coming months. As for The Sinking City 2, it has four days remaining on its Kickstarter and amassed nearly $473,000 in crowd-funding, over four times the original goal.

A full-fledged survival horror title unlike its sequel, The Sinking City 2 is set in the decrepit, flooded, and abandoned streets of the Lovecraftian city of Arkham. The gameplay trailer, which is under a minute long, showcases glimpses of a variety of enemy types, combat gameplay footage, investigations, and more. 

Further details are revealed on each of those aspects in a longer and much more detailed developer diary, which also dives into the game’s usage of Unreal Engine 5, and how the engine’s tech has enabled Frogwares to develop a more visually compelling experience. Check out both videos below.

The Sinking City 2 is due out sometime this year for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. 

Based on the images, backers who pledge enough for the latter will receive a SteelBook, a collector’s box, a figure, what appears to be a vinyl record, a hardcover art book, stickers, a medallion, and more. There’s even some art of Cthulhu with a rubber ducky in the bath.

Frogwares also promises “exclusive first looks at new environments, creatures, and gameplay features” during development. Fans can also participate in challenges and community events for “hidden secrets” before launch.

The Sinking City 2 is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC in 2025. While exploration and battling cosmic horrors like the Deep Ones is the name of the game, you’ll also investigate and gather clues. It’s developed on Unreal Engine 5, utilizing MetaHuman, Lumen GI, and more.