Sinking City 2 Ditches Open World for Resident Evil DNA

Forget the sprawling, janky open world of the original. The Sinking City 2 is a survival horror game now, and based on hands-on previews that went live yesterday, Frogwares isn't being subtle about where the inspiration comes from.

Multiple preview outlets describe a game built from Resident Evil's blueprint: safe rooms with calming music, limited ammunition, locked doors requiring specific keys, and enemies with glowing weak points you need to shoot precisely. The flooded streets of Arkham stand in for Raccoon City, a hospital level draws comparisons to the RPD, and shambling reanimated corpses called Slither fill the zombie role. One preview from TheSixthAxis directly compares the weak-point shooting to the regenerators from Resident Evil 4. Protagonist Calvin Rafferty even saves his progress at a gramophone in safe rooms decorated with personal mementos, a beat-for-beat lift from the genre's classics.

This is a massive pivot. The first Sinking City, released in 2021, was defined by its open-world investigation structure, letting players roam a flooded Oakmont and piece together crime scenes using a mind palace mechanic inherited from Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games. That investigation system hasn't been removed entirely, but Frogwares has confirmed it's no longer central. It's been replaced by a bulletin board where Calvin links documents together, earning upgrade currency for correct deductions. The mind palace is gone; the corridors are in.

I'm excited about this. Lovecraftian horror and survival horror should be a natural pairing, but almost no game has properly married the two since Eternal Darkness on the GameCube. Frogwares clearly studied what Capcom and Konami have been doing with Resident Evil Requiem and Silent Hill f, and they're applying those lessons to Cthulhu mythology with a confidence the first game never had. Not everyone is sold, though. GameSpot's preview was cooler, describing the survival horror elements as feeling like "a checklist of genre requirements rather than offering anything new." Whether Frogwares can make this feel like more than a Resident Evil skin swap will depend on how much the investigation mechanics actually matter in the full game. The Sinking City 2 is targeting a summer release on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.