Frogwares was hoping to release sequel The Sinking City 2 as a surprise in late 2025, but it’s delayed the game into 2026 due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Sergiy Oganesyan, the studio’s head of publishing, explained:
“Developing a game during a war isn’t something you can ever really prepare for, but something you need to keep adapting to. At one point, we were losing power for days as drones and missiles hit our power grid. When that tactic stopped working, it became mass drone swarms every other night, going from midnight until dawn. You work all day, then spend the sleepless night listening for explosions, and somehow still need to function the next morning.”
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In addition to the perilous situation surrounding its country, the Sherlock Holmes dev is also challenging itself with a dramatic genre shift into full survival horror.
“We’ve been making investigation adventures for more than twenty years, but survival horror asks for a completely different kind of design thinking,” lead game designer Alexander Gresko pointed out.
“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.”
While the studio hasn’t nailed down an exact release date in 2026 just yet, it expects the title deploy within the first half of the year.
In order to ease the wait, it’s released a batch of new screenshots embedded within this article to demonstrate its progress. Honestly, we’re really impressed with how this one is coming together.
Of course, for those of you who didn’t play the original The Sinking City, this is a 1920s-inspired survival horror with a Lovecraftian twist.
The press release teases: “Experience a morally grey and captivating story focused on personal loss and woven around the Lovecraftian mythos of cults, rituals, and incomprehensible creatures.”
We’re looking forward to this and would urge Frogwares to take its time as much as possible. There’s obviously no shortage of games to play right now, so a 2026 release date makes more sense to us at this stage.