For over a decade now, the Ukrainian developer Frogwares has been expanding and improving its Mind Palace mechanic. A feature that connects clues and forms conclusions, it’s spearheaded all the recent Sherlock Holmes games and The Sinking City — a solid set of investigative titles.

It’s probably what the studio is best known for, so to throw most of that work out and go in a new direction for The Sinking City 2 represents a bold move.

Frogwares is now doing survival horror of the Resident Evil and Silent Hill ilk, as it fashions a standalone sequel more about combat and puzzle-solving than analysis. It’s also considerably more linear and your actions have no impact on the story; the second game is almost the complete reverse of the original.

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All these changes, updates, and decisions, however, have allowed Frogwares to elevate its craft: in The Sinking City 2, the team has its best achievement to date.

There are still some flaws, from stiff facial and voice performances to poor enemy variety, and the experience ultimately doesn’t reach the heights of bigger budget efforts. It’s still an admirable game, though, that presents something of a diet version of the Resident Evil formula through sound combat, exploration, and puzzles.

Despite the number in the title, The Sinking City 2 is unrelated to the first game, as Calvin Raffery claims the protagonist role for a quest to save his partner from a magical coma. Inspired by the works of author H. P. Lovecraft, the journey into Cthulhu mythos is set in 1920s Arkham and explores many of the themes and fantasies of the genre.

A flood has destroyed much of Arkham, forcing Calvin to travel from place to place by boat. Compared to the first game, boat travel is far less pronounced; it’s simply a vehicle to get you from one location to the next.

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By taking value away from such a feature, it’s placed all the emphasis on the action on foot. The game is structured around visiting these storm-swept places, where you’ll encounter all the hallmarks of a survival horror classic: I’m talking weird puzzles, risky combat encounters, inventory and resource management, and special save rooms.

The puzzles are the highlight, requiring both a keen eye to connect clues and figure out answers from files, and a curious brain. Some involve decoding safe solutions while others demand you search the environment and probe and prod to reveal its secrets.

As a lover of all the strangest brain teasers from the Capcom and Konami classics, I think Frogwares has a fantastic set of puzzles to be proud of in The Sinking City 2. Like I said, the sequel feels like a lighter version of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, so at no point does it actually surpass the inspiration. However, what’s here is really, really good.

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Fights against Cthulhu monsters and humans consumed by the Slither form the other half of the experience. A combat system based around a small selection of weapons and limited ammo constantly raises the question: is this the right time to use my shotgun shells or would I be better off running away?

The actual feel of the combat is… serviceable. At no point did it impress me; at no point did it disappoint me. It works well enough to facilitate the action, so the charm comes more from resource hoarding and picking the right time to use something.

You have limited inventory slots and a bunch of items and crafting materials competing for a place. Save rooms are sparsely spread across the locations you explore; making sure you have the right loadout along with enough spare inventory spots for the area you’re about to investigate is paramount to making progress.

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Opening up shortcuts through buildings makes those sprints back to the save room more forgiving, and upgrades grant extra inventory slots. If it’s a hallmark of the traditional survival horror formula, The Sinking City 2’s got it — and it does it well.

Forgive it for the few things to shoot, though, as enemy variety isn’t a strong point. The human enemies controlled by the Slither repeat the same character models again and again while the more cosmic monsters introduced later on aren’t plentiful or diverse enough to solve the issue.

The cutscenes and performances to go with them fail to impress as well. Some rather stiff facial models and voice acting don’t lend much believability to the story, and since there are so few characters in the game, the lead performances for Calvin and his partner Faye are what the narrative largely hinges on. What’s there isn’t quite up to par; the performances don’t manage to make the 12-hour playthrough all that exciting from a plot perspective.

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It does at least hold up fine on the technical side; I played through the game on a PS5 Pro set to Performance Mode, which targets 60 frames-per-second. From the naked eye, it achieves that for the most part; at no point did I encounter noticeable frame rate drops or any technical hiccups. I don’t believe there are any enhancements exclusive to the PS5 Pro version, so I’d expect performance to be similar on the base console too.

There’s even a bit of PS5 adaptive trigger support across the two systems, as weapons provide a touch of resistance when you go to fire them. I didn’t feel all that much variation between the guns, but to support the feature in the first place is more effort than most third-party studios make.

Conclusion

The Sinking City 2 is a solid attempt at the classic survival horror formula that’ll please those looking for preposterous puzzle design and tense resource management. A smaller development budget means the performances aren’t quite up to the standards of the genre’s biggest names, but Frogwares still has an admirable Resident Evil-esque effort on its hands. This is good — sometimes really good.