The Sinking City 2 Review

The Sinking City 2 is a Lovecraftian survival horror game set in 1920s Arkham, plagued by a supernatural flood and overrun by decay and Eldritch monsters. Players are put in the boots of Calvin, looking to bring back his lost love. Unfortunately, the ritual goes awry and Fay’s body becomes trapped in Dreamlands while the Slither managed to capture the body. It’s up to our Indiana Jones look-a-like protagonist to rescue the body and put an end to the Slither.

The Sinking City 2 is a third person survival horror game where players are tasked to explore the city of Arkham on his quest to save his loved one. Our protagonist does have a few tricks of his sleeve as he can run, dodge enemy attacks, stomp the ground and a basic melee attack that allows you to get some distance from an enemies getting too close for comfort.

For proper defense, you start off with a typical pistol, but as you progress through the game, you’ll find additional weapons such as shotgun, rifle and grenade launcher. You’ll also find a variety of resources that will allow you to craft ammo for your arsenal and a diverse of health items. Enemies also have weak spots for you to shoot in order to one-shot them. You can still shoot any other body parts, but it’ll take more bullets to take them down. Be mindful as some enemies can revive slightly stronger.

The game also heavily relies on inventory management. While you can increase your pouch the further you go, early on, you’ll come across a lot of resources and also key items which might force players to backtrack often to a safe room to stack them in your safe box for latter usage. And as a nice touch, when you using the map, the game gives you hints; when a room is red, it means there’s still items left to collect.

Another vital part of this game, which was a core part of the first game, just less emphasized here, is the puzzles/investigation. As you explore you’ll find various documents about the lore and giving you hints on how to the solve the fun and well-thoughtout mindbenders. While some of them are straight forwards, others will actually make you think about the solution. And most of the puzzles also require more than one clue.

Speaking of clues, when looking over the documentation, you can linked clues together which rewards you with Dream tokens. This reward allows players to “upgrade” Calvin with a few perks such as taking less damage from humanoids, switch weapons faster or craft more ammo for example. Once you’ve unlocked them, you can equip up to four of them. You can only upgrade in safe rooms.

The game looks great. The developer did a good job designing the city, Arkham, as a desolate, dark, drab and unnerving area to explore. Enemy and character design is fair. Regular enemies are zombie like enemies infested with the Slither. They will also react to you; often they’ll move at the last minute before you shoot. The game lacks any sort of soundtrack as you explore the city; emphasizing the impact of the ambiant noise as things crack and enemies stumble towards you. The voiceover work is quite solid and enjoyable. And it’s the first game to give me jump scares in a long time.

The game does have two main nuisances. The first being inventory management; it is a nightmare reminiscent of the inventory management found in the very first Resident Evil game when playing as Chris. If you want to grab and save up all the resources, you’ll constantly have to backtrack to a close safe room in order to stash away some items. While you do get expanded backpack two blocks at a time, you’re finding new weapons or mandatory items… that take two blocks.

Same goes for puzzles. If you reach a puzzle, but realize that you’re missing one or more clues, you’ll have to backtrack to find missing hints. Also combat can feel a bit clunky. While it does what it’s supposed to do against a few enemies, it becomes problematic when there’s five enemies and more. Also for some reason, enemies coming from behind are suspiciously quiet making it impossible to not get cheaped shot with unnecessary damage. Also the over the shoulder camera is way too close when aiming down which doesn’t help.

The Sinking City 2 is overall another great entry in the survival horror genre. The atmosphere is top-notch, the story is interesting and the puzzles are really fun to figure out. If you loved the first one, you might be disappointed that the investigating has taken a backseat but the rest of the experience remains intact. If you can look over the limited item inventory management early on and adapt to the clunky combat, you’ll find a great gem of the genre. Highly recommended.