Summary
- Make The Horror Scary: The Sinking City 2 needs to amp up the fear factor to keep players on edge.
- Greater Enemy Variety: The game must introduce more diverse enemy types to prevent repetition.
- Deeper Combat Experience: Combat in The Sinking City 2 should be engaging, responsive, and resource-intensive.
When it launched in 2019, The Sinking City was an anomaly for Ukrainian developer Frogwares, known for their Sherlock Holmes action-adventure games. Instead, The Sinking City still featured the studio’s detective mechanics but swapped out the Victorian investigator for a Lovecraftian horror game. It was a surprisingly smooth transition, with the grisly murders of Holmes’ London replaced by the grisly horror of 1920s America being gradually subsumed by an encroaching eldritch god.
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The game itself, however, was a mixed bag. While the writing and representation of Lovecraftian mythos were spot on, the combat, exploration, and detective gameplay all left something to be desired. With the surprise announcement of The Sinking City 2 at the Xbox Partner Preview in 2024, fans are hoping that this follow-up can improve upon the first game’s weaknesses while maintaining the majority of its strengths. For that to happen, these are some of the changes that The Sinking City 2 absolutely has to make.
7
Make The Horror Scary
Lovecraftian Horror Needs To Get In Your Head
There is no doubt that The Sinking City is a scarier game than any of Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes entries, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is frightening. It starts well enough, with protagonist Charles Reed traveling to Oakmont to visit Professor van der Berg, who can supposedly help him discover the cause of the troubling visions that plague him. According to the Professor, similar visions have been reported by several citizens of Oakmont. However, when Charles arrives, he discovers that Professor van der Berg has been murdered and Charles has been framed for the crime. On top of this, Oakmoat is in the throes of a mysterious flood, and its citizens have begun to change physically, becoming more “fish-like” in appearance.
While the writing maintains this level of Lovecraftian mystery and horror, the gameplay quickly loses steam in this regard. For one, much of the game takes place during the day and in a well-populated city. While it fits the story, it rarely makes Charles feel like he’s vulnerable. Most monsters appear in abandoned buildings, and if players are ever overwhelmed or run out of ammo, they can just walk back outside to Charles’ boat and find immediate safety. There are a few segments that take place underground or in underwater caverns that help to remedy this issue, but they are few and far between. If The Sinking City 2 is going to improve in this area, it needs to make sure that there are fewer ways for players to quickly escape, and safety needs to feel like it is much further away.
6
Greater Enemy Variety
Repetition Can’t Kick In As Quickly
In The Sinking City, there are a total of five enemy types once standard humans are taken into account. There are also the small, weak, skittering enemies (Stygians), “humans but evil” enemies (Lethians), “humans but evil and without legs” enemies (Cocitians), and giant, Bloater-equivalent enemies (Acheronians). There are slight variations on these (Stygians that release clouds of smoke, Acheronians that explode, etc.), but that’s effectively all the game has to offer. There are a handful of boss fights—four to be precise, not all of them mandatory—but only a pair of them deviate from the same combat tactics players will use against the game’s standard enemies.
There are unique enemies found underwater in the dive suit sections, but they don’t appear anywhere else in the game and are similarly fought with a weapon that can’t be used anywhere else in the game.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; let’s look at the Silent Hill 2 remake as an example. This game also has five enemy types: Creepers, Lying Figures, Mannequins, Bobble Head Nurses, and Mandarins, with variants of Lying Figures, Mannequins, and Bobble Head Nurses. However, it’s the way they’re used that makes them effective and avoids the feeling of repetition that dampens their fear factor. For one, each of these enemies has unique behavior. Critters will scuttle along the floor and up the walls. Lying Figures will come shambling out of the mist, but they will also crawl out from under vehicles. Mannequins will stand perfectly still and then attack once players have their backs turned (in later levels, they also start crawling on walls). Mandarins will hang from the ceiling, or in the Otherworld, will hang beneath floor grates. Bobble Head Nurses are far more subtle; after players kill them and leave the area, when they return, some of the Nurse corpses will have vanished. Occasionally, they will reappear as enemies, and other times, they will simply disappear.
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This is the kind of thing that The Sinking City 2 needs to incorporate. It’s a tall order to say “just do what Silent Hill 2 does,” but taking a page out of the book is never a bad idea. Standout enemy behavior strikes a fine balance between predictability and unpredictability, and unless The Sinking City 2 plans to vastly expand its enemy variety to eliminate the predictability aspect, this is another effective workaround.
5
Deeper, More Engaging Combat
Fighting Back Shouldn’t Feel Like A Chore
A common complaint about The Sinking City is that its combat is not particularly engaging. It’s fine, and it gets the job done, but by the back half of the game, it really starts to drag. The weapons don’t have a lot of kick to them, and enemies are primarily either pushovers—going down in a couple of shots—or bullet-sponges that will force players into fleeing the battle simply because they are out of bullets to shoot.
Crafting a tight, responsive combat system is easier said than done; if it weren’t, every game would do it. However, some staples can go a long way towards making combat feel satisfying. Weapons need to feel effective (meaning no—or very few—bullet sponges) and distinct. Enemies need to react to damage and be able to respond in kind but should rarely feel overwhelming, especially if players are well-prepared. Most of all, if The Sinking City 2 is to be a true survival horror game—as Frogwares has suggested—finely-tuned resource scarcity is essential. While it doesn’t add anything directly to combat, making every missed shot feel like it can lead to disaster is the best way to ramp up the anxiety of combat encounters.
4
Ditch The Weapon Wheel
Slo-Mo Combat And Survival Horror Don’t Mix
Other than in fast-paced first-person shooters like DOOM Eternal and the occasional open-world game like GTA 5 and Horizon, the weapon wheel has seemingly gone the way of the dinosaur. That’s probably for the best, particularly when it comes to survival horror. The Sinking City had a weapon wheel, and it quickly became the go-to tactic for cheesing the game’s combat.
The thing with weapon wheels is that they almost always slow down gameplay without outright stopping it. This is the case in The Sinking City as well. While players can’t continue to aim—as the right analog stick is used to navigate the weapon wheel—they can still move Charles around, allowing them to line up the perfect shot in show-mo, drop the weapon wheel to take the shot, then open it again immediately to line up the next one. It’s massively immersion-breaking and kills any tension created by the combat. Removing the weapon wheel is a very simple fix to make, but implementing a more active weapon-switching system—akin to what’s seen in Resident Evil 4—is essential for The Sinking City 2.
3
Amped-Up Investigations
Involve Players Instead Of Presenting A Checklist
Frogwares’ bread and butter is investigative games. This is the main focus of their Sherlock Holmes titles, and while The Sinking City has more going on, they incorporated those same systems to a degree in their Lovecraftian horror game as well. However, while these investigations require some amount of player thought, they typically devolve into “find the blue clouds” until the game states that all evidence has been discovered.
Thankfully, The Sinking City 2 has a bunch of modern inspirations to base its investigation mechanics on. Just a month before the first game came out, the world was introduced to Outer Wilds, and just 6 months later, Disco Elysium broke onto the scene. Even Return of the Obra Dinn was released just 8 months prior to The Sinking City. All of these games not only demonstrated the value of allowing players to approach investigations in a non-linear fashion, but they provide exceptional case studies for how to effectively create mechanics to take advantage of such a system. If nothing else, the developers at Frogwares have their own broader game development experience to draw from, and can hopefully apply it to making the investigations in The Sinking City 2 more engaging.
2
Less (Or More Worthwhile) Backtracking
Returning To Quest-Givers Isn’t All That Scary
Open-world survival horror games are, for the most part, a rarity. They have been attempted by indie games like Darkwood, and The Evil Within 2 used this approach for the first half of its campaign. The Sinking City takes more of a semi-open-world approach, with much of the game taking place in the open city of Oakmont, but with other segments ferrying players into linear story missions.
There’s nothing particularly problematic with the way the world itself is designed. Taking Charles’ boat through Oakmont’s flooded sections and wandering through the dilapidated streets all feels immersive and interesting, and slowly learning the map to navigate more easily is well applied. The thing is, none of it is all that scary or novel.
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This is then compounded by the open-world trend of getting a quest, going to the quest location, and then returning to the quest-giver to complete the quest. This process is about as anti-horror as it gets, particularly on the return journey and particularly in a game lacking any engaging traversal mechanics. Backtracking is nothing new in survival horror games, often acting as a moment of respite from the horrors of a first-time exploration. However, it can’t be so much of a respite as to cause a complete disconnect, and this is something The Sinking City 2 needs to improve on.
1
Open-World Validity
Player Freedom Without A Purpose Doesn’t Add Anything
All of the previous points come together into this one. Backtracking, investigating, combat, and horror elements all play into the effectiveness of the open world in The Sinking City, and for the most part, the open world feels a bit unnecessary. There’s not a lot in the way of collectibles, side quests aren’t particularly interesting, and we’ve already discussed the issues with backtracking and the lack of any sustained feelings of terror. All of this boils down to one question: Did The Sinking City need to be an open-world game?
The answer to that question is moot because it is an open-world game, but if The Sinking City 2 is going to follow the same formula, it’s a question that needs to be asked and answered more thoroughly during its development. At the end of the day, the success of the Sinking City 2 will hinge on the validity of making it open world. If the game can maintain its survival horror trappings in an open world—which has been done in The Evil Within 2—then it will succeed on the strength of that decision. If it stumbles on the same pitfalls as the first game, then odds are it will receive the same middling reception.
Survival Horror
Action
Mystery