The Sinking City 2 shifts the series to survival horror, and manages to be genuinely unsettling

If you played a Cthulhu lore drinking game during The Sinking City then I pity your liver. It had tentacles, a New England setting, a sanity mechanic, a troubled private detective, an asylum level, analogies for racism incongruously placed next to depictions of actual racism—all these genre clichés shuffled onto its damp stage, shuffled around a bit, then shuffled off.

It wasn't a terrible game, but it was a bit of an odd fish, mixing horror with an open-world detective game like a version of L.A. Noire where you've got a rusty motorboat instead of a Chrysler. You could tell Frogwares, the developers of the Sherlock Holmes games, wanted The Sinking City to be about mysteries. But it was a chore crossing the open world every time you needed to hit up the archives or find a different abandoned house to search for clues, and many of its sidequests ended in monster shootouts in those samey abandoned houses.

The Sinking City 2 could have doubled down on detective stuff, becoming another Sherlock Holmes game in all but name. Instead, Frogwares stripped back the open world clue-hunting in favor of survival horror, and based on what I've played it's a success. This is Resident Evil: 1929, with the original Sinking City's psychic detective vision and knockoff Obra Dinn event-sequencing replaced with puzzles more typical for the genre (expect to hunt for a four-digit code to open a padlock more than once), and shooting that actually feels decent with a mouse and keyboard.

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It's not a direct sequel. You play a shabby detective named Calvin instead of a shabby detective named Charles, the flooded city you're stuck in is Lovecraft's favorite city Arkham instead of Oakmont, and instead of tracking down the source of mysterious visions you're trying to revive your girlfriend, who has been comatose since you performed a ceremony and took an ill-advised trip to the Dreamlands together for funsies.

The first segment I got to play began in a waterlogged library where I had to find a book with a resurrection ritual that could undo the problems caused by the last ritual I got out of an occult book. Seems like trying to solve your cocaine problem by taking up heroin, but let's give it a shot.

Arkham's equivalent of zombies are possessed by leech-worm things and their skin boils with convenient weak-spot lumps, though the way they lurch around inevitably makes it hard to line up a shot on the left shoulder or wherever the latest pustule has appeared. Pop those arcane pimples and enemies drop long enough for a stomp attack, and while Calvin the haunted private detective may not be Leon Kennedy, in moments like these he proves an acceptable substitute.

As well as zombies, the first game's wylebeasts return, particularly the ones that look like a spider made of pale human arms. After leaving the library I hop in a boat to my next destination, getting distracted by a church on the way that turns out to be overrun by the things. Someone's tried to deal with them by surrounding the church with beartraps, and I manage to successfully lure a couple of wylebeasts onto the grim metal teeth without standing in them myself. That saves some bullets, though there's a crafting system just like the first game that lets me combine metal scrap and shell casings to make more.

One of my favorite improvements is that you can search cupboards and other containers for loot with a single press now instead of needing to hold down the key. It's the little things.

While the church isn't truly optional—there's a puzzle here to lift a gate to get to my next destination—there are optional things to do which can earn ammo and perk points. While there are heaps of perks to buy for upgrades to damage, toughness, and reload speed, you can only equip a limited number of them. In the demo I can only have one, though there are unlockable slots in the talent menu for two more.

I say "talent menu" but actually it's the silver face mask of your comatose girlfriend, which you carry on the back of the satchel where you keep spare bullets and health kits. Which is an agreeably odd detail, and not the only one in The Sinking City 2. There's the guy who has replaced his eyes with worms so he can read alien books, and locked doors with what I assume is alien-tech facial recognition that can be opened by carrying around the authorized person's skinned face.

Said doors appear in the second location I have access to, a spooky hospital from later in the game. Which is another tick for the Cthulhu lore drinking game, but a cliché that's balanced by more of that agreeable oddness. Like the safe rooms, which are intrusions from the Dreamlands that look like rooms from the idealized home you shared with your lost love. There's a gramophone with a seashell speaker (a returning prop from Throgmorton Manor in the first game) that you can save at, and the usual storage container and talent-resetting area.

The fact this space is an actual oddity in the world rather than just a menu makes it meaningful—at one point I popped in and out of a safe room and an NPC asked where I'd been, genuinely baffled that I temporarily stepped outside the confines of his reality. It's this kind of deliberate surrealness that gives The Sinking City 2 its unsettling atmosphere, that gives the dusty old Lovecraftian tropes back a bit of their power to unnerve.

The Sinking City 2 is due this summer and will be available on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store.