Frogwares' are ready for you to dip your toes into their survival horror game The Sinking City 2. What happens to said toes in those tentacle-filled Lovecraftian waters is your responsibility. As well as a release date – August 18th –, the Ukrainian developers have released the game's first hour as a demo on Steam.
You'll step into the waterlogged gumshoes of private investigator Calvin as he searches for his missing lover, Faye, in the city of Arkham, a flooded Massachusetts town overwhelmed by Cthulhu horrors. Our Jeremy played a portion of the game recently and said it might just be "we'll finally have a good Cthulhu game that can stand up to the likes of what Pyramid Head and Nemesis have given genre enthusiasts."
What I played of the original Sinking City, released back in 2019, I found to be set in a scale slightly too big for the intimacy of a detective game. Fresh off its Sherlock Holmes series, it felt like the team were trying to wrap the investigation systems they were familiar with around a world that was too big to handle them. It wanted to be smaller, more bespoke. As Alice found in her review, you could see where the developers were running into limitations of what they could achieve.
Jeremy says this shift to something more fitting seems to have happened for the sequel, though it has also picked up more action mechanics along the way. What he played was deeper into the game than the first hour, so it will be good to see where the balance is initially struck between the investigation, the action, and the opening up of the Lovecraftian world you will be playing in.
While many games see their fair share of delays, The Sinking City 2's have been far from fair. Made in Ukraine, the development team has faced huge challenges during the Russian invasion, as Frogware's head of publishing Sergiy Oganesyan explains in a statement provided with the release date and demo news.
Making games is already chaotic and unpredictable, so having a war going on at the same time adds a layer of immense chaos. We were forced to constantly adapt and change our plans. So many times we had to rethink and adjust how we were going to get things done. And often just as we’d finally adapted and got into the new flow of things, something else would be waiting around the corner to throw us into disarray. Rinse and repeat."
We went through entire winters where heat and power were regularly cut off throughout the day because our infrastructure was being intentionally targeted. We had days where someone would be part of the team, and then the next day we’d hear they had been called up to serve and needed to start handing over their work to the rest of us. You’d be in a meeting one minute discussing some trivial design question, and the next, half of us would be saying, “Hold on, the air raid sirens just went off.” We’ve had people disappear for days because, overnight, their home or apartment building was hit directly or indirectly, damaging their homes.
Even during the week we finally picked a release date internally as a team, our feelings of joy and relief were quickly dampened when, that very Sunday, cities across the country came under some of the worst attacks since the start of the war. It felt like some vindictive force reminding us not to celebrate too much because everything could still change in an instant.
But despite all this, we’re keeping our heads up. We’re beyond proud and in awe of how we’ve come together through all of this, and we’re happy to have finally brought the game to a point where we can see its release on the horizon.
You can dive into the demo today over on Steam, and see for yourself what Frogwares have managed to achieve under these conditions.