I’m standing in the prosthetics lab of a campy horror hospital, hunting for a preacher’s flayed face to wear so I can trick the world’s grisliest smart doorbell. Pinned to a board in the corner of the room are a dozen X-rays: shattered bones and metal splints in sepia negative, each with a note attached. It’s a stark, clinical intrusion on the theatrical gore elsewhere.
It takes a beat to realise that I’m reading the stories of injuries sustained by soldiers fighting for Frogwares’ native Ukraine. Fingers amputated after severe burns. Limbs lost in mine explosions.
Toes torn off by shell fire. Like so many of my favourite PS3-era seven-out-of-tens, The Sinking City 2 is a pulpy action horror. It’s fuelled by scrappy ambition, Lovecraft fan fiction and wonderfully unhinged scenario design.
A puzzle that has you determine which talking jarred brain is telling porkies. A scavenger hunt to fix a crane to move a rotting whale carcass. A gunfight amid the grisly results of a siren pop star’s fan meet-up turned battle royale.
Frogwares’ latest is also fuelled by the trauma and grit of developers who refused to let an invasion stop them making it. Through an open window, a couple resign themselves to abandoning their dead daughter’s toys. Rafferty’s decided to stick around, despite the floods and the strange infestation of worms that came with them.
His girlfriend’s in a coma, and it’s “cursed pacts with interdimensional gods” serious. Hoping for a cure, he hops in the boat you’ll use to explore the first act’s semi-open city map, and makes for the Miskatonic library. Out is the first Sinking City’s clumsy but earnest exploration of Lovecraft’s provincial racism; in is shooting unknowable cosmic horrors in whatever passes for the face with a tommy gun.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
