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, ...
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