Evgeny Maloshenkov has spent years imagining how a corpse moves when the thing pulling its strings has never used a human body.
As creature design lead at Frogwares, he is the person behind the worms, harvesters, and juggernauts now stalking The Sinking City 2, which landed on PlayStation 5 today PlayStation Blog as a survival-horror sequel rather than the detective adventure that defined the first game.
The change is not a tweak. Investigation, the spine of the original, is now optional — a layer for players who want to dig, rewarded with resources and shortcuts. Combat, exploration, and survival carry the experience.
Maloshenkov noted that the studio “knew we wanted to take the series in a new direction” when it opened the sequel. Frogwares began that work in 2023 PlayStation Blog, and the result is a stand-alone story set in Arkham after a flood forces the population to flee, leaving a handful of survivors and the creatures that arrived with the water.
Five monsters, one flooded city
The new Arkham is a semi-open world, and its enemies are the real subject. Maloshenkov walks through five of them.
The Slither are worm-like parasites that gather into a hive mind serving Yog-Sothoth, puppeteering human corpses with uncanny, imprecise movement — shoulders dislocated, limbs swinging wrong. Stygian Harvesters are small, fast, and fond of darkness, turning the environment into an ambush. The Acheronian Juggernaut, a six-armed mass with a maw running from head to torso, returns from the original game but with fully rebuilt behavior.
Maloshenkov said, “The Sinking City 2 is out now on PlayStation 5!”
The Lethian Revenant splits its head open to spit bacterial fluid from range, while the Deep One Raider — a close-combat bruiser — dodges in ways that are distinctly not human. That bestiary is the pitch: a horror game where the threat is as much the bodies as the things wearing them.
A horror reboot some fans did not ask for
Not everyone welcomed the pivot. The original built a cult following on investigation and atmosphere, but trading that for action risks alienating the players who loved it most. Frogwares is betting that a larger, louder horror audience outweighs the loss.
The studio is also shipping from an unusual position. Maloshenkov said building the game with “a team in Ukraine while a war continues around us has presented challenges we could never have anticipated.” The game’s arrival is, by his account, a point of pride as much as a product launch.
The Sinking City 2 is a PlayStation 5 title PlayStation, joining a library that spans console exclusives and backward-compatible PS4 games. For players who want more than the headline monsters, the studio promises that digging into Arkham’s mysteries pays off in resources and shortcuts.
For another new release to play tonight, Halo: Campaign Evolved Is Out Today on Xbox, PS5 and Steam Halo: Campaign Evolved Is Out Today on Xbox, PS5 and Steam.
The water is still rising.
