The Sinking City 2 is delayed into 2026 because of the war in Ukraine, but not just that: Making a survival horror game requires ‘a completely different kind of design thinking’ than adventure games, and that ‘definitely makes development slower’
Frogwares announced The Sinking City 2 in 2024 with a bizarre teaser billing an overt shift to survival horror and a 2025 release target. Today, however, the studio said it needs more time, and has thus pushed the game’s release into 2026.
The reason for the delay is twofold: First and foremost, Frogwares is a Ukrainian studio, and Ukraine is still fighting off the Russian invasion that began in 2014 and exploded into full-scale war in 2022.
“Developing a game during a war isn’t something you can ever really prepare for, but something you need to keep adapting to,” Frogwares head of publishing Sergiy Oganesyan said. “At one point, we were losing power for days as drones and missiles hit our power grid. When that tactic stopped working, it became mass drone swarms every other night, going from midnight until dawn.
“You work all day, then spend the sleepless night listening for explosions, and somehow still need to function the next morning… These things all slowed us down regularly to the point where it just doesn’t make sense to try to rush what we have left to meet a date that we no longer feel is worth chasing.”
On top of that, The Sinking City 2 is Frogwares’ first real survival horror game, and, well, it’s harder than it looks. Lead designer Alexander Gresko said the new genre calls for “a completely different kind of design thinking” than the studio’s prior “investigation adventures,” including several Sherlock Holmes games and the original Sinking City: “We’ve always loved the genre as fans, but once you start building it yourself, you realize how much you still have to do. It’s exciting, but it definitely makes development slower.”
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