Ukrainian developer Frogwares announced that its next project, The Sinking City 2, is being moved to the first half of 2026. The first and most tragic reason is the continued assault on Ukraine by the Russian Federation, with the developers having to deal with power loss on top of the constant worry for their own safety. Sergiy Oganesyan, Head of Publishing at Frogwares, stated:
Developing a game during a war isn’t something you can ever really prepare for, but something you need to keep adapting to. 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. How Moscow’s tactics to terrorize civilians will change again as winter comes is anyone’s guess, so we’d rather be ready to adapt again, knowing we’re able to take our time.
The development of The Sinking City 2 is also going slower because Frogwares is shifting the sequel’s genre from the first installment’s action/adventure to survival horror. Lead Game Designer Alexander Gresko explained:
Switching to survival horror for the first time has been a whole new kind of challenge for us in itself, too. We’ve been making investigation adventures for more than twenty years, but survival horror asks for a completely different kind of design thinking. Tension, pacing, combat, etc. 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.
The studio has committed to sharing more gameplay and information in the coming months. Meanwhile, you can always check out our previous interview with the developers, in which Frogwares talked about switching to Unreal Engine 5 and placing a much bigger emphasis on combat in The Sinking City 2.
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