The Sinking City 2 Was Made in a City Under Attack

The Sinking City 2 arrives on Xbox Series X and S on 18 August, the headline name in a five-day stretch that Microsoft has crammed with more games than any week this summer. Most of them are tiny: hidden-object puzzlers, arcade re-releases, a driving game called Driving is Hard. One is not. And the interesting part of it has almost nothing to do with Xbox.

The developer is Frogwares, a studio with its main office in Kyiv and a subsidiary in Ireland, best known for two decades of Sherlock Holmes games. It built this sequel through three years of drone strikes, missile alerts and power cuts, after a long-running legal fight with the publisher of the first game, and after going to the public on Kickstarter for money it described as a safety net rather than a budget.

For a UK player deciding where the money goes this month, the practical detail is the price. The standard edition is $49.99 in the US and lands at roughly £41 here — well under the £60 to £70 that big-budget releases now ask as standard. That is a deliberate choice by a studio that could have charged more and didn't.

What Lands on Xbox, and on Which Day

Microsoft's roundup spreads the week across five days, with the load stacked towards the back end. Thursday is the busiest single day of the lot. Here are the releases most people will actually have heard of:

• 17 August — Black Flower, optimised for Series X and S
• 18 August — The Sinking City 2, plus Archerio and Driving is Hard
• 19 August — Grim Trials, Dungeon Antiqua 2, WonderCat Adventures and four others
• 20 August — Mortal Shell II, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 expansion Cost of Hope, and Yet Another Zombie Survivors in Game Preview
• 21 August — eight smaller titles, including Mega City Force and Creepy Shift: Uncle Joe's Motel

The Sinking City 2 and the Studio That Nearly Lost It

The first game shipped in 2019 and then effectively vanished for a while, pulled from storefronts during a bitter dispute between Frogwares and its publisher. That history matters, because it explains why the sequel was funded the way it was and why the studio kept such tight control over it this time.

A Crowdfunding Goal Cleared in Hours

Frogwares set a Kickstarter target of $108,035 and passed it within hours of going live, according to GamesRadar. The campaign eventually closed with 6,181 backers pledging €554,002. That is a modest sum next to a AAA budget — roughly what a big publisher spends on a single marketing beat — but it was never meant to fund the game outright.

From Detective Work to Survival Horror

This is not more of the same. The 2019 original was an open-world detective sim where you interviewed people and pieced together cases. The sequel is a third-person survival horror set in 1920s Arkham, built around scarce resources, deliberate combat and a much heavier atmosphere. Frogwares also moved the project to Unreal Engine 5 mid-development. It slipped out of 2025 in the process.

Built Through Blackouts

Speaking to Wccftech, the studio has been open about what shipping a game from Kyiv actually involves: regular air raids, generators, and workdays that stop when the grid does. Two of this week's three biggest Xbox releases come from Ukrainian teams — S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 developer GSC Game World is the other. That is not a coincidence so much as a decade of Ukrainian studios quietly becoming very good at this genre.

Why £41 Is the Number to Notice

Pricing has crept steadily upwards on Xbox, and £69.99 is no longer unusual for a flagship release. Coming in at around £41 puts this sequel closer to a mid-tier indie than a marquee launch, and Frogwares has three tiers: standard, a deluxe step up, and a premium edition at $59.99 that adds extra content and 24-hour early access. Even the top tier costs less than a standard big-publisher game.

Why One List Says 25 and Another Says 30

You will see the week's total quoted as 25 in some places and closer to 30 in others. Both are defensible. The gap comes down to whether you count DLC such as Cost of Hope, Game Preview titles that are technically unfinished, and releases that slip regions or dates at the last minute. Xbox's own roundup is the fullest version; outlet counts usually strip out expansions.

What to Check Before You Buy

Two things worth knowing. Several of the smaller titles this week carry Xbox Play Anywhere, meaning one purchase covers both console and PC — Grim Trials, Gallipoli and Dungeon Antiqua 2 among them. And Yet Another Zombie Survivors launches in Game Preview, which is early access by another name: buy it expecting an unfinished game, or wait.

None of the week's headline releases is flagged as a Game Pass day-one drop, so these are straight purchases. If you're tempted by the horror sequel, the sensible move is to hold off on pre-ordering and wait for the first reviews on the morning of 18 August — a genre change this sharp, from detective game to survival horror, is exactly the kind of shift that splits opinion. Mortal Shell II's Devout Edition, meanwhile, unlocks 72 hours early on 17 August, so the first real impressions of that one will land before the week officially begins.