After finishing my playthrough of Still Wakes the Deep I was left with just one question: why? It’s such an unusual blend of different things: Lovecraftian horror, oddly specific details of 40+ year old old rig infrastructure and a character drama that plays out in the most peculiar ways. So I set myself the task of understanding the developer’s motivations, trying to see if I could divine the reasoning why they’d choose such a specific set of items in which to craft a horror experience. The answer was, as it almost always is, more mundane than what I was thinking it might be: oil rigs make for a great place to explore all kinds of different horror tropes. Between that and the Scottish heritage of some of the team behind the game it begins to make sense why this exists. As to whether or not it’s worth playing? Well horror and I have a mixed history but I’m more than willing to admit there’s something here.
It was the only way out of the troubles he’d gotten himself into. Caz McLeary, drunkenly beating another man in public, was now on the run from the law. Running out of time and places to go his brother offers him a lifeline: come with him to the Beira D oil rig off the coast of Scotland and hope that the police give up their chase. He didn’t want to go, he’d left his wife and family by themselves for far too long, and he was certain that they wouldn’t be there for him when he got back. Without any other options though he takes it and, on of all the days it could happen, disaster strikes the oil rig on Christmas day. This isn’t your usual drill operation gone wrong however. No their desire to plunder the depths of the seas has awakened something and it threatens harm to more than just those on the rig.
We’ve all been spoilt by games auto-detecting our hardware and configuring the best experience for us so there’s always a few grumbles when I have to dive into the settings to get things working as intended. I am glad I did though as, for whatever reason, Still Wakes the Deep decided to default to a non-widescreen resolution whilst also slathering on film grain which made it look absolutely awful. Tweaking those settings brought out what the game was meant to look like and it’s beautiful, even the dreary setting has a kind of dark beauty to it. As you’d expect from a claustrophobic horror game there’s a ton of detail packed into every scene, showing the depth of research that the game developers undertook to make this setting true to life. Performance is good too, rarely skipping a beat even in the more action or particle intensive sections that you’ll go through.
Still Wakes the Deep is in the middle between a straight walking simulator and a survival horror game; not being enough to be fully survival horror but certainly a lot more than a plain walking simulator. There’s a variety of simple puzzles that you’ll have to solve, most of them with solutions laid out for you nearby should you take the handful of seconds needed to find them. There’s also some platforming involved although it’s rarely of the precision or complexity that other first person platformers would put you through. There’s also some stealth/avoid the monster scenes which, whilst terrifying, are really just simple puzzles in disguise. So it’s not a complex game by any stretch of the imagination, preferring you to engage more deeply with its story.
One of the things I really appreciated about Still Wakes the Deep was the limited exploration that the game expects you to do. To be sure there’s different routes and other things to go and look at if you wish, but these aren’t core parts of the game nor are there a bunch of random collectibles about the place that they’ve scattered around just to pad out the game’s play time. There are bits of flavour text you can pick up by searching around specific places, but none of them contain massive story related items or things that change the game’s narrative significantly. I know this will annoy some, preferring to have more of a sandpit in which to explore, but I do enjoy these kinds of experiences more when they’re on rails.
The game does a great job of pacing out the high tension with moments of “relief” or, more to the point, giving you enough space to recover from whatever just happened and leave you wondering what will come next. Thankfully there’s precious few jump scares or other cheap tricks to get your heart racing, the devs instead relying on the oppressive weather, the various noises of an oil rig and the ever present danger of the thing that could attack you at any moment. All of that is made somewhat bearable by the fact that you’re not also having to manage an inventory of supplies to ensure you can make it through the next encounter, something that definitely takes the sheen off any game I play in the genre.
As for the story itself it certainly had its moments although I failed to get hooked in by any of the characters. They certainly did a great job of fleshing out the world, making the characters relatable and generally making everything believable within the framework they’d setup. But I just didn’t find myself resonating with any of them, perhaps because I simply couldn’t imagine myself in the same scenarios that were playing out on screen. I don’t necessarily fault the game for this as I don’t usually gel well with horror stories overall. More I can appreciate the craftsmanship and effort that went into it even if at the end of the day I didn’t find much in it for myself.
Still Wakes the Deep is an interesting experiment for The Chinese Room, blending together the core components of some of their biggest successes to produce something that is truly unique. The artwork is great, the attention to detail really standing out when you’re cowering in fear from the game’s various horrors. Whilst the on-rails experience might not be for everyone it’s certainly something I’ve appreciated after enduring far too many games that hide useless collectibles around every corner. At the end though it failed to leave much of a mark on me, putting it firmly in the good but not great category for me.
Rating: 8.0/10
Still Wakes the Deep is available on PC, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 right now for $50.95. Game was played on the PC with 4 hours total playtime and 59% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Xbox Gamepass.
