Still Wakes the Deep

An instant horror classic

Still Wakes the Deep, set on the Beira D. Image credit: The Chinese Room/Secret Mode

Still Wakes the Deep is a four-to-five-hour horror experience from developers The Chinese Room (the people behind Dear Esther, amongst titles). On the spectrum of Ubisoft-open-world-collectathon to literally-watching-a-movie, Still Wakes the Deep is definitely on the ‘interactive story experience’ end of things, but it does it confidently and with aplomb.

You play as Cameron “Caz” McLeary, an electrician trying to escape his poor decision-making aboard the Beira D oil rig in the North Sea. Caz and most of the other crew of the Beira are Scottish and the superb voice acting coupled with the intricately detailed environment of the rig make this one of the most atmospheric games I’ve played in a long time. The ‘Scottishness’ of it all is really accurate too. I’ve lived in Scotland for around seven years and the characterisation is extremely authentic, it truly feels like wandering around Glasgow.

My favourite thing about this game is how it utilises both the environment and the monsters to scare the player. Being out at sea, confined and unable to escape is inherently frightening; an oil rig is an unfamiliar setting (to me and probably to most people) laced with fear (you could just! fall into the sea! there’s a huge drill! industrial equipment everywhere! When everything goes tits up, the rig starts breaking down and losing stability, and mere traversal becomes a nightmare. Add onto that the strange monsters who were once your crewmates and the…thing spiralling through the entire rig, and there’s rarely a moment where your death isn’t imminent.

The deck of the Beira D. Image credit: The Chinese Room/Secret Mode

I found the moment-to-moment gameplay paced really nicely, which is important for a horror game in my opinion. A few minutes of stressful, vertigo-inducing traversal, scrambling around over catwalks made even more perilous and makeshift ladders as the rig disintegrates, followed by heart-stopping chase sequences with a Chthonic monster talking with your friends’ voice. There’s no let-up, just different kinds of fear – the only breaks are the scant seconds when you get a phone call from another crew member, or the loading screens between areas.

I really loved Caz as a horror game protagonist. So often in these games, the NPCs will say something like “We need to go reset the generator! You’re the player character, you go and do it,” and off you go with little to no pushback over the fact that they get to hide in the safe room and you have to face the danger again and again. But in Still Wakes the Deep, Caz calls people out repeatedly or goes headfirst into peril while someone else goes and does something equally as perilous. There’s a cool segment where an action has to be performed four times, once in each leg of the rig, and you and an NPC take on two each. It’s a relatively small thing but I found that it really made a difference to the believability of the situations. Caz also swears up a storm if you nearly fall off the edge of something or slip off a ladder, which I applaud.

Caz is an absolute master of understatement. Image credit: The Chinese Room/Secret Mode

Caz can’t fight, either. He’s good with the leccy but he’s here to escape his brawling. Besides, no punch is stopping whatever those monsters are. It’s a classic but made interesting because Caz is exactly the type of protagonist one might expect to pick up a shotgun and start blasting monsters. However, he has no interest in becoming an action hero – he just wants to get home to his family before Christmas.

Fear isn’t the only string on Still Wakes the Deep’s bow, either. There are some surprisingly emotional, heartfelt scenes between the characters, alongside some memories of Caz’s wife Suze. I was genuinely surprised at how sad some of the scenes were and how effective they were – I think the really excellent voice acting carried a ton of weight here, the performances were exceptional.

Still Wakes the Deep is an extremely linear experience, and it tells its entire story through the game. Being set in a real-time and place means no worldbuilding is required, and as soon as the game’s precipitating event does occur, there’s no time for there to be any notes or tape recorders to get in the way of the game. I found it extremely refreshing that the game let me just be in the game the entire time. I was never looking out for bits of paper or anyone’s discarded diaries – outside the intro, there’s nothing there to find, and as much of a sucker as I am for worldbuilding, I really liked this decision. There are also no collectables at all, which I was extremely on board with. It’s so easy to just put something in because it’s expected. There absolutely could have been collectables. ID cards on dead crewmates, post-it note conversations, trinkets of some kind, but Still Wakes the Deep acknowledges through their omission that it would not be a normal human response to what’s happening to Caz. The game oozes humanity, and let’s face it, if you were faced with an eldritch doom, you wouldn’t be reading the notes in your dead crewmate’s pockets.

I think I’ll take the stairs actually, aye. Image credit: The Chinese Room/Secret Mode

If I had to dredge up any criticisms, about Still Wakes the Deep, they are terribly minor things. It leans heavily on genre tropes and while it still does things well enough that it’s not egregious or irritating, it is noticeable. Caz is running away from his problems, the starting point of too many horror stories to count. You receive an internal phone call from someone who can’t possibly be calling. You split the party. There are perhaps two legitimate complaints aside from this. One, the extremely overzealous use of yellow paint to show the player where to go – the stuff is everywhere, and I think it must be because the game can be quite inconsistent in what you can climb/interact with. At one point another character tells you the locked gate can be opened with a solid kick, and I thought we’d be kicking our way through gates left and right, but that’s the only time it ever comes up, despite that exact locked gate being used to funnel the player in the right direction repeatedly. The second complaint is that (and this is personal, really) I didn’t find the tension escalated enough after about the midway point. The monsters didn’t get any worse – once you’ve sneaked past one, the experience doesn’t really change. The environmental terror does keep rising as the rig descends into chaos and collapse, but I’d have loved just a little more from the creatures and your encounters with them.

That being said, Still Wakes the Deep is, in my mind, an instant classic. It will be extremely easy to keep recommending it to horror game fans for a long time from now. The game makes elegant and admirable use of its setting, and the voice acting and character work are really top-of-the-pile. The atmosphere and gameplay work in concert to produce fear, and the story is effective and touching. It also has a Scottish Gaelic language option for the subtitles, which is extremely cool. It really is scary though – not one for the faint of heart.

• Game: Still Wakes the Deep

• Developer: The Chinese Room

• Publisher: Secret Mode

• Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox

• Note - I receive the key for this game for free to write this review