For their latest game, Still Wakes the Deep, developers The Chinese Room are taking a dip into the sub-genre of horror known as aquatic horror. Usually, aquatic horror and creature features go hand in hand, but that isn’t always the case. Sorry readers, but all those low-budget shark attack horrors do not count! For my money, there aren’t enough aquatic horror movies, games, or books. Whether it’s on a ship, a submarine, or, as in the case of Still Wakes the Deep, a drilling rig, the sense of isolation, lack of places to run, and no help within calling range adds to the horrific thrill of panic and dread that powers these stories.
Still Wakes The Deep takes all of these themes and plot devices, chucks them into a blender and goes one further by adding the disaster movie genre into the mix. Now not only are you running for your life from something nasty, but the collapsing environment around you is also looking to do you in.
Set on an oil rig on the coast of Scotland, Still Wakes The Deep transports you back to the year 1975. You’re far away from the safety of land in an inhospitable and uncaring environment where one mistake could cost you, and the men next to you, dearly. As electrician Caz McLeary, you’ve run to the sea from the law and are just scraping by on keeping the rig’s electrical systems running. Just when you’re about to be sent packing, the rig’s drill breaks into something unknown and disaster ensures. Everything that can go wrong on a rig does but the real nightmare is only beginning.
That’s the basis for The Chinese Room’s cinematic horror adventure game. It would be wrong to call Still Wakes The Deep a survival horror, even though you do have to survive, as the game is more interested in throwing you into the bowels of a horror movie and tasking you with playing through what is, essentially, an interactive movie.
Now, initially, I thought that Still Wakes The Deep’s linear gameplay and lack of exploration was a disservice to a fantastic setting. And the concept of interactive movies still has a bad taste in the mouths of gamers, but once I realised what The Chinese Room was aiming for, Still Wakes The Deep blossomed into one of this year’s best horror games.
You see, the developers want you to live a horror movie with this. And a disaster movie too. And just like those movies, there’s a ticking time bomb propelling you from one set piece to another. You can’t just escape. Everything has to break down to form an impasse for you. Need to get to that lifeboat? Sure but you have to swim through oil, but before you can do that you have to shut the power down or risk becoming a crispy critter.
And then there’s the horror movie aspect, as friends and foe start to mutate around you, dying horrible deaths or becoming unrecognisable things looking to tear you limb from limb. From the heights of the oil rig to its water-logged depths, you have to solve the rig’s problems while running and hiding from what your friends have become.
Pitched as “The Thing on an oil rig”, Still Wakes The Deep influences are plainly visible. The Thing, Leviathan and a whole host of gloopy, gory 80’s body horror movies permeate the game along with action and disaster flicks such as The Poseidon Adventure. It’s a great hodgepodge that works wonderfully with the game’s character-centric narrative. There’s a fair amount of psychological drama at play here, mixed in with a vaguely Lovecraftian, cosmic horror aesthetic that keeps a definitive explanation as to the organism invading the rig wrapped in mystery. It’s a narrative move that I appreciate as it keeps the mystery intriguing.
The game plays out from a first-person point of view. You can run, jump, crawl, climb and interact with specific objects. There is no combat in the game with enemy encounters relying on stealth, hiding and speed to avoid dying. There’s also very little in the way of exploration with the paths you need to follow clearly highlighted for you. Much has been said about signposting interactable parts of the environment in yellow recently, but here it works due to the nature of the environment. Yellow railings, lockers and vent covers fit perfectly in with the environment’s industrial design, becoming as much a part of the environment as red gantries or flickering work consoles.
As such, Still Wakes the Deep is a very linear affair that relies on its cinematic design and character work to keep you engaged. The developers have used their previous experience to craft a tense, pulse-pounding affair steeped in dread.
While the actual story beats may not be surprising, the character work is well-written and acted. The game sports some fantastic voice acting from Scottish actors that keeps character interest alive.
Still Wakes The Deep is also a very beautiful game featuring some gorgeous, realistic-looking visuals in the environment design, fantastic lighting and absolutely stunning reflections. The rig and weather are characters themselves, with splashing waves and fog-filled visuals paving the way. The game may not be using RT reflections, but the high-quality SSR on water and oil are breathtaking to behold.
The great visuals and set design do come at a price in the more expansive views though, as I could see some frame drops in the outdoor locations, especially later in the game when the combination of fog, flame and out-of-this-world lighting combine to create an eerie, alien landscape. There are only three visual options available on the console: Motion Blur, Film Grain and Chromatic Aberration.
Motion Blur is the first thing I disable in any game and switching off Chromatic Aberration helped to smooth out the frame-rate in these sections a bit. Disabling the Film Grain may have helped as well to disable the post-processing load but I liked the atmosphere it lent to the game.
Still Wakes The Deep may not be the expansive survival horror title I was hoping for, but I feel that the developers have achieved what they set out to do by dropping you into a horror movie. As such, not only have they created a gnarly body horror title, but also one of this year’s tensest and most atmospheric horror games.
Still Wakes The Deep Trailer
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