Still Wakes the Deep review – Oil work and no play makes for authentic horror experience

When playing through a game for the first time, one of the more rarified characteristics is authenticity. – something beyond the flashing lights and mind-numbing gameplay loops that define so many releases. Enter Still Wakes the Deep, a game that brings so much to the competitive survival horror genre.

Still Wakes the Deep is developed by The Chinese Room, a UK-based team that got its start developing mods for Half-Life 2. Since then, it has become best known for horror sequel Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and the eerie adventure release Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

The DNA of the latter is undeniable in this latest effort. The developer has taken all of the lessons from the already impressive Rapture and applied them here, except almost every element of Still Wakes the Deep is an improvement.

Linear story-focused horror is often a genre that relies on inane jumpscares and short-term jumps, so finding a departure can be difficult. Fortunately, The Chinese Room has delivered a package that should act as a narrative benchmark for video game horror releases from this point forward.

Still Wakes the Deep key details

• Price: $34.99/£29.99
• Developer: The Chinese Room
• Publisher: Secret Mode
• Release Date: June 18, 2024
• Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC (+Game Pass for Xbox and PC)

The setting was rigged from the start

One of the key aspects behind the game’s success is its setting. Players find themselves stranded on a North Sea oil rig in 1975. You’ll take on the role of Cameron “Caz” McLeary, an electrician by trade who finds himself working at the behest of his best friend and Godfather to his children, Roy.

This isn’t out of the goodness of his heart, though. See, Caz has been a naughty boy back on the mainland. This has attracted the attention of the increasingly interested police. It’s another major reason he’s ended up here, adding strain between him and his wife which is threatening to tear his family apart.

Right from the outset, the game lets you know something important about its setting—this is not a state-of-the-art oil rig. That’s putting it mildly, too. Cabins are entirely out of action thanks to leaky ceilings, crumbling walls, and failing electrics. A chance encounter with a maintenance worker drives this home, and workers discuss the possibility of a general strike over working conditions.

This isn’t just set dressing—it’s critical to the way the rest of the game plays out. When the horror kicks in, crumbling infrastructure presents some of the greatest dangers.

As a wider setting, the oil rig (and the North Sea it’s found in) work brilliantly for the horror that permeates proceedings. You are a long way from help. The sea churns ruthlessly beneath you, threatening to swallow you in an instant. Still Wake the Deep feels heavily inspired by the isolation of The Thing, except you’re right in the middle of it. No way out. 

Traversing the rig after things go wrong is also a tough ask, with Uncharted-style platforming in horrendous conditions. These mechanics are relatively simple, largely revolving around climbing and jumping, but every move feels precarious like it could all end terribly for Caz in a split second.

Isolation is not so splendid

The first throes of the game see Caz make his way up to his boss, Rennick’s, office. Rennick, as it turns out, is furious with Caz after the police made their search for the electrician known. After a tense and extremely sweary conversation, Caz is given his marching orders and sent to the helipad for removal from the rig.

This is where everything goes wrong. Before departing the rig is hit by what feels like a major earthquake. A crew member is sent overboard, and in our attempts to save him, we follow him into the depths.

Fortunately, you’re rescued, but after waking up, you may not feel so lucky. Things have gone very wrong.  The limited crew we encounter all seem terrified by whatever caused the damage.

This isn’t a gas bubble of underwater explosion though, it’s some kind of organic threat. Fleshy tendrils weave throughout the rig, and strange organic masses cause weird distortions in our vision if we go too close. Whatever this is, it’s killing everyone off… or worse

Former friends are transformed into amorphous blobs, cycling phrases from when they were a little less fleshy. The strange nature of the threat synergizes perfectly with the game’s setting.

Those who have seen the Natalie Portman-fronted Annihilation will know roughly what the game’s threat looks like. It has the potential to corrupt and destroy, reducing previously memorable characters into disturbing tools for its parasitic machinations.

Caz is no hero

Still Wakes the Deep’s gameplay is undeniably limited. Like The Chinese Room’s previous games, there’s not a plethora of mechanics for you to utilize for your survival.  You’re mostly limited to interacting with certain items and objects, perhaps throwing them to distract threats. However, this can be to the game’s advantage too. This lack of agency lends itself brilliantly to the idea that Caz isn’t an omnipotent hero, but instead a normal man.

It’s reminiscent of the excellent Alien: Isolation – though even that gave the player some chance to combat the Xenomorph temporarily. Here, Still Wakes the Deep exclusively forces the player to hide when the danger gets real.

The earliest example of this is a former crewmate patrolling the laundry room. Taking the form of a fleshy blob with a human torso and head attached to it, it lurches around the room, looking to make you its next victim.

Caz is forced to skulk in the darkness and tuck himself into cupboards when the enemy approaches. The most agency you have is to throw nearby objects into the distance in a sometimes vain attempt to get the monster to move away.

These sections of the game are genuinely frightening. Building up the courage to step out of the cupboard and make a break for it is when the game comes to life. If ill-timed, things can devolve fast. In one instance, my timing was less than perfect, and I was spotted quickly. I was then chased in a pant-wetting intense moment that saw me escape by squeezing myself through a tight area where the walls had collapsed.

The game offers a story mode that makes stealth sections significantly easier to progress through for those who’d like an assist. While this is a brilliant push for further accessibility that allows more players to experience the game’s narrative, it’s worth keeping the standard difficulty on if able.

A cast adrift

It’s not all the big things like the setting and the horror that make Still Wake the Deep work though – It’s the smaller things. The game is set in the sea north of Scotland and, as such, local accents play a big part in the texture of the game.

Rather than going for the annoying caricatured versions of Scottish and Irish accents that we so often hear, the development team took advantage of voice actors from the Isle of Skye, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Dundee.

It’s impossible to overstate how grounded this game is because of that. There isn’t a single moment of clunky execution in dialogue sections, with characters using real colloquial terms and humor (think bampot and bahookie), that makes the rig feel like a realistic community before it all goes wrong.

For those who may find the dialogue hard to parse, the game offers multiple subtitle options. One of those is simply listed as English, and it puts across the meaning of the sentence without including the specific terms used by the characters in some cases. 

In addition, it’s also possible to set subtitles to Scots Gaelic, a language that finds its roots in Old Irish. For those who don’t know, the percentage of the Scottish population that actually speak this language is very low. Including it is a lovely way to introduce the language to a new audience and preserve it in video game form.

The choice is demonstrative of the developer’s respect for the culture that the game is rooted in. Underneath all of the cosmic horror and unspoken tension, the narrative is brought home by characters that feel textured and filled out. You’ll struggle to find a more grounded and realistic game in that regard.

The Verdict – 4/5

For fans of horror video games,  Still Wakes the Deep is one of 2024’s safer bets. It doesn’t have the perpetual terror of a game like Outlast, but that isn’t what it’s going for either. The peaks and troughs between genuine fear and relief turn the game into a rollercoaster of anxiety, but one that lets the player breathe.

Though it isn’t hugely long or particularly demanding, it’s a welcome break from the formula of so many mechanics-focused games, making this a welcome return from The Chinese Room. This puts you in the shoes of a protagonist in a movie, with a curated story. Just be aware that what starts as a Ken Loach film quickly turns into something John Carpenter would be proud of.