Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.
Waves the size of skyscrapers explode beneath me as I crawl along a broken metal beam in the middle of the North Sea, suspended at the base of an oil rig that is in the process of collapsing. I crawl quickly but carefully, my knees sliding on the wet metal and eyes fixed on the platform in front of me. Don’t look down.
I look down. The cold sea boils mere inches from my beam, white sprays rising up, threatening to pull me under miles of suffocating darkness and pressure. fuck it
in Still Wakes the Deep, horror comes in many forms. Fierce creatures stalk the paths of thin, overly long limbs that protrude from their bodies like snapping bungee cords. Human-sized pustules and ribbons of blood grow along the corridors, emitting a painful cosmic glow. The ocean is an unrelenting menace, howling beneath every step. And then there’s the Beira D oil rig itself, a massive and labyrinthine industrial platform supported by thin stretched legs in the middle of a raging sea, groaning and tilting as it’s torn apart from within. Each of these elements is deadly; each of them exhibits a unique kind of terror.
Still Wakes the Deep is a first-person horror game from The Chinese Room, the studio behind Amnesia: Pig Machine, Dear Esther and All go to the Rapture. The game takes place in the winter of 1975 and is set in Beira D, a vast metal maze that offers mystery, growing familiarity and death at every turn. The facility is filled with a rich cast of characters from the British Isles, most of them Scottish. Players take on the role of Caz, an electrician on the rig whose best friend is Roy, the cook.
Still Wakes the Deep it feels like a hit from the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, stripped of modern AAA bloat. It is restrained like the original Dead space, with a core loop that serves the narrative and vice versa. The mechanics are constantly evolving without becoming repetitive or clunky. His monsters are killer but not overplayed. in Still Wakes the Deepthe horror is unrelenting, but its source constantly shifts—vicious beasts, the crumbling platform, the angry North Sea—and this variety infuses the game with a humming tension until the breathtaking final scene.
The game is fully voiced and its cast members are incredibly adorable. An undercurrent of good-natured ribbing belies every interaction, and the dialogue is serious and legitimately funny, even in life-or-death situations. This deft sense of character development only makes the carnage all the more disturbing once the monsters board the Beira D.
After an oil rig drills through a mysterious substance deep in the North Sea, a giant, terrifying organism takes over the structure, shattering its metal corridors and infecting the bodies of some crew members. Kaz is on a mission to survive among the creatures and escape the platform – and help save Roy, whose body is rapidly fading because he can’t get to his insulin.
Gameplay in Still Wakes the Deep is a traditional first-person horror game filled with elegance and experience. The action involves jumping across broken platforms, balancing on thin ledges, running down corridors, climbing stairs, swimming through claustrophobic holes and hiding from monsters in vents and lockers. There are no weapons in Beira D, and Caz only has a screwdriver to help him break locks and unscrew metal panels, putting the focus on pure survival rather than combat. The interactives are usually highlighted in yellow, so it’s never about what to do or where to go, but rather how to get there without falling prey to the monsters, the sea, or the platform.
Every input feels perfectly precise and responsive. Climbing a ladder, for example, requires holding RT and pushing the analog stick in the right direction – but if Caz slips, players must suddenly press and hold LT as well for him to regain his grip in a Quicktime event. In those moments of sudden panic, pulling both triggers feels like a natural thing to do. It’s deeply satisfying to grip the gamepad as tightly as Caz grips the rungs of a ladder, player and character completely in sync after a sudden scare. Still Wakes the Deep is an excellent example of intuitive game design.
It’s also just a great game. I stopped a few times while playing Still Wakes the Deep simply to admire the crisp lines, intricate lighting and photo-realism of specific scenes, but each frame is saturated with thoughtful and well-rendered detail. The otherworldly structures littering the platform cause Kaz’s vision to bubble like a melting film roll, and multi-colored circles overtake the screen whenever he passes too close to a pustule—it’s disorienting and eerily beautiful, much like the rest of the game.
Still Wakes the Deep is an instant horror classic. It’s filled with heart-pounding horror and laugh-out-loud dialogue, and it’s all set in an environment rarely explored in interactive media. Between sneaking, swimming, running and climbing the Beira D, Still Wakes the Deep succeeds in telling a heartfelt and affecting story about relationships and sacrifice. Kaz and Roy have a special friendship, but they also have family ashore, and getting back to those people—alive, ideally—is a constant driving force.
Still Wakes the Deep is now available for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S and is included in Game Pass. It is developed by The Chinese Room and published by Secret Mode.
