first, The Abyss is Still Awakening is an incredible work of art. It may be the best game The Chinese Room has ever made, blending the tense, creepy horror of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs with the evocative, well-crafted world-building of Dear Esther and Everybody Goes Wild.
There are familiar themes here too: a sense of weariness with industrialisation, distant places wailing over the loss of loved ones far away. There’s a startling, effective sense of place that grounds the whole film. Whether or not you lived in Scotland in the 1970s, Still Awakes will convince you that you did. But I think it could have been a little bolder. More on that later.
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The east coast of Scotland has some of the most beautiful places in the world. Towering cliffs are topped by the ruins of forgotten castles. Quiet villages sit tucked away on cliffs around natural harbours. Every town has a large, successful fish and chip shop, where all the tourists go, and a small but actually good one off the main road, where all the savvy locals go. Arbroath has a delightful dual identity as both a historically significant location, where kings were born, and the home of Pleasureland, a shabby indoor amusement park that feels like a living set from a Reeves and Mortimer sketch.
This is a land of contrasts. Stunning scenery is dotted with monuments to tragedies both recent and long since faded from people’s memory. Visit places like Eyemouth or St Abbs (which you may be more familiar with as New Asgard) and you’ll find shrines built from the gravestones of cholera victims that had to be dug out to make room for cemeteries. A series of bronze statues commemorate the fishing disaster on the east coast in 1881, when a biblical storm claimed the lives of hundreds of fishermen and left a generation of fatherless men stranded to raise families alone during one of the cruelest periods in history. The statues are called Widow with childrenmemorializing not the men who were lost, but the women and children who were left to pick up the pieces without breadwinners. In a way, the poets lamented, the men who died were the lucky ones. They didn’t have to figure out how to live.
In the aftermath of the Scottish oil boom of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new kind of tragedy emerged to haunt the survivors of the workers lured to the iron ore islands in the middle of the North Sea by dangerous money: the oil rig disaster. The most famous and perhaps the most influential of these is the Piper Alpha tragedy, a 1988 event that killed nearly as many people as the entire east coast fishing disaster a century earlier. Again, it is commemorated by a bronze statue in Aberdeen, and even more gruesomely, a wreck buoy marks the wreck of what was once the world’s most productive rig, sitting not far from its modern replacement, the Piper Bravo. It is undoubtedly a constant reminder to today’s North Sea workers that they do indeed have one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet. If you search for oil rigs on YouTube, you’ll find dozens of clips titled “Why are oil workers paid so much?” That’s the wrong question.
Still Wakes the Deep’s authenticity is its most endearing and striking feature. The opening twenty minutes—in which you do nothing but wake up, walk through the rig, and get yelled at by your boss—are probably the best scenes in the entire game. Not because the rest of it is bad, but because you’re here to experience what normal life is like on one of these facilities. Meet a few coworkers. Join them for a morning chat as they eat eggs, beans, toast, and sausages that look incredibly realistic. It’s in these opening minutes that the game’s main theme becomes apparent: toxic masculinity. There’s aggression lurking in nearly every encounter.
It accurately describes Scotland’s oppressive social contract, and its Golden Rule You don’t have to care. Trots, a nod to the SNP slogan “It’s Scotland’s oil”, is your bespectacled trade union colleague whose nickname betrays his position in the group: A riddy. A bit of a joke. Don’t start an argument on workers’ rights or you’ll be there for hours, etc. A big bald bastard called Addair threatens you while eating a plate of bread. You exchange sarcasm, laughed at him at the time, and now earn the respect of your peers. I particularly like this because I went to school with a big bald bastard called Addair who once threatened me while eating a bacon roll.
These interactions have a narrative purpose, of course: they foreshadow many of the harrowing encounters that later inform the game. But they’re extremely well-written vignettes that do a lot of world-building, making up for the fact that setting the game on an outcrop of scaffolding hundreds of miles off the coast of Aberdeen doesn’t help the message that these are 70s people from a 70s world. Imagine 200 people crammed onto the accommodation deck. You can smell it. Dozens of people in overalls eating baked beans, stinking of bad breath and feces. That’s the real horror.
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Which brings me to my main complaint about The Abyss Still Awakes: despite its amazing production values, gorgeous dialogue, and relentlessly tense atmosphere, the actual gameplay is pretty uninspired. A ton of horror mechanics cribbed from elsewhere make up the tedious work here. For example, the fact that you can hide in strategically placed lockers while your current opponent crawls around the dimly lit level is straight out of Alien Isolation, for example. The click-clack of equipment you have to press X to operate is timed perfectly to let you pause control of the camera until the animation ends and you’re internally screaming to quickly look around. Few games go the extra mile in these moments of extreme vulnerability, letting something attack, but the threat alone is enough to keep you on edge.
Yes, it’s a walking sim, a busy work sim, and a hiding sim. While those elements are all well-executed, there’s nothing particularly bold about them as the gaming portion of this interactive disaster movie. To be honest, the story’s reliance on awakened supernatural forces also feels pretty bland in a game world populated by mutated monsters. Pained human faces stare at you from masses of oozing flesh and tentacles. These abominations patrol set paths through an environment full of hidden caves, allowing you to pass through them with relative ease. The thing about this horror game is that it’s not particularly scary. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the genre will find it unchallenging. Not only in terms of gameplay, but also in terms of how bland the bio-matter threat is.
Here’s the thing: Life on a normal, non-disaster oil rig is a pretty horrible thing. You don’t need to coat it in horrible goo and turn your buddies into horrible monsters to make it a distinctly unpleasant place. It’s an outpost of an impossible civilization, sitting on a rusty patch of land in the middle of the ocean. Far away from ape territory. We’re not supposed to be there. We’re sending people there because the energy demands of our giant sci-fi society – giant glass towers and tiny glass rectangles – are insatiable. The cost is that maintaining it all is next to impossible, and all the procedures involved are incredibly dangerous.
This could have been a disaster game about the real-life phenomenon of oil drilling gone wrong. In the decidedly “elven” and safety-conscious era in which the game is set, lax precautions and broken maintenance plans were more common than they are now. Impatient bosses forcing overworked engineers to cut corners are a historical record. Hubris is a real monster. To phrase it in Cronenbergian terms only dilutes the point. The boss who scolds you at the start of the game (for good reason, actually) ends up being a rotting flesh-and-blood terrorist with a giant head. It’s like calling a game about insomnia Alan Wake.
I wish it had been bold enough to ditch the silly monsters and just tell a six-hour disaster story about trying to stop an oil rig from sinking or exploding after an explosion. Partly because that’s basically what it is. I think there were smarter, less incongruous ways to introduce the various story elements that keep the story going — the fading hopes of escape, the hostile cast trying to hinder your progress — than to go down the path of ripping off “every recent horror game.”
Still, taken as a whole, Still Wakes the Deep is an engrossing, well-made game. The talent is undeniable: the voice acting and direction are especially key. The words of protagonist Caz echo through your head like your own, and you feel every hitch of breath, every anxious gasp, every curse that comes from the decks in a uniquely Scottish way (fans of the C-word should love this game). It’s a tactile experience that proves how gimmicky VR can be. Yes, you could make the argument that this game is a prime candidate for a future VR conversion (I wouldn’t be surprised if it started out as a VR exclusive but then became a traditional 2D game because people like to pay the bills), but if you just let it happen to you via a big TV and a nice pair of headphones, it gives you enough cerebral immersion to prove that it was the story and artistry that pulled you into the game’s world, not a silly hat.
In the end, The Abyss Still Awakes is worth the six or seven hours you put into it. It’s not inherently scary, but it’s intense, and there’s a powerful pain that shines through the soot, gunk, and toxic masculinity. The real meaning of this game, like the bronze monuments at Eyemouth, is the widows and children left behind.
Still Wakes The Deep will be released on PS5 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on June 18th. Reviewed on PC using a copy provided by the publisher.
