Game News “This is one of my favorite horror games of the year,” this video game available on Game Pass ends in just 5 hours
Still Wakes the Deep is available on Xbox Game Pass and will keep you busy for five hours while promising plenty of thrills.
It’s been nearly a decade since The Chinese Room last offered a narrative adventure since the hugely successful “Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.” The English studio makes a terrifying return with “Still Wakes the Deep,” an experience that sets sail on a Scottish oil tanker and is intended to portray a beautiful range of fears: “Dizziness, drowning, claustrophobia – all the classic fears are present on an oil rig“, explained game director John McCormack, adding: “And there is the distance that separates us from the earth: if communication fails, we are cut off from the world“. And it is true that on the open sea and in the grip of the worst atrocities, no one can hear you scream. Brilliant idea. In the opinions scattered around the Internet, some will already say that Still Wakes the Deep is one of them “their favorite horror games of the year.”
The encounter between Lovecraft and The Thing
Still Wakes the Deep takes us to the coast of Scotland in 1975, a setting easily recognizable by listening to just a few lines of dialogue told with superb authenticity by a particularly talented local cast. Besides, it never seemed to me that a horrific experience had produced such credible results.and capable of infusing just as much terror into the general atmosphere, already favored by excellent musical work. As for the year, it is not chosen by chance: “Politics and class are the backdrop to the working environment on oil rigs. Many of them talk about industrial action and it is very important that this is included“, explained the director. Here we play McLeary, married and father of two daughters, who obviously has a certain inclination towards violence, since he is currently wanted by the police for having seriously injured a certain Billy Chamberlain. In order not to languish in prison and embarrass himself by leaving his family, he accepts the plan of his best friend Roy, a cook on the Beira D oil platform, who gets him a job in the same place. McLeary is an antihero like we like, not without humor and with a composure that we appreciate in the most delicate situations.
The nightmarish adventure begins with a letter from his wife, who is clearly not enthusiastic about the idea of finding out about him on an oil tanker a few thousand kilometers from home. She then orders him to return to his family, a request that we suspect will be very difficult to fulfill. By this point, McLeary is already well acquainted with the ship’s crew, which saves us lengthy introductions.
Unforgettable, although not extensive
In Still Wakes the Deep, you are free to approach the experience in story mode to avoid the fear of dying at the hands of filthy creatures, or opt for the standard option, which in no case will confront you with a test that is too difficult. The game also manages to offer a very good balance between the sequences full of fear, which aim to sneak through canals to avoid being surrounded by a horror, and the quieter phases of linear exploration
The game mechanics, on the other hand, remain very simple and time-consuming from start to finish. Each corridor traversed has padlocks to break open, platform holes to climb over, and monsters to avoid by crawling into a room where there is no way to avoid. McLeary passively and mindlessly follows a path that is constantly painted with yellow markings, the narrowness of which only makes the crossing even narrower. The victims follow one another without us really being attached to them, and from time to time scraps of McLeary’s past emerge without managing to properly cling to the narrative thread that, however general, is nonetheless very touching about humanity. If The Chinese Room brilliantly mastered the art of environmental storytelling in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, here it is experienced mainly through the dialogue, often scattered in distress calls from colleagues we barely remember. But it is very pleasant to hear a few rational voices in this labyrinth of cold corridors haunted by the impossible. And if the story of Still Wakes the Deep has a hard time keeping us hooked until the end, it’s hard to let go once the credits roll, however brief they may be.
