I’m sure there have been some oil rig horror stories, but I can’t think of any, which is odd because with its remote open-ocean location and creaky structures, it’s a place that breeds fear of isolation and the unknown.
The Chinese Room – who have already shown with “Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture” for example that they can create exciting digital spaces – take this starting point and run with it so far that I can only applaud, drenched in sweat. You take on the role of Cameron McLeary, an electrician on the Beira oil rig. The circumstances of your presence quickly prove to be of a questionable nature. A man has ended up in hospital and you try to evade the police by staying as far away from him as possible and hoping that everything will go away on its own, which understandably doesn’t please your better half, who is also the mother of your two daughters.
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There’s something wonderfully socially realistic about this premise, which is heightened by the bickering of the crew. Here, the chef is a tall, bald man with a potbellied belly and the manager is a short office worker with an inferiority complex. They smoke, swear and speak with a thick Scottish accent, just as you’d imagine.
Beira is an intimidating place from the first second you step in. The hallways and rooms are narrow and metallic, and outside the wind whips cold, while the dark sea threatens to swallow anyone who falls in. A not unlikely fate considering the poor condition of the oil platform, which can be felt and heard with every step. This is also helped by the tactile approach to small and large actions that The Chinese Room has taken. Unscrewing vents or picking locks requires more than just pressing a button, you have to put out fires with fire extinguishers that you would normally fire with a firearm, and the developer has even found space for short platforming sequences that may not be demanding, but they still give you an unsettling feeling. No, it’s not a mechanically deep game, but it’s more immersive than the classic walking sims that The Chinese Room made its name with, and more importantly, it shows just how difficult and inhospitable a place like Beira is.
Still Wakes the Deep manages to create a sense of unease even before everything goes to hell. Because of course it does. He’s going to hell, of course. But for the first hour or so, the game lets you experience Beira and his coworkers on a normal day. Navigating rooms and outdoor areas, completing small tasks and chatting with your coworkers. In this way, a normality is established that only adds to the impact of the events that inevitably occur. This is a horror game, after all.
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The pieces are prepared specifically for the event that turns the place from a menacing state to a nightmarish one. It would be a shame to go into details, but since this is an oil rig, I think I can reveal that Beira awakens something it shouldn’t. Soon, the platform is torn apart by a mysterious substance that turns even those who come into too much contact with it into frothy Cronenberg monstrosities.
Encounters with these terrifying creatures are not only gleefully grotesque, but also one of the game’s key mechanical elements. If you’ve played horror titles like Alien: Isolation, Outlast, or Amnesia, which ditched combat in favor of stealth and escape in the 2010s, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect. There are no weapons, and confronting the monsters directly leads to an endgame screen, so it’s all about sneaking around and using diversions, small holes to hide in, and of course, closets to hide in. There’s nothing new under the sun here, but because the monster design is so terrifying and the environments so atmospheric and believable, many of the sequences are incredibly memorable. This also applies to escape sequences, which can occur both naturally and as set pieces. In ingeniously sadistic fashion, Still Wakes the Deep has dedicated a button to recapture. It’s not useful as such, but what it lacks in pure functionality it makes up for by being a terrifyingly delicious source of some of the year’s most memorable images, as you look over your shoulder at full speed and realize that Cronenberg’s monstrosity is charging down the half-flooded hallway, coming straight at you.
However, sometimes the design of the encounter conflicts with the naturalistic aspect. There is a big difference between the look of the areas where the cat-and-mouse sequences take place and the rest of the game. For example, towards the middle of the game I was moving through the engine rooms where loose objects, cabinets and open shafts gave a very clear indication that I would be returning that way with a monster on my heels. You could argue that this helps to create fear of the immediate future, but it is also unsettling when the rest of the settings are so believable.
But it’s not just monsters that keep threatening Cameron’s life. The Chinese Room wisely holds back on the monstrosities and confronts you with Beira’s increasingly horrific state. It’s nerve-wracking to balance on the thin poles that only separate you from the frozen sea, and it’s downright claustrophobic to swim through oil and water in the flooded depths of Beira with no place to catch your breath in sight.
Even with this restraint, Still Wakes the Deep loses much of its ability to scare towards the end because the tricks The Chinese Room uses don’t fundamentally change. It’s a shame, but thankfully the more emotional aspects come through more clearly. Because the game took the time to introduce the various characters, it also hits the spot when a cruel fate befalls them, with that of their best friend Roy being particularly memorable. He’s the one who got Cameron the job and generally looked after him, but during the crisis the roles are reversed because Roy lacks courage. The common thread, however, is Cameron’s desire to return home to his wife and daughters. An effective plot device that raises the stakes and investment in Cameron’s mission. In my opinion, The Chinese Room could have put even more emphasis on Cameron’s relationship with his wife and daughters, because with a little more backstory, the emotional foundation of the game could have been even stronger without overdoing it.
If I complain that Still Wakes the Deep loses some of its ability to scare and could have used an even stronger emotional core, it’s only because there’s so much potential. The Chinese Room has brilliantly recreated its original take on The Thing on an oil rig, while injecting the horror with the excitement that characterizes a game like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. It’s the kind of game that manages to use relatively few mechanics to create immersion with great sound design, atmospheric visuals, and believable storytelling. If you’re the kind of person who prefers head and heart in their horror, Still Wakes the Deep is the icy but oddly warm cocktail you’ve been looking for.
