Still Wakes the Deep Review
When a game is trying as hard to terrify and unsettle me as Still Wakes the Deep is, and instead I mostly feel kind of bored a lot of the time, I start to question whether this type of experience simply doesn’t tingle my spine anymore. But digging deeper, there are a lot of specific reasons this feels like a lackluster attempt at that formula. It has almost all of the hallmarks of a creepy, Amnesia-style, first-person horror game with a powerless protagonist – the very same sort I’ve been playing and enjoying for almost 15 years now. But despite great dialogue, superb voice-acting, and a memorable setting, irritating level design and sometimes silly scenarios meant this dreary tale never fully got its Lovecraftian tendrils into me.
The premise is simple but promising: You play as Caz, an electrician on an offshore Scottish oil rig in the 1970s, diving head-first into a world that has been meticulously realized – from the period-accurate outfits to the technology to the delightful dialects of the cast. They even have dialogue subtitles and a full translation of the UI into Scottish Gaelic, a language with less than 100,000 native speakers, and I have to respect that. It clearly wasn’t going to boost their sales, so they must have included it for cultural or artistic reasons.
The rig, unfortunately for everyone on it, drills down into some kind of deep sea alien nonsense that starts transforming the environment and the crew into Cronenbergian body horror abominations, leaving poor Caz to traverse storm-swept decks and cramped corridors to try and escape. And damn, it is a beautiful game. From the weathered, hulking, industrial presence of the rig itself, to the unsettling infection spreading throughout it, to detailed weather effects that I could practically feel on my own skin, developer The Chinese Room has gone above and beyond in taking full advantage of Unreal Engine 5 here.
It’s a shame, then, that these environments end up being absolutely, tyrannically linear most of the time. Still Wakes the Deep feels like it absolutely hates the concept of exploration, and that got on my nerves. There is generally exactly one path, rarely more than an arm’s length wide, through any given area. The very beginning sequence allows you to collect some lore on your fellow crewmates by visiting their cabins, but never again was I rewarded for trying to go off the main track or snoop around in side areas – of which there really aren’t many to begin with.
There’s so much “yellow paint” it almost feels like a parody of the entire debate.
Almost every door you find is locked, unless you need to be able to break it open for plot reasons. Outside that very beginning area, there are no hidden collectibles, not even stray bits of paper strewn about that give you more context on the story. A single six-hour playthrough, sprinting to the end, will show you 95 percent of everything there is to see. There are entire plot points that could have been resolved by someone being able to fit through a gap that looks easily big enough for their body.
And I know “yellow paint” being used to indicate interactable objects or the correct path forward has become a point of discourse again recently, but Still Wakes the Deep is like Yellow Paint: The Game. There is so much yellow paint everywhere that it almost starts to feel like a parody of the entire debate. They’ve gotten enough feedback on it, in fact, that the studio informed us the day I finished writing this review that it is planning to add an option to hide most of the paint at some point after launch. But I’m not sure that’s actually the main problem. The real issue is that the level design doesn’t seem to have any other way of indicating where you’re actually, physically allowed to go, so I think people would get hopelessly confused without it.
I’d commonly come across obstacles about the height of my shins that couldn’t be jumped over due to invisible walls. Why even give me a jump button then? Certain fences can’t be climbed, except at one specific point where they put a yellow blanket over one of them and now, magically, you can! And this happens basically everywhere. There is so little in-world logic to which areas can be traversed and which can’t, that I often needed the yellow paint to figure out what the hell they even expected me to do. It’s a very heavy-handed fix for a fundamental failing in the way areas are presented and laid out.
Gaps in logic extend to the story as well. In fact, one of the main emotional moments, which I won’t spoil here, is greatly undercut by the fact that it only happened due to the kind of willful, “Let’s split up, gang!” stupidity that you’d expect in a schlocky slasher flick or an episode of Scooby Doo. One developer described the story as “The Thing on an oil rig,” which is an unflattering comparison, as it only highlights the lack of intrigue and interpersonal drama that made that film a classic. The only characters you will have any meaningful conflict with have already clearly turned into monsters, for the most part. It doesn’t really dial up the paranoia.
You’ll pull some levers, turn some valves – it’s all pretty unsurprising stuff.
And that’s where my biggest point of disappointment comes in: Still Wakes the Deep is not that scary. Not for a lack of trying, of course. I played it in the dark, with the windows shuttered, in 4K HDR, while using high-end, noise-canceling headphones – doing it as many favors as I could – as all horror games deserve to be experienced. But the fear I was hoping would grip me, like it did in previous games by The Chinese Room like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, never arrived.
I even had to stop and ask myself if that was a sign I’ve just become completely jaded and inoculated to these sorts of “Amnesia-like” horror experiences. It’s hard to say. Certainly, this one doesn’t do anything new or surprising that might have put me on my toes right when I thought I knew I was in for. Sometimes you have to run from a monster down a corridor while it screams bloody murder behind you. Sometimes you have to sneak around through the vents, or throw a bottle to distract them. You pull some levers, turn some valves, and occasionally engage in some fiddly swimming and platforming. It’s all pretty familiar, uninspiring stuff to me at this point, which doesn’t really retain its impact when I’ve seen it so many times already. Someone completely new to this kind of game might find it more affecting, but I can only speculate on that, because I really didn’t.
There isn’t even anything I would really describe as a puzzle. It’s all going from one place to another and then interacting with clearly-labeled machinery. You never really even have to backtrack, except in a couple cases where one linear segment is just going through the previous linear segment in the opposite direction. I never even had to search for a door code or a key or anything like that. So Still Wakes the Deep not only discourages exploration, it doesn’t even want you to have to think too hard about how to overcome its obstacles, which makes it more underwhelming.
All the same, I did care about Caz and his crewmates. The voice acting, as I mentioned before, really is top-notch, with a cast of mostly Scottish actors speaking in authentic and evocative dialects. Few games are this effective at making me feel transported to a specific place at a specific point in time, and the backdrop of the tempestuous, unforgiving North Sea adds a lot to the experience – especially when the storms really start raging. And the great sound design only enhances this.
We learn a fair bit about Caz’s backstory and why he’s here, which lends heartbreaking context to his plight. The final moments are an emotionally-affecting payoff to his character arc, but once again, the stifling lack of anything approaching player agency throughout the story undersells it a bit. We’re watching someone else’s tale, through his eyes, but I never came to identify with him as strongly as I might have if at least some of these important choices had been within my control. I probably would have made the same choices Caz did anyway, but it would have been nice to have a choice.
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