Go! Go! GOTY! 2024: Still Wakes the Deep
By Mento 1 Comments
- Game: The Chinese Room's Still Wakes the Deep
- Release Month: June
- Started: 24/12
- Completed: 25/12
MerRig Christmas to oil, and to oil a good fright! So yeah, Still Wakes the Deep is a survival horror game set on an oil rig. The Chinese Room, they of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (neither of which I cared much for but hey, I figure they're due), is behind this one and much like the latter of the above it's a combination first-person adventure game and a survival horror experience where you occasionally get chased around corridors by monsters. The aquatic and rusty setting actually reminds me more of Soma in parts, so I guess TCR s just planning to follow Frictional Games around like one of their own many pursuant ghoulies.
Cameron "Caz" McLeary is an electrician stationed aboard the oil-drilling rig Beira D in the North Sea just off the coast of Scotland during the mid-'70s. Though liked by most of the crew, a recent assault charge (which was for the sake of defending his wife, at least, so it's more of a "benevolent cause" Con Air type of bar fight; must be a thing with Camerons) picked up from his last trip to the mainland has put him at odds with the rig's supervisor Rennick and Caz soon loses his job after being flippant in his short-fused boss's office. Yet that's far from the worst of his problems right now: the rig accidentally drills into something a wee bit uncanny, to use the local parlance, and suddenly everything's gone to shite in a hurry. Sorry, you start speaking like a Scottish laborer pretty quickly after hanging around the jovial but foul-mouthed denizens of Beira D long enough, even if most don't have much more to say after the prologue's concluded. After establishing Caz's electrical wizardry during these early stages, you end up relying on it to survive long enough to get back home safe to your estranged wife and kids (and possibly a police escort; sort of an "out of the pan, into the pen" situation).
A cheaply-maintained oil rig isn't exactly the safest place even when it isn't being torn apart by Lovecraftian whoosits, so the game splits its time between running from or stealthing past tentacled monstrosities as much as it does making your way across rickety walkways and through flooded engineering chambers with some mild first-person action sequences. The areas where you're expected to interact with the world in a non-traditional manner, such as sidling or climbing or crawling through rubble, is made clearer by splashes of yellow paint similar to how it is in other modern action-adventure games with a whole lot of traversal and not a whole lot of respect for the audience's resourcefulness. It reminded me a little of Mirror's Edge with all its red-coded environmental objects you could interact with, as opposed to the white ones you couldn't. Even when a corridor is blocked and the only way through is a tiny vent at foot level it shouldn't take long to find the right course due to this supportive visual language, and the game is extremely linear for the most part which helps its case also. As for the monster sequences, it all depends on whether they've seen you: it's either a mad chase through the crumbling environs or you're sneaking between small spaces while tossing objects around as a noise distraction. The stealth isn't too objectionable and those sequences are thankfully relatively few. I never tried fiddling with the difficulty settings but I'd wager they'd mitigate those sections the most.
Truthfully, though the monster and corpse designs are wonderfully grotesque—think John Carpenter's The Thing and its copious amounts of vaguely human gooey body horror, though the oily iridescence also gives these eerie piles of meat a certain The Color Out of Space vibe too—the true fear comes from more conventional sources: swimming around rough terrain in low-light conditions, fighting for your next breath as you desperately try to make out the water's surface through the murk. Likewise, getting suddenly jarred while sidling a narrow ledge or climbing up a ladder and having to suddenly grab on for dear life (the closest the game has to QTEs) makes for some harrowing moments. Still Wakes the Deep is able to unnerve you in multiple ways simultaneously, and is constantly reminding you that an oil rig—especially one run by a Scrooge McDuck-sounding cheapskate—is filled with things that can kill you. That there's an achievement for dying in every way it's possible to die should tell you that much.
Speaking of which, I really have to tip my hat to the achievement set in this game. It's tough to write an effective set for a game that's linear and has zero backtracking since the usual collectible hunts aren't going to cut it (though fortunately, for the few that exist there is a post-game chapter select option around to help sweep up whatever's left, which I believe may be a recent addition). My favorites include listening to the Shipping Forecast in full, which is (ironically) the driest thing on UK radio, and playing through the whole game in Scottish Gaelic. If you thought the regular Scottish accents and dialect were impenetrable, well, try a language that predates the Roman invasion of Britain and comes in at least four distinct variations.
On the whole, I think this is The Chinese Room's best effort yet: one that takes you on a rollercoaster of grisly terrors and OSHA non-compliance that very rarely gives you a moment to sit down and rest, save for the few times you check back in with the helpful engineers Brodie or Finlay, who unlike Caz know the rig back to front and often have some idea of what to do next, or are touching base with the rig's genial chef (and Caz's close friend) Roy who spends most of the game holed up in the galley's pantry suffering from a lack of insulin (which is another curious Con Air parallel). Though an oil rig isn't the most aesthetically pleasing sight the game does a fine job rendering it in a sharp realistic style, then corrupting that established sense of reality with the very unreal otherworldliness caused by whatever alien goop was sitting at the bottom of the North Sea for who knows how long. On that note, I appreciate the game's keen understanding of Scottish pragmatism: no sitting around asking dumb questions that nobody there is equipped to answer, just getting on with it and escaping in one piece. (Rating: 4 out of 5.)