The Comforting Tension of Still Wakes the Deep

When I was a kid, I really enjoyed horror stories, but not horror movies. It’s a weird dichotomy; on the one hand, I could find myself enthralled in Stephen King’s Cujo over the course of a summer weekend in middle school, but on the other I couldn’t bear to actually see the brutal gore of Lewis Teague’s 1983 film adaptation. Later in life, this same strange dichotomy would manifest differently; I still love horror fiction, but now I am unable to actually get through horror games.

Resident Evil 7 or Village? Couldn’t do it. Amnesia: The Bunker? No thanks. Outlast? I’d rather get out. So when Still Wakes the Deep was announced, I was apprehensive. From the jump, I could see that the game had clear potential. Its studio’s pedigree, the morbid appeal of terrible things happening on an oil rig in the middle of a stormy sea post-Deepwater Horizon, the glimpse of something… unwelcome—it was immediately clear that The Chinese Room was once again cooking with gas. If I could stomach the game, I was sure I’d love it.

Still Wakes the Deep starts slowly. We play as Cameron “Caz” McLeary, an electrician working aboard the Beira D oil rig as it drills for oil in Scotland’s North Sea. We get a chance to poke around crew accommodations, sneaking peeks at our coworkers’ bunk setups. One fellow worker, Trots, is a card-carrying communist looking to unionize the Beira D crew in order to combat poor working and living conditions on the rig; another crew member, Addair, is a supporter of the British National Front, a fascist party that operated in the UK from 1967 to 1995. The game makes no bones about who sucks and who doesn’t, here; Trots is shown jovially chatting with several other crew members about being in a union in the cafeteria while Addair eats alone and only exchanges barbs with Caz, who makes fun of him.

The other crew members, while not as outwardly political, are no less compelling. There’s Roy, Caz’s best friend and rig cook; Finlay, an engineer trying to keep the Beira D together and the only woman on the crew; Brodie, the rig’s principal diver, first seen helping Raffs, a dive trainee, prepare for his first solo excursion; and there’s Rennick, the Beira D site manager.

The opening salvo of the game has us pilot Caz from the crew accommodations sector of the rig to Rennick’s office after we hear the manager call for us, with the added admonition that we’re to head straight to him and not fuck around. This is, of course, an open invitation to fuck around, which is where we interact with most of the crew and discover the true delight of this game: its dialogue and voice acting. The crew is predominantly Scottish, and as a result the dialogue is Scots as fuck. Everyone on the crew is constantly gently ribbing each other, which immediately generates a nice feeling of comradeship (except for Addair; fuck Addair). It signposts this sense that, while you might not be best friends with anyone on the Beira D except for Roy, you’re comfortable with everyone to banter.

This feeling does not extend to Rennick. In addition to just being the crew’s boss, and therefore inherently separated from them as all bosses are from their rank-and-file workers, he’s a joyless, mean and spiteful prick (and implied to be Addair’s only on-board acquaintance, which says a lot). He’s furious at Caz, not because of what Caz did on the mainland – something the story heavily hints at but doesn’t visually represent to us – but because what Caz did brought the police to the Beira D’s door, which is the last thing Rennick wants in general. So we’re walking to his office, likely to be fired and sent back to the mainland on the first helicopter out of here.

As we walk through the Beira D and out onto its deck, what immediately comes to mind is how maze-like and disorganized it already is before anything horrific has happened. The path from the Accommodations bulkhead to Rennick’s office is not a straight line but a winding path over construction and drilling materials, through convenient gaps in shipping containers, and around dangerous – and unsecured – pieces of heavy machinery. As we progress we stop and talk to more of the crew and see our first hints of something wrong as the drillers have seemingly hit something down below. But since we’re about to be shitcanned, we pay it little mind. Most of the rest of the crew either sends us off with well-wishes or tries to encourage us with the knowledge that we might not be fired after all – even if we ourselves know that isn’t true.

We reach Rennick’s office after performing our lecky duties one final time by replacing the fuse in the crew lift. He’s not just pissed; he’s apoplectic, and he orders us off his rig without delay—no time to even go back to our bunk and collect our things. As we trudge up to the helipad, the rig shudders before what seems to be a massive explosion rocks the whole thing violently, sending us careening into the ocean hundreds of feet below.

In the tradition of games like Half-Life, our journey into hell is not over before we can begin; Brodie and another crew member are able to pull us out of the water before we drown. Though almost immediately we start to wonder whether it would have been better if we’d just died in the ocean, because we are introduced to the first terrifying element of the game itself: the sheer fucked nature of this oil rig post-blowout. Even if there were no eldritch horrors waiting to meet us above-deck, the fact that we have to navigate a maze of catwalks that are actively in the process of falling into the fucking sea is enough to make this the horror game of the year. It is absolutely possible to miss a jump or fail to hold on to a railing or lose your balance and fall back into the ocean yourself, with Caz shouting “fuck, fuck, FUCK!” each time he drops, but Still Wakes the Deep is nice enough to heavily checkpoint our progress.

We’re delirious and disoriented. We’re possibly injured from our fall. But there’s no time to worry about that. We have to get above-deck to the platform to survey the extent of the damage from the blowout. We are in emergency mode, and fired or not, the Beira D will likely need an electrician to help mitigate the damage until we can evacuate.

The problem is that whatever obstruction the drillers hit before our meeting with Rennick decided to come up with the blowout and have a chat with us. It is only ever seemingly referred to as “the Shape,” but it’s better described as webs and strings of an oil-slicked, gelatinous, flesh-colored substance that has attached itself to (and started to burrow between the walls of) the rig and its facilities. Getting near it causes our mind to fray like the dissolution of celluloid film, and this burning, melting sensation at the corners of our mind (and our vision) act as a kind of radar we can use to sense when “Shape monsters” – our former crewmates – appear and try to eat our lunch.

I really, really like the nature of these monsters. Many of them are kind of just mindless husks of our former buddies, which is terrifying in itself; they pull themselves around, balls of goop held aloft by strange strings that shoot out of their mass like bullets. They seem to be unable to see us, or at least not very well. If we keep our headlamp off and make as little noise as possible, we’re able to avoid them. But sometimes we just have to move to the end of a room as fast as possible.

Some of the monsters seem to retain more of their former human selves, though. You can hear them moaning for help, begging their friends not to leave them alone, trying to reason with us – or even warn us to stay away – as we run for our lives in their wake. These ones really got to me, even as I knew I had to stay hidden for fear of a quick and painful death. Imagine being in one of the most terrifying at-sea accidents that could possibly happen, and when you try to help keep your friends from dying, you’re turned into (or maybe better described as absorbed into) this kind of blob-thing that is trying to override your very personhood. You feel yourself slipping away, you desperately try to hold on – and you feel these stringlike tentacles eject from your body at full speed and into the chest of your coworker. It’s a fate worse than death.

And then there are a few of the monsters who have retained most or all of their hosts’ personages, namely Addair, Trots and Rennick. I don’t know why these folks specifically became monsters but didn’t lose all of themselves, but it makes for great dramatic tension, as we have to avoid – or straight up run from – each of them in lengthy setpieces in turn. Hearing Addair insult us, Rennick swear to god that he’s going to kill us himself, and Trots demand that we leave the area as he chases us down really works for me in a way that some of the other mindless shambling blobs honestly kind of didn’t.

All the while, we’re still talking shit with the slowly-dwindling ranks of unchanged crew as we try to keep the rig from falling into the sea. It’s here I think the dialogue really shines, in these areas where everyone is scared shitless but still trying to do their jobs. Everyone bickers with each other as a means of pressure release while still communicating the condition of their part of the rig to each other and letting us know which electrical system is busted now. Maybe my favorite bit in this vein is the section where Caz has to work with Finlay to restart the generator and the two have a little back-and-forth about who gets to crawl around on the ground, narrowly avoiding Addair, and who gets to stay in the shielded control booth, looking for the fault preventing the generator from coming back on.

Despite my general fear of interactive horror, I was borne aloft in this game on the strength of these character interactions alone. Well… that and the fact that, incredible monster designs aside, I never really felt permanently threatened by any of them. The creatures’ pathing was easy to determine and even easier to sneak around. Even in well-lit outdoor situations, where the monster had a high vantage point with which to spot me, as long as I was able to get from one cover spot to another I could progress with relative ease. The main areas where tension was highest, for me, were places where the environmental hazards were actively bearing down on me. Having to swim through a tangle of catwalks to one tiny open spot with a 30-second drowning timer (as the water levels also rose) was often more nerve-wracking than any area featuring a Shape monster on patrol.

I don’t mean this as a detractor to the game, by the way. I just think drowning in the pontoon of a sinking oil rig is much more frightening than a goop monster whose movement patterns I’ve figured out, and thus the section where I’m swimming through the pontoon of a sinking oil rig got my ass harder than the areas where I was hiding from Blob-Addair.

Still Wakes the Deep may not reinvent the wheel of first-person horror, but The Chinese Room nevertheless presents us with a master class execution of its template. From the horrifying, crumbling underbelly of the Beira D to its eldritch heart, Still Wakes the Deep is by far one of the most compelling horror titles of the year, one that is well worth checking out.