Still Wakes the Deep review – A horrifyingly good wading sim

Whatever form survival horror takes, whether it be passive film viewing or the interactive experience provided by video games, almost always the characters are dispensable. It may not be the case for the protagonist, but the audience knows not to get attached to the supporting cast, however likeable they may be. Often the creators reinforce this attitude by spending little time fleshing out these figures, setting up them to be collateral damage.

That’s what sets apart new first-person narrative adventure Still Wakes the Deep. Coming across as The Thing meets The Poseidon Adventure, the game sucks players in emotionally; makes them care. And it’s accomplished through arguably the best combination of dialogue and vocal performance since Firewatch – where raw, real response to horror and loss is paired with the just-as-credible, very human reaction to stress that is humour.

Still Wakes the Deep is the type of game where your hero is dispatched on their next mission with the parting words, “Remember, Caz, Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you’re a c*&#t.” It’s an unusually empathetic game where colleagues and friends refuse to leave each other behind, and where you never become numb to the horrific fate of the “poor bastards” you used to work with. These creative choices make such a difference; and make the game hit so much harder.

Let’s backtrack for a moment though. Published by Secret Mode, Still Wakes the Deep comes from UK developers The Chinese Room, who pretty much birthed the walking simulator genre with Dear Esther, and have also made the likes of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, before trying something a bit different with Little Orpheus.

With Still Wakes the Deep, The Chinese Room returns to their moody exploratory action roots. The game kicks off on a Scottish oil rig in the North Sea just in time for a bizarre catastrophe to strike on Christmas Day 1975. Your character, Cameron “Caz” McLeary (voiced by Alec Newman) is working as a leccy – play the game with subtitles if you need a translation of the relentless Scottish slang – but your presence is more of a necessity than a career move, as you hide from the mainland authorities. You’d much rather be home with your wife and daughters. All those concerns go out the window, however, when the crew is forced by their callous corporate masters to drill though a strange blockage miles under the ocean surface. That unleashes something that plunges the rig into chaos and forces you into a desperate fight to stay alive… and uncontaminated.

Still Wakes the Deep has a slow start, and the first few scenes post the disaster are so rigidly on rails that it’s hard to feel any tension as you leap between collapsing surfaces and tentatively navigate narrow ledges. That said, once the inexplicable horror from the depths starts spreading across the Beira D in all its sinewy, pulsing glory, things take a chilling and far more engrossing turn. The on-rails nature of Still Wakes the Deep suddenly makes the game simultaneously more claustrophobic and cinematic, and the first real indication of this is a laundry room encounter with one of your physically and mentally transformed crewmates. The gradual build-up of emotional charge suddenly finds an outlet.

Something to note is that The Chinese Room have made Still Wakes the Deep free of collectibles. While that takes some getting used to, given how ingrained the concept is to modern gaming, it does ramp up the urgency. Just as importantly, it erases any ludonarrative dissonance that stems from leisurely hunting for random items, or pausing to read world-expanding documents, when everything is collapsing around you.

With its ominous atmosphere (the sound design is especially unnerving) and graphic body horror leanings, Still Wakes the Deep calls to mind the likes of Doom 3 and the original Dead Space. However, Caz is just an ordinary man. He may have a background in boxing but at no point does he enter Schwarzenegger mode, and fight back with a “break glass in case of emergency” BFG or flame thrower. Nor does Caz turn scientist and set out to discover the root cause of the otherworldly takeover. As already mentioned, Still Wakes the Deep goes for immersive naturalism, and as much as it’s reflected in the game’s photorealist graphics, and lack of a minimap, you find it in the character behaviour and responses.

As such, Caz, acknowledging his impotence in this situation, is limited to running (sometimes swimming), hiding and outsmarting the monsters who manoeuvre around the deliberately disorientating rig via their elongated spider limbs and tendrils, keening and growling their madness all the while. Still Wakes the Deep is exploratory at its core and stays that way – which is perhaps a missed opportunity for something more.

As it stands, the game, an easy-to-revisit five- to six-hour experience, contains only a handful of big stealth set pieces. At the same time, gameplay requirements with potential, such as locating fire extinguishers to subdue blazes, and pushing around items to create new pathways, pop up and vanish from Still Wakes the Deep just as swiftly. If you’re craving more of a puzzle element – and there’s certainly room for it as Caz must fix fuse boxes and decipher complex industrial machinery under pressure – that’s missing.

But if Still Wakes the Deep is a wee bit skint on cerebral challenge, it more than makes up for it on the visceral front. A gut punch that you won’t easily forget, the game emerges as an affecting ode to the determination and good-heartedness of the working class in the face of disaster. And if you can get through its last 20 minutes without tears in your eyes, you’re a right tough bastard.

Having released on 18 June, Still Wakes the Deep is available now for Xbox Series X|S, PC, and PS5. It is also currently included as part of Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.