Review: Still Wakes the Deep

Still Wakes the Deep takes the horror of the sea and drags it into a virtual reality where you’re small, trapped, and must try to escape an entity you cannot understand. It’s brutal cosmic horror that borrows from some of Lovecraft’s best work and manages to craft a survival horror game that I believe is going to be remembered by the horror community for years to come.

Developer The Chinese Room is perhaps best known for games like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, narrative titles that do a great job of telling a compelling story through gameplay that’s generally okay. Still Wakes the Deep kicks things up a notch. Set on an oil rig in the North Sea in 1975, you play as Caz, an electrician who took a job on the rig to get out of Scotland and dodge some police charges. While his past has caught up with him, it matters little compared to the monumental event that occurs on the rig right after his boss gets wind of them.

Still Wakes the Deep (PC, PS5 [Reviewed], Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: The Chinese Room
Publisher: Secret Mode
Released: June 18, 2024
MSRP: $34.99/£29.99

The opening to Still Wakes the Deep is dripping with atmosphere. You’re introduced to a plucky crew around a rig that’s barely holding itself together, a flawed protagonist whose past is less than glamorous, and a first-person perspective and movement system that’s good enough to get around, but feels as clunky as a middle-aged Scotsman should.

Something that stuck with me from the outset and lasted all the way through is the exceptional visuals. At points, I struggled to understand how the game looked so real. The Chinese Room has pulled off some sort of magic with this game, and it makes the horrors you face all the more terrifying, because they seem to be bursting out of reality. That’s quite appropriate because, soon after the muted introduction, the rig drills into something, an entity, and all hell breaks loose on the platform.

However, the visuals, like the movement system, aren’t perfect. An update may fix this, but the logic of narrow wires in Still Wakes the Deep is, to put it bluntly, bonkers. It makes sense for enemies, but phones and other wiring will also go haywire and fly around in unnatural ways. Seeing these glitch in and out of existence or fly around for no reason broke my immersion, but at least they didn’t break the game.

After being thoroughly thrown around, Still Wakes the Deep reveals its true colors. What starts out feeling like a walking simulator very quickly becomes a first-person horror game, and I adore it. There’s a lovely split between environmental puzzles, things like switches and fires, platforming, and sneaking around or running away from colossal, impossible enemies.

The environmental puzzles are a lot of fun. They’re all framed as fixing a system or finding an item that you need to help someone and progress, much like in the original Dead Space. This gives you a sense of purpose and helps you forget the scary parts until they suddenly rear their head again. Mechanically, these puzzles are simple, but the way they’re used throughout the game keeps it fresh without anything ever feeling overused.

The enemies are where the real horror/fun is, though. Certain crew members have been altered by the entity the rig’s drill ran into. They’re bloated and barely human, but retain some level of intelligence and a few dangling limbs. The monster design is top-notch and grossed me out more than once. I even froze up a couple of times just because these creatures look like they were ripped right out of nightmares.

You’re not fighting these things. Instead, you’re escaping them, working around an environment, sometimes quite a long series of rooms, while throwing objects to distract them. Some encounters even have you activating systems for the rig, which feels incredibly stressful when a giant blob of fishy human meat is moving around trying to absorb you.

If this sounds a lot like Alien: Isolation‘s Xenomorph encounters, that’s exactly what it feels like to play. Where in that game, the environment and your arsenal changed how you explored and worked around your enemy, Still Wakes the Deep‘s environment and enemy variety keep things from feeling dull. Even when you think you know how an enemy will react, it’s going to surprise you and keep you on your toes.

It’s not just how these things look and move, either; it’s how they sound. Human voices have been distorted to sound like animals or certain personality traits that they had before being transformed. This debases them, but also makes them feel scarily advanced, because you just don’t understand why they’ve been twisted in such a way.

The sound design, in general, for Still Wakes the Deep is better than many AAA titles. Silence is used to devastating effect, but the soundtrack, where used, is superb. Every footstep, creak of metal, or groan from something in the distance is done so well that this game can scare you with the controller on the table and nothing happening.

The Scottish voice acting is also just amazing. Most of my family is Scottish, and it felt almost homely to hear so many Scottish words used in passing that I’m sure a lot of people will miss. While some of it feels a little forced, the majority of the dialogue is stunning. It makes the game feel authentic, even though it’s packed with dreadful monsters.

Lastly, there’s the story. The real narrative in Still Wakes the Deep is told through flashbacks, your actions, and even the way the enemies look. In true cosmic horror fashion, the true nightmare lies within protagonist Caz’s mind, not the rusty rig falling apart around him.

Similar to how the horror community still analyzes, dissects, and discusses Soma to this day, I can see Still Wakes the Deep being a game that people find new ways to explore and explain for at least a decade. It’s well-made and clearly has a strong vision behind it, which I’d say has been nailed.

I’ve always thought that the unknowable depths of the sea make for a terrifying realm to contemplate. We really have no idea what lies at the bottom of a large percentage of Earth’s oceans. That’s why it’s always seemed a little bonkers to me that we’re so willing to drill straight down into the crust below and hope for the best when aiming roughly where we believe there’s some oil.

Still Wakes the Deep blends this terror with genuine human flaws. Outside of Dredge, I don’t know if a game has felt so uniquely Lovecraftian. This is a game that everyone should play just to experience once, and thanks to its deathless story mode, you can. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s noteworthy and a game you’re not going to stop hearing about for a long time, and it scratches the itch you’ll have been feeling since playing Alien: Isolation.