Still Wakes the Deep (XS)

Reviewer’s Note: Given certain praises & critiques I have for the story, there will be SPOILERS within this review.  Read on at your own risk.

One of The Chinese Room’s best surprises is a subtle sleight of hand hinted at in the settings menu – of all places.  Selecting English/English for voiceover and subtitles looks like any other game, just with a few extra accessibility options alongside.  Then you hear a Scotsman say “me shite-tunnel ha’ me crestin’ fer ten barley barrels and knocky!” while the subtitles display “my tummy hurts!”  Okay, I’m being a wee bit hyperbolic, but the subtitles do essentially double as a real-time translator for those less-attuned to this foreign dialect.  It’s a small creative nuance that goes a long way in committing to the setting.

That authenticity spreads beyond the dialogue as our protagonist, Glaswegian electrician Cameron “Caz” McLeary, navigates his way through the Beria D oil rig out in the North Sea.  The year is 1975, reflected by all the retro paraphernalia and décor.  Despite lacking any offshore experience, Caz is desperate for work and hopes for his onshore tensions to cool off after causing a violent altercation.  After those plans are dashed and the Scottish Police directly contact his work, he’s promptly fired and ordered to return home.  Before getting the chance to leave, the oil rig hits something.  John Carpenter’s The Thing to be more precise.

So, a rickety oil rig drills into some nesting place of cosmic horror and Caz is foisted into finding Plan B, C, D, etc. to get himself and any surviving crew off this accursed place.  It’s a great setup, fusing grotesque creature feature and disaster flick into a balanced stew.  If you’re not avoiding mutated crew members or pulsating flesh strips, you’re cautiously shimmying across an I-beam above the torpid ocean or crawling through a water-logged engineering room.  By the end, you’ll have navigated the whole place from top to bottom.  There’s a great sense of continuity too, as you see it slowly crumble during this six-hour (or so) journey.

Shouldering the Beria D’s slow descent feels worth it, not only to see Caz through but the remaining survivors as well.  Letting the opening chapter breathe and establish so many characters – if just a smidge, including best pal Roy – provides tangible stakes after things go to hell.  Getting calls via the rig’s wired phones works to both establish the next objective and sprinkle some flavorful character writing.  A large part of the crew’s comradery also stems from this being Dan Pinchbeck’s least pretentious writing to date.  The attention to natural mid-70s Scottish vernacular from his and Emma Beeby’s dialogue captures the type of gruff everyday working man and avoids indulgent circumlocution, unlike in Dear Esther.

That great tempo translates over to the horror as well.  Because of the aforementioned balance between The Thing and Deepwater Horizon, seeing Caz’s trepidation evolve from creaking metal struts and destroyed platforms to gut-wrenching body horror feels carefully paced.  The crew quarters – once prepared to celebrate Christmas – are ramshackled, and someone’s pained screams can be heard in a nearby closet, yet you can’t see through the door window because of a blinding blue light.  While anyone inspired by Carpenter or Cronenberg will naturally put great effort towards fantastical body distortions beyond comprehension, Laura Dodds, John McCormack, and co. also find these small ways to add beauty to this alien entity.  A few scripted scenes with Jason Graves’ symphonic score do a great job of capturing the inherent contrast between surreal beauty & abject horror.  

It’s not without some choppy waters.  Caz’s onshore troubles with both the law and his family, especially his wife Suze, are occasionally explored through useful flashbacks, but it feels like more background was left on the cutting room floor.  That’s all the more surprising to say, given this developer’s pedigree for belaboring emotional beats with loved ones in past works.  And while its tautened structure works in hopping between creative scenarios, the story gets too repetitive in killing someone off-screen (by phone call or otherwise) right after they’ve conveniently run their course.  But these are more modest critiques of what’s otherwise a tightly-paced & well-acted horror tale.

It’s a shame, then, that The Chinese Room is still trying to get its gameplay sea legs.  You’ll immediately know this song and dance after seeing yellow-painted floor vents, ladders, and handrails around every corner.  Unlike the team’s first foray into traditional mechanics with Little Orpheus, it’s easier to extend an olive branch here because of the context and impressive visual fidelity.

Whether stealthily avoiding or desperately running from them, each mutated member carries a different personality and intention.  Despite their grotesquely warped anatomy, a shred of their past humanity is exhibited through their canned lines and tortured howls.  Narrowly escaping one altered crewmate will make you want to say “see ya later, asshole!” while another makes you feel sorry for him; he’s a towering monstrosity grabbing and killing other members, but also crying out for help in genuine terror.  This genuinely neat context doesn’t keep its grip because of such boring stealth mechanics though.  It mostly boils down to throwing objects and crouch-walking through convenient tunnels, but made worse with hazy line-of-sight detection and infantilizing notifications about how stealth works.  So much work was put into these patrolling freaks of nature, from art design to bizarre locomotion physics, yet each segment feels so routine and stale.

The meat of the gameplay is a slight upgrade from walking sim to ‘precarious shimmying sim,’ with dashes of basic puzzle-solving.  Whether grabbing makeshift monkey bars, crawling through vents, leaping to platforms, and more, you’re following the painted path to pull levers, push buttons, break locks, and swap out fuses.  There are two distinct dialogues taking place during this.  On one hand, certain interactions like scaling a downed helicopter capture a first-person Uncharted sensation as the secondary audio-visual elements engross you in this world; the darkened brine crashing against the rig’s steel legs, the wind pushing the rain sideways, tarps flapping in the wind.  On the other hand, all of this pretty gloss is there for its on-rails structure, which is smattered with scores of empty quick-time events.  Without any inventive nuances, hardly any of these interactions feel nourishing; moreover, progress-halting strictures, like having to warm Caz’s hands by a heater or interact with some objects in the correct order, before enabling players to progress, detracts from the immersive atmosphere.

It’s rather ironic that the one place I have no gameplay notes for Still Wakes the Deep is the “walking sim” beginning, as though The Chinese Room finally cracked that code.  Past that, unfortunately, it constantly feels like being barraged by waves from two sides.  The team’s reputation in visual design and soundtrack are supplemented by a tautened horror thriller that’s oftentimes engaging to watch; however, it’s degraded by shallow mechanics that are typically unrewarding to play.  Like oil and water, there’s an incongruous mixture of creativity within its setting (both spoken and unspoken) and utter predictability within its foundation.  Genre fans can treat it like oil spill remediation, mentally separating the two enough to at least appreciate its better qualities.

Contractor by trade and writer by hobby, Lee’s obnoxious criticisms have found a way to be featured across several gaming sites: N4G, VGChartz, Gaming Nexus, DarkStation, and TechRaptor! He started gaming in the mid-90s and has had the privilege in playing many games across a plethora of platforms. Reader warning: each click given to his articles only helps to inflate his Texas-sized ego. Proceed with caution.

This review is based on a digital copy of Still Wakes the Deep for the XS, provided by the publisher.

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