An oil rig is a location already terrifyingly dense with phobia triggers; heights, drowning, isolation, cold, electrocution, darkness, fire and tight spaces. So, it’s quite a setting for a horror video game, even before the deep-sea drill hits an eldritch – something that really shouldn’t be disturbed – in the opening minutes of Still Wakes the Deep.
This latest combat-free horror experience from British developer The Chinese Room (Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs) brilliantly captures the claustrophobia, grime and atmosphere of a creaking metal structure fixed to the ocean floor miles from civilisation, while also invoking iconic horror cinema of the 1970s.
A strong script and predominantly Scottish cast of characters adds to the masterful display of tension, although it falls just short of amazing – both as a game and as a story.
The foreboding setting and tense but familiar interactions between the rig workers reminded me of John Carpenter’s The Thing, which bore out as a clear influence once the proverbial keech hit the fan.
Helped along by a grainy cinematic presentation and pitch-perfect decor, the Beira D rig and its inhabitants feel ripped straight from a movie theatre of 50 years ago, and our protagonist Caz is a great reluctant hero.
An electrician who is relatively new to the rig, Caz is friendly and warm with the rest of the crew, but is clearly hiding a darker side. He has taken a job on the Beira D in an attempt to dodge the law, after committing some kind of assault.
The situation devolves rapidly when something seems to infect the rig, leaving Caz to deal not only with company bureaucracy but the double-horror of a collapsing structure and colleagues who have been grotesquely transformed into murderous appendages of a veiny deep-sea nightmare. From there, the game switches between tense navigation of the wrecked, swaying, sinking structure and pulse-pounding encounters with vicious fiends who seem to remember their lives and are fixated on regret and escape.
Subtly, the game seems to suggest a parallel between Caz figuratively running from his problems and literally running for his life. Even with the help of his friends, every plan of survival only seems to make things worse and, at the end of the day, they are literally out at sea. It is only along these lines that the game hits upon something truly disturbing and horrific, as you consider whether Caz’s decision to avoid accountability means he will never see his family again.
The few scenes in which we see interactions between Caz and his wife are therefore more devastating than any tentacled gore beast, and the emotional ending is imbued with much more power as a metaphor than as a conclusion to a monster movie.
Dinnae get too attached to this lot.
Yet as powerful as it is, this brief game can be a slog. The environment is spectacular but offers few reasons to explore beyond the critical path, which is marked by yellow paint spills. Puzzles and impediments consist of finding nearby fire extinguishers, flipping switches in a certain order and the like, serving as uncomplicated filler between scares.
Each of the above listed phobias are invoked as your attempt to survive as the rig becomes increasingly imperiled, and creature encounters are marked by exceptional sound design that can make for thrilling chases, but the lack of combat means the hide-wait-run setup gets old fast.
Even narratively, things are presented with such a light touch that I found myself wishing for a revelation or a twist of the kind you would see in the films that Still Wakes the Deep takes so much inspiration from, but it never came.
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