Still Wakes the Deep (2024, Playstation 5) Review

THE BEAST HAS AWAKENED

If game developers want their walking simulator to capture an audience, they could do far worse than follow The Chinese Room's example with Still Wakes the Deep. Instead of leaning on philosophical introspection, they embrace something far more immediate: pure psychological horror. Drawing on the experience they gained making Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, they've crafted one of the most unsettling games I've played in years.

The story unfolds aboard an oil rig in the North Sea during the 1970s. Everything falls apart when the drilling awakens an enormous creature slumbering beneath the waves. As it stirs, the platform begins to collapse piece by piece. At the same time, the creature seizes control of the crew's lifeless bodies. As one of the few survivors—a hot-headed troublemaker named Cameron "Caz" MacLeary—you have one objective: escape. Helicopter, lifeboat, distress call... any way off the rig will do.

The premise inevitably recalls John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), another horror story set in an isolated location, starring a protagonist with "Mac" in his name, where an alien lifeform assimilates human beings. The difference is that the creature in Still Wakes the Deep never truly passes for human. It tries, but fails spectacularly. Human faces twisted and fused into a writhing mass of tentacles fool no one, and neither do its fractured, half-formed attempts at human speech.

Wherever you run, its pitiful pleas, threats and desperate cries for help echo through the rig. Stare at it for too long and your vision begins to distort, like a strip of film melting inside a projector. Get too close, and you're dead. It's a truly revolting creation—one of the most horrifying monsters I've encountered in a game, especially if you make the mistake of glancing over your shoulder during one of the many frantic escape sequences.

Still Wakes the Deep makes brilliant use of limitations. Cramped, dimly lit corridors and a platform literally falling apart create an intensely linear form of claustrophobia and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. There is nowhere to go. You're trapped.

Its minimalist mechanics reinforce that feeling. Played entirely in first person, every metallic corridor feels cold, sterile and deeply inhospitable. Every footstep rings out against the steel walls, threatening to give away your position unless you move quietly, while the storm-tossed sea outside waits to swallow you whole.

Borrowing from Amnesia, interactions are handled directly through contextual button presses and lever-pulling rather than abstract menus. You'll open heavy doors, operate machinery and solve simple environmental puzzles. Anyone looking for demanding gameplay, however, may come away disappointed. Wisely, The Chinese Room rarely lets puzzles interrupt the pacing for long. The focus is squarely on atmosphere, stealth and survival. The most complex challenge usually amounts to deciphering a set of straightforward operating instructions—"Here's how to activate the pumps"—while a monster stalks the corridors nearby.

You stay in contact with the remaining crew through telephone calls scattered throughout the adventure. The supporting cast is surprisingly strong and more grounded than anything The Chinese Room has attempted before. They're ordinary workers whose believable camaraderie carries much of the emotional weight. Their determination keeps the story moving, although I found it difficult to believe that not one of them ever becomes paralysed with terror, as Lambert famously does in Alien (1979). Instead, they display almost superhuman resilience, refusing to surrender hope no matter how impossible the situation becomes.

My only real criticism concerns a familiar trope in survival stories. Why does every writer feel compelled to pile on so much backstory?

It certainly makes characters more relatable and can even add thematic depth, but screenwriters often overestimate how important it is. The worst offenders interrupt the momentum with flashbacks that grind the narrative to a halt. Still Wakes the Deep avoids the worst excesses, but it still includes several dream sequences and hallucinations in which MacLeary speaks with his wife. They're mercifully brief and don't do much damage to the atmosphere, yet they unfortunately tipped me off to where the story was heading.

Thankfully, that barely dents the overall experience. Here, the journey matters far more than the destination. We learn that MacLeary accepted the oil rig job while fleeing the consequences of a violent assault, and the family he left behind continues to haunt his conscience. When the creature attacks, those same protective instincts resurface. MacLeary becomes the rock everyone else depends on.

As events spiral into catastrophe, everything carries an air of inevitability, as though the monster itself represents a form of poetic justice for his past failures and neglected responsibilities. That gives the creature a strange duality: it feels both utterly inexplicable and somehow inevitable, making it all the more terrifying.

Where did it come from? Why has it targeted the crew? The game offers few answers. In the end, though, the mystery isn't what kept me playing. It was my growing sympathy for MacLeary and the people around him. Still Wakes the Deep is almost too intense to play for hours at a time, but I always found myself returning as soon as I'd worked up the courage.