For better or worse, this is definitely a Chinese Room game. Anyone familiar with Dear Esther or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture will recognize the singular, distinctive voice of this studio and its particular brand of "games as art" of which Still Wakes the Deep (SWD) serves as a classic example.
Of course, what seemed refreshing and even avante garde in 2011, the commercial release of its premiere title Dear Esther, looks a little creaky and badly worn in places in 2024. Dear Esther used a game engine to deliver a novel interactive experience of dreamlike, surreal intensity. The player controlled a first person character who walked around the rugged, stoney Hebrides islands, triggering a series of ever more enigmatic and mysterious voiceovers.
"Walking simulator" is the somewhat derogatory title some critics like Stephanie Sterling have given these games and indeed, even among the ranks of other Walking Simulators (Firewatch or Gone Home, for example) the Chinese Room's games stand out for having more walking and less gameplay than most. They're probably most accurately described as cinematic audiovisual storytelling experiences, interactive movies if you will. And for SWD the description also fits.
The modern gaming audience is liable to find the results somewhat divisive. Certainly when compared to more mechanically rich horror experiences, SWD's linear design, its simplistic stealth gameplay and puzzles can seem rudimentary or outdated. Challenge is absent. The player character, an electrician from Glasgow named Caz McCleary, can sprint, jump, hide, climb ladders, throw objects, and does some electrical work. But the range of possible interactions turns out to be illusory because the order and timing in which they occur is largely predetermined. They're almost glorified quicktime events.
Players willing to adjust their expectations will find something distinctive here, even outstanding in some respects. A rusting, decaying oil rig slowly falling apart in the middle of a stormy ocean serves as the setting for the action. The blue collar milieu of the working ship Nostromo from Alien seems like a clear inspiration for this grimy, creaky, leaking and increasingly menacing environment.
The sense of place is precise. I believe I know something about being an oil rig worker in the North Sea of the 70's for having played this game, the pressures of work far from home, the isolation, the disintegrating marriage, the arrogant boss looking over your shoulder, the discontented grumblings of the union rep as they plot a strike, the camaraderie with your workmates over lunch in the canteen, the rusting and decrepit equipment provided by a company more than willing to cut a few corners on the safety budget. And then there's the cold. Did I mention the cold?
The Scottish have this word: "dreich". It means dreary and bleak, and it's a word for those days when nature itself, wind and water, seems to be lashing you. This game has more than one kind of monster. There's the supernatural kind, there's the company and its agents, and then there's the "dreich". As the drill hits some mysterious "something", unleashing unspeakable eldritch forces on the workers of the rig, the game throws all three kinds of monster at you, sometimes separately, sometimes all at once.
Tendrils and masses of monstrous flesh begin to creep through the structure of the rig which itself starts to twist and warp. Boundaries blur and melt. The tendrils merge with and consume McCleary's co-workers, distorting them into monsters. He
hears the voice of his wife, the one waiting for him on shore, whenever he approaches these tendrils. Strange writhing visual distortions like oil bubbles in a lava lamp appear in the FOV. It's like something unnatural, not of this world, is leaking into his mind, just the way that black viscous oil, and the freezing sea are leaking through the frayed seams of the rig.
There's so much here that's better than good. I could name the delicately astringent musical score, the evocative and dialect appropriate character writing, the emotional voice acting, perhaps the best this side of Firewatch. This game has perhaps the most sublime animations of the surface of the sea during a storm I have ever seen.
And these all go some way perhaps to creating the mounting sense of dread and doom of the surprisingly emotional ending. SWD is hard to recommend as a game. The game design is so constricted, allowing the player hardly any latitude of agency at all that it's barely a game, tbh, but I'm glad it exists whatever it might be.
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3.0