Highlights

  • Still Wakes the Deep features a protagonist facing personal struggles on an isolated oil drilling rig.
  • The horror elements draw inspiration from Lovecraft, with crew members mutating into terrifying creatures.
  • The game seamlessly combines supernatural scares with everyday hazards and themes of corporate greed and incompetence.

Still Wakes the Deep is the latest release from developer The Chinese Room, the studio behind previous titles like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Similar to those, Still Wakes the Deep sits within the walking simulator genre with a strong psychological and horror focus. The game sees fans exploring and attempting to survive an incident on what is on the surface a fairly ordinary location and setting– an isolated oil drilling rig situated in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland during the mid 1970s.

There have been a number of horror games where the protagonist works a mundane job in recent times, and Still Wakes the Deep is firmly in line with this trend. Players are set in the role of Cameron "Caz" McLeary, a professional electrician going through a rough patch at home with his wife and two daughters, as well as an altercation that led to trouble with the local authorities. Caz takes a job on the Beira Delta rig in an effort to right himself and set his affairs straight upon his return. Of course, things don't quite go as planned, and Still Wakes the Deep pits Caz against threats both unearthly and routine, combining both in a way that elevates its tone and terrors.

the title menu in still wakes the deep.
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Still Wakes the Deep's Horror Cuts Two Ways

Minor spoilers below.

Still Wakes the Deep Channels Classic Lovecraftian Scares

Being a horror title on the high seas, albeit on a fixed installation instead of an actual vessel, Still Wakes the Deep's setup contains many recognizable elements of Lovecraft and adjacent works. After the drill hits an unknown substance many fathoms below, the rig is critically damaged, while crew members begin to change into unsettling creatures, mutating into warped monstrosities that still retain a sense of their memory and humanity, making it all the more horrifying and heartbreaking when Caz is inevitably forced to confront and end them following a tense series of cat and mouse segments.

As fans navigate the rapidly deteriorating rig, Caz also begins to receive mysterious phone calls, hearing the cries of trapped crewmates and eventually haunting voices and visions of his own past and current fears. Distracting screen distorting effects accompany these moments, and though this is also a fairly standard convention seen in games like Still Wake the Deep, they are still effective here, serving to heighten Caz's desperate state of mind and frantic efforts to escape the depths of the rig and its horrors.

The Other Side of Still Wakes the Deep's Terror is Rooted in Normalcy

While its Lovecraftian influences are readily apparent, Still Wakes the Deep is also grounded in the risky but necessary day-to-day aspects that operating an industrial ocean rig entails. The labyrinthine level design of the Beira Delta, by nature, is not conducive to human habitation or comfort, consisting of massive winding pipes, storage tanks, and other obstacles created by otherwise unassuming objects. These all form a tangled claustrophobic maze, made more deadly by the damaged state caused by the supernatural substance. There is even an achievement attached to dying every possible way in Still Wakes the Deep, with the majority of these being everyday hazards like electrocution, burning, or falling from the rickety heights of the rig into the unforgiving sea.

A related element it touches on is corporate greed and incompetence, as the Beira Delta's manager is shown engaging in unethical cost and safety-cutting measures, making it unstable even before the drill goes too far and unearths something not of this world. The disaster could have easily occurred naturally without the Lovecraftian component, and this is reflected in some real life tragedies seen linked to oil drilling. Still Wakes the Deep is a shorter title, taking only a few hours to complete Caz's journey through the doomed rig, but it manages to cover these two angles equally well in that time, resulting in a satisfying horror experience all around.