Still Wakes the Deep - the deep blue sea

I hate horror movies and games. I hate them, I don't play them, I don't watch them. I make exceptions for space fiction like Alien/Aliens, Event Horizon, or Sunshine. But I played Still Wakes the Deep by The Chinese Room with pleasure, so what attracted me to this game?

First, thank you to Microsoft for Game Pass. As I've said many times before, this subscription gives you a good chance to get acquainted with games whose genre is not a priority for you and which you would not 100% buy at full price. Thanks to Game Pass, I discovered a lot of interesting games that I would have passed by otherwise.

Secondly, Still Wakes the Deep is a walking simulator from the studio that actually invented walking simulators. Yes, this is the British The Chinese Room - the authors of the Dear Esther mod for Half-Life 2 (2008), and then the full Dear Esther game (2012). In fact, the Dear Esther mod is considered to be the first walking simulator or interactive story. I love such games, which, of course, are more like movies or an interactive book, but have a good story, interesting characters, and atmosphere. That's what I was hoping to find in Still Wakes the Deep. And I did.

Still Wakes the Deep takes place on the Beira D oil platform in the North Sea in 1975. The protagonist of the game, Cameron "Kaz" McLeary, got into a fight in a pub and couldn't think of anything better than to temporarily hide out on the oil platform until things calmed down, where he was employed as an electrician by his old friend Roy, who works as a cook there. Because of problems with the police and his desire to hide, Kaz has problems with his wife, who remained on the big land, and it looks like they are headed for divorce. And then the head of the platform, Rennik, calls Kaz "on the carpet" because he has already received a request from the police.

However, very quickly all these problems of a simple electrician fade into the background. The drilling rig bumps into something at the bottom of the sea, an explosion occurs and... all hell breaks loose on the Beira D. Now Kaz McLeary has to save himself, his friends, and the platform, which is trying to sink or explode. And there is something that rises from the depths and hunts people...

1975, a platform lost in the middle of nowhere, a small group of people and the monsters they turn into. Yes, you guessed it, Still Wakes the Deep has a powerful take on John Carpenter's The Thing, starring Kurt Russell. By the way, the protagonist of The Thing is R.J. Macready, and the protagonist of Still Wakes the Deep is Kaz McLeary, even the names are similar. Although Still Wakes the Deep doesn't have this intense search for hidden monsters, the thing that woke up in the depths doesn't hide, it looks for you, and the people it distorts are really similar to the monster from The Thing.

As already mentioned, Still Wakes the Deep is mostly a walking simulator. It's very well directed, with great dialogues, skillful voice acting by Scottish actors (the accent of the characters is an additional plus of the game), amazing music, and a skillfully recreated atmosphere of the 1970s. Horror? Yes, there is a bit of it. Both direct screencasts and pumping up the atmosphere behind the scenes, with voices and sounds. In fact, climbing through the dark insides of a sinking oil platform filled with monsters is a bit scary, but nothing so extreme, The Thing level, no more.

The additional gameplay includes QTE events, simple puzzles, some climbing, hiding from monsters in closets and other hidden places, distracting monsters, and a little bit of running with death.

The plot is presented through dialogues between survivors and phone calls that MacLeary receives from fellow survivors from different parts of the platform. In fact, the Beira D oil platform is a huge fool, a kind of hybrid of an island and a skyscraper, with many interesting places that MacLeary will have to visit in search of salvation. In addition, the platform collapses and changes throughout the game.

Like most walking simulators, Still Wakes the Deep is a completely linear story, an interactive movie for 3-5 hours. But it's a really high-quality sci-fi horror movie. Its characters are shown without pathos, you sympathize with them, you feel the death of each of them.

Well done, The Chinese Room. Now I have a lot more faith that Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2, which The Chinese Room got hold of in 2023, will finally be finished and that it will be a good game. We are waiting for the release, supposedly at the end of 2024.