Still Wakes the Deep is the latest game from The Chinese Room, the studio behind stand-out indie classics Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Dear Esther, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
Still Wakes the Deep is a first-person survival horror, and it’s not messing about. It takes everything the dev team has learned about feelings of dread, discomfort, and impending doom, and distills it down into a single harrowing premise. Sounds like an exaggeration? Let’s look at the facts:
- It’s set on an oil rig.
- In Scotland.
- At Christmas (peak Winter, so very few daylight hours).
- In the late ‘70s.
If ever there was a recipe for disaster, this is it.
Watch the terrifying trailer:
I Can See McLery Now
Players step into the unfortunate—and presumably rubber-soled—shoes of Glaswegian electrician Caz McLery as he tries to escape the post-catastrophic, but still very claustrophobic, confines of the rig while pursued by a mysterious creature.
Players will rely on stealth and quick thinking and keep one desperate step ahead of whatever it is behind them
Despite being a first-person game, there’s no shooting. There’s no combat at all, in fact. Caz is a tradesman, not a fighter. Instead, players will rely on stealth and quick thinking to solve environmental puzzles and keep one desperate step ahead of whatever it is behind them.
Why does it always rain on me?
There’s one other ingredient that cranks up the feelings of despair and helplessness, and that’s the weather. The team has leaned into the feeling of “dreich.” Voted the “most iconic” Scots word in 2019, dreich is, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, used to describe “wet, dark, unpleasant weather.” Anyone who’s been even slightly north of London will feel this definition.
Still Wakes the Deep launches on 18th June 2024, and is available on Xbox Games Pass, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games store.
Wishlist it now on Steam, Xbox Game Pass, and the PlayStation Store.
