tThe premise here is a classic of the genre: one day, workers on the Beira D oil rig hit something with their drill that they shouldn’t have hit, and soon, a nameless horror descends upon the ship and picks off the crew one by one. . When it happens, Glasgow electrician Cameron “Caz” McCleary is already walking off the rig, fired from the remote job he fled to dodge the police after a serious bar fight. It’s his work boots we put on as he desperately searches for an escape.
While the team that made Still Wakes the Deep is almost completely different from the incarnation of developer The Chinese Room that made its previous hits Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, they all share a high visual fidelity, a work of realistic sound and moving effect. acting as his trademark. The set of Still Wakes the Deep is probably the most realistic oil rig ever seen to date, with hundreds of tiny hissing valves and a maze of dangerously creaking metal stairs. Even without an encroaching horror from the deep, this is not a place to talk about health and safety, and the platform is easily the game’s standout character.
Still Wakes the Deep is also probably the most Scottish game you’ll ever play, even with a staggering amount of swearing. Each piece of dialogue is a fantastic example of what natural conversations should sound like, both when Caz talks to his few remaining colleagues and when he thinks about the events that led him to Beira D. But since this is a short game, of course. At around six hours, there’s just not enough time to do much character work beyond superficial introductions. This makes it difficult to feel much for them, and the clumsy device of several characters in a row calling you on the phone just so you can hear them die on the line doesn’t help.
This is one of The Chinese Room’s most interactive games and allows you to do much more than just walk around and look at things. But their game design has a big problem: me, the player who knows. Every gaming device in Still Wakes has been used in so many games that the first time I saw yellow paint splattered on a ledge I was supposed to grab onto, I couldn’t help but groan. After that, yellow is everywhere. It’s the yellow tarp that shows where to climb and the yellow edge of the target that I can jump on. Beira D goes from being an intriguing labyrinth to a gentle parkour course.
When enemies appear, Caz cannot fight them. Instead, he must sneak past. Areas are filled with spaces to crouch and objects to throw as distractions, often in rooms that I walk through several times before having to start hiding in them. Ideally, this would be a source of tension, but just as it does with its navigation, the game tells me what’s coming (and what’s going): at one point a platform worker literally shouts across a large room with echoes that the monster is actually leaving. ) so clearly that there isn’t much left for me to do as a player but follow the path.
I was dissatisfied when I realized that the light from my headlamp didn’t bother the monsters, making sneaking around incredibly easy. Or he’d fail a jump for purely camera-related reasons and have to listen to McCleary curse as he falls to his death over and over again, feeling the tension dissolve. The ever-present desire to help the player contrasts with a horror game’s need to leave us in the dark at times. Every time the illusion was broken, I was left with a game I tolerated to see what happened to a character I wasn’t particularly attached to.
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Still Wakes the Deep manages to create an atmospheric portrait of an ordinary man with no special abilities simply trying to stay alive in the most inhospitable environment imaginable, but there aren’t enough real scares or engaging moments to make it memorable beyond that.