"It needs to feel like a roller coaster of trauma" – How The Chinese Room crafted Still Wakes The Deep

gamesindustry.biz:

Still Wakes The Deep isn't your typical first-person horror game.

There's no combat, it's set on an oil rig that (quite literally) becomes a living, breathing entity, and all the player can do is traverse this ever-changing landscape, avoid a growing number of possessed crewmates and hide.

GamesIndustry.biz recently spoke with art director and project creative director John McCormack, associate art director Laura Dodds, lead designer Rob McLachlan, project technical director Louis Larsson-De Wet, and audio director Daan Hendriks about how The Chinese Room went about creating this isolated world and how they aimed to root it in emotional connection and traumatic beauty.

The decision to tell this story through a first-person perspective was an easy one.

Not only did it allow the player to connect with the game's protagonist Cameron 'Caz' McLeary, but it turns out Still Wakes the Deep was initially developed as a VR game.

"The input of gripping things and climbing in the environment survived the whole way through because the direct analogue to a VR grip is the triggers," McLachlan explains. "We were always focused on the physicality and the direct connection with the environment so that you felt you were really there in feeling that cold metal under your fingers."

The most difficult thing in making a first-person horror, however, was trying to figure out whether the game was actually scary during development.

"When you're making a horror game, you know what's behind everything that you see on the screen, so it's difficult to be scared," he explains.

"So the temptation is to make it scarier or harder because you think, 'We're making a really un-scary game and no one will find it the least bit frightening.'

"You have to trust yourself to a certain degree, and you have to play test. We had everyone in The Chinese Room playing the game: people from the Vampire Bloodlines team, people from across Sumo, and playtesters. It was the results from that which made us go, 'Okay, we're