Still Wakes the Deep Review

thesixthaxis.com:

The Chinese Room are probably best known for Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, a pair of games where you gently wander through the countryside and gradually uncover a deep mystery as you go. Still Wakes the Deep is the polar opposite of that game, a tense, cramped horror title that will have you on the edge of your seat.

It’s December 1975 and the decorations are up on the Beira D, an oil rig off the coast of Scotland. Our character, Cameron “Caz” McLeary, is not in a festive mood, though. Before he arrived on the rig something happened back on the mainland and it has now caught up with him, the police are here and he is about to be fired. As if Caz’s day couldn’t get any worse, a huge explosion then rips through the oil rig as some mysterious monster is released by the drilling.

The story feels like a mashup of Deep Rising, Dead Space and a prime time ITV drama – the last point mainly because all the cast are from northern England or Scotland, which makes the game seem genuinely authentic to the setting and time period. The flashbacks to a story on the mainland which really could have been lifted from a TV show. It also helps that the characters talk like real people and that means a lot of cussing, there’s more C-bombs ten minutes of Still Wakes the Deep than in the whole of Bulletstorm.

The game is totally linear, guiding you from one location to another as the story plays out and rather surprisingly there’s a touch of Uncharted in the mix as you clamber around the wrecked rig, albeit in first person. Caz has to hang from the ceiling, slide through tight gaps and make leaps of faith, many of which require a quick presses of a secondary button to stop him from falling to his death. There are a few puzzles alongside, but these a really simple and I think this actually adds to the game – having a “search and collect four gubbins in different areas to fix a whatsit” type of quest would have really broken the tension, while the simple solutions here mean