Still Wakes the Deep review: Is the Scottish horror game worth playing?
Still Wakes the Deep is an immensely moving and bleak horror game from develop The Chinese Room. It will tug at your heartstrings and send your heart racing, as you navigate the foreboding Beira D oil rig off the coast of Scotland in 1975. But, unfortunately, a few shortcomings hold it back.
Protagonist, Cameron ‘Caz’ McLeary finds himself on the rig after getting into trouble with the police on the mainland, hoping for it to all blow over. Back home, his wife Suze threatens to leave him for getting himself into a mess and abandoning his family.
Unfortunately for Caz and the rest of the crew, things go from bad to utterly desperate and awful after the drill disturbs an entity lying deep within the earth.
The oil rig is already falling to bits, owing to its cheap construction from owner Cadal, and the entity helps hurry the job along — by consuming the rig and its crew as it exponentially grows and creeps into every corner until the game's ending. But don't let it stop you from unlocking all the achievements!
The real star of the show isn’t Still Wakes the Deep’s gameplay, graphics or sound design – though these are all great and something I’ll touch upon later – it is instead the simply sublime performances from the cast of the game.
Everyone's thick Scottish brogue is left intact vocally, so as to not lessen the authenticity of the characters, with gallows humour in full effect. If these accents had been dulled to be more understandable, I would have been raging and disappointed, for the game intrinsically feels Scottish — something I have never experienced in the medium of gaming before.
Immediately I found myself caring for (or loathing) these characters as they truly felt like real people, in no small part owing to the wonderful opening that introduces you to them. Living on an artificial island floating in one of the most dangerous seas in the world is a humbling experience, and it’s clear from the onset that all the characters deeply care for one another,
Read more on radiotimes.com
