Still Wakes the Deep Review

ign.com:

When a game is trying as hard to terrify and unsettle me as Still Wakes the Deep is, and instead I mostly feel kind of bored a lot of the time, I start to question whether this type of experience simply doesn't tingle my spine anymore. But digging deeper, there are a lot of specific reasons this feels like a lackluster attempt at that formula. It has almost all of the hallmarks of a creepy, Amnesia-style, first-person horror game with a powerless protagonist – the very same sort I've been playing and enjoying for almost 15 years now. But despite great dialogue, superb voice-acting, and a memorable setting, irritating level design and sometimes silly scenarios meant this dreary tale never fully got its Lovecraftian tendrils into me.

The premise is simple but promising: You play as Caz, an electrician on an offshore Scottish oil rig in the 1970s, diving head-first into a world that has been meticulously realized – from the period-accurate outfits to the technology to the delightful dialects of the cast. They even have dialogue subtitles and a full translation of the UI into Scottish Gaelic, a language with less than 100,000 native speakers, and I have to respect that. It clearly wasn't going to boost their sales, so they must have included it for cultural or artistic reasons.

The rig, unfortunately for everyone on it, drills down into some kind of deep sea alien nonsense that starts transforming the environment and the crew into Cronenbergian body horror abominations, leaving poor Caz to traverse storm-swept decks and cramped corridors to try and escape. And damn, it is a beautiful game. From the weathered, hulking, industrial presence of the rig itself, to the unsettling infection spreading throughout it, to detailed weather effects that I could practically feel on my own skin, developer The Chinese Room has gone above and beyond in taking full advantage of Unreal Engine 5 here.

It’s a shame, then, that these environments end up being absolutely, tyrannically linear