4/5 ★ – Hazzi's review of Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest.

Sirens Rest is a DLC built on an idea so strong it barely needs execution. Diving down to the wreck of the Beira D in the North Sea is already horrifying. Cold water. Darkness. Industrial debris. The ocean doing what it does best, which is quietly reminding you that you do not belong there. I loaded it up feeling confident. That feeling did not survive the opening minutes. The diving mechanics are good. Uncomfortably good. You float just long enough to forget you are supposed to be afraid, then the game lets the silence stretch until your brain fills in the blanks with something worse. I spent a lot of time hovering in black water, waiting for a jumpscare that never came, which somehow made it worse. Nothing attacks you quite like anticipation and your own imagination. Then there is the umbilical. My personal nemesis. On PC, this thing behaves like it has opinions. I had so much cable I could have opened a small underwater data centre. It wrapped around poles, threaded itself through wreckage, clipped cleanly through solid objects. Any actual diver would immediately freeze, panic, and die while thinking about insurance forms. The game encourages the opposite. Logic is optional. Physics are decorative. I was looping myself through metal gaps like a feral ribbon dancer and the game nodded approvingly. The character you play is an absolute liability. There is a checklist at the start and she treats it like spam email. The crew says not to remove your air supply. She removes it anyway. She does not listen. She does not learn. She should not be allowed near water. Chapter two is where my umbilical achieved enlightenment and went fully wireless. Just disconnected from the diving bell. No warning. Still alive. Still swimming. About five metres of cable trailing behind me like a forgotten thought. I am almost certain this was a bug. It was also one of the most unintentionally poetic moments in the DLC. A lone diver in the North Sea, untethered, unsupervised, and somehow still fine. I did not feel fear. I felt chosen. If I died there, it would have felt earned. The monster encounter is solid but familiar. If you played the base game, you already understand the rules. Crawl through tight spaces. Stay low. Panic quietly. Move from one small area to an even smaller one until a cinematic rescues you from your own decisions. It works. It is tense. It does not surprise. The atmosphere does most of the heavy lifting, and to be fair, it is built for that job. Overall, Sirens Rest is a strong experience that feels slightly held together with tape, but it gets away with it because there is almost nothing else quite like it. Deep-sea diving horror is a narrow lane, and this DLC commits to it fully. The atmosphere, sound design, and core concept pull serious weight, doing most of the work that other games outsource to combat or spectacle. When it works, it works extremely well. When it does not, it stutters, glitches, and fumbles its own transitions, especially in and out of cinematics. It feels less like a carefully finished expansion and more like something that surfaced a little too early. Still, the originality carries it. I enjoyed it. I do not trust it. Much like the diver I was playing, it survives on nerve, momentum, and a loose relationship with safety. 8 / 10