4/5 ★ – Smabbott's review of Still Wakes the Deep.

Scottish The Thing Still wakes the deep from the company who brought you Dear Esther and Everybody’s gone to the Rapture is in a sense the same genre as those games but not exactly. Positioned as a horror game which acts as a walking or running simulator with a few moments of horror thrown in. This can be seen as a negative, but genuinely I don’t see it that way. The restraint shown to break up the gameplay in two philosophies for each area made the short horror experience fly by. Unlike traditional horror games, there is no backtracking involved. No collecting of items or management. Rather focusing on a linear experience where you just run to the end. I quite like this approach, it’s the reason I’m a Layers of Fear defender. A horror game doesn’t have to make you scared from start to finish, it just needs to be affective when the horror begins. And this game succeeds straight away. Set on the oil rig of the Beira D in 1975 you play as the Scottish foul mouthed Caz McCreary as he finds himself on the rig as a side job as the electrician. His backstory is rather simple but effective as to why he’s there. The rest of the crew are actually well written characters which I cared about throughout the whole game. Something I don’t see much in this genre. Not everything can be SOMA. The drill hits an entity in the water that begins to infect the rig at large. Due to the boss Rennick not listening to safety precautions as profit is so low that he doesn’t care. And as such dooms the whole crew. Lovecraftian horror is something I don’t think is very well portrayed in any media at all honestly. Said my piece on Bloodborne enough so not bringing that up. But SWTD managed to keep the mystery alive in the sense of not explaining anything and keeping you at the perspective of the main character. Why would you get what’s going on? The entity infects the whole rig including the crew, mutating them into grotesque puppets as it tries to take over the facility. The most haunting thing about every character is that they keep their personality. Screaming out to you to help them and confused as to why you’re running away as these multiple limbed abominations hunt you across the numerous levels of the rig. There’s a lot of personality to them all which made me remember each encounter. The most tense moment of the whole game was Gibbo’s transformation in engineering. Utilising the platform aspect to the game, the whole scene does not show you what Gibbo becomes. Navigating through the darkness, swimming through the oil as you hear bones breaking and the moment he kills a crew member Douglas as he breaks down unable to understand what he’s done. The manic nature of his dialogue changing as he keeps mutating, banging the pipes as you try to escape the area. This was terrifying. Because the fear of the unknown will always trump anything else a game can throw at you. Every time the game returned to engineering I thought we’d see Gibbo and it always put me on edge. But he’s never seen. That is incredible design. It’s shown how affective fear of the unknown is, because as soon as I saw what Muir became, the tentacled towering blob of eyes and faces, it ceased to be scary. It was still affective and each set piece was great to go through. Especially Trots moments. The design of the Beira D was so well realised. The small details like a pool table and memorabilia dotted around the rig did a lot of heavy lifting to building a personality to the place. Every area was interesting to progress and take in. The game also looked gorgeous. The use of lighting was perfect, never being too dark to just be a cheap way of scaring. For a game which is more about the horror experience, I loved the fact there was no gotcha jump scare moments. It was just the build-up of tension from start to finish. Negatives would be the underwater sections. The controls wouldn’t work when they were supposed to. Which would make a re-run of the game rather annoying. I say this, because the game was so quick and fun that I wouldn’t mind returning as time goes on. Overall Still Wakes the Deep was a truly immersive horror experience which stands as one of my favourites in the genre. From the story to the characters and the way the game treats the characters as people rather than heroes. Nothing happens in the game which makes you feel like, okay why aren’t they dead? It’s just a great time from start to finish. Yeah, it’s great.