Still Wakes the Deep Review- Underwater Nightmare

If you're into horror games, developer Chinese Room is probably not what your mind springs to when looking for a new experience. With a track record of immersive first-person stories like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, this AA studio decided to use their skills at creating realistic environments and captivating sounds to keep you cowering under the nearest bed while playing.

I must admit that I am not the biggest fan of the usual Horror game. I don't particularly enjoy jumpscares, and it feels most games rely on that a bit more than they should. What I enjoy most of all in this kind of experience is eery atmosphere and tense situations; if you throw in some "meaning of life" thing, then I'll be over the moon. Some of my favorite horror games are Soma, Observer and Alan Wake 2 (if you could call it horror).

This game seems to follow a little on the footsteps of those previously-metioned games, at least as far as atmosphere and interesting plot points go, with the game having a big emphasis on tension and human conciousness.

Story

You are a random worker on a remote oil rig in the ocean. Work conditions are tough and so the workers band together in the face of this hardship to form tight bonds. It is these bonds that shall be tested, first by poor management and then by literal blasphemous monstrosities.

It's easy to pay no mind to the faceless monster that indiscriminately kills and maims, but what happens when the creature takes the body of someone you know and contorts it into an unrecognizable mass of gory elements.

The results of this thought experiement are no less disturbing than they seem, with each abhorrent beast you encounter having a personality that builds on top of who the human used to be.

Other than that though, there is not that much going on, with the majority of the plot being focused mainly on your imminent survival, with a little bit of family history sprinkled in.

Gameplay

This is also a rather straightforward affair. It's the sort of game where you are powerless against the beasts that hunt you down, so its more or less a game of cat and mouse most of the time.

The enemy behavior is generally well telegraphed though, so it does not feel overly frustrating to skirt around the horrors of the oil rig, but it is indeed slightly unremarkable in the gameplay department.

I don't really have a problem with this however, as the game takes around 4-5h to complete, and there is enough visual variety and eye candy to keep you going steadily.

Conclusion

A remarkably memorable horror experience that sort of came out of the blue, but served as a great pallete cleanser for me in between the usual games I play.