7th Game Completed in 2024

Are you familiar with the protocol for what happens if someone becomes trapped in a stamping press? Probably not, unless you've worked in a stamping plant. But basically, if someone bypasses the safety systems and works inside the press (or in the case of some plants in countries like Mexico and Thailand, doesn't have safety systems to protect them), and becomes stuck... That's it. They're alive, but with no chance for escape. They call in the worker's family, call a priest if requested...

And then some poor bastard pushes the button to finish the press.

Because you see, a stamping press cannot be reversed. It goes in one direction. If you become trapped, you are kept in a quantum state of life and death until the button is pressed. This is the brutality of production under capitalism.

My blue collar ass loved Still Wakes The Deep. I won't get too deep into the plot, but this setting - an oil rig in the Scottish North Sea - hit me differently as a tradesman than it might to someone who isn't. I read a few interpretations of the plot online, and I was not especially surprised to see (in a post-Silent Hill 2 world) that nobody really discussed this angle, instead fixating on the extremely limited emotional and psychological angle of the game.

It's a new - but cheaply-built and rapidly decaying - oil rig, where the company man runs the facility like a dictator, and the workers live in a constant state of maintenance and poor safety protocols. As someone who's worked in somewhat similar situations, I was looking at this meticulously crafted environment and mentally parsing my Ontario Green Book (that's our workplace safety laws), and finding violations after violation.

For anyone familiar with the history of Scottish oil, you may recall the Piper Alpha explosion, where an oil rig in the Scottish North Sea erupted in flames, leading to the deaths of 167 workers - including some who remained trapped and never rescued, before dying isolated and in pitch darkness. I have no doubt that this moment in history was an important touchstone in the writing of this game, and the story of how OPCAL management completely failed to adequately consider the safety of their workers both prior to and during the incident is something people really ought to make themselves aware of.

Anyway, that's a TON of preamble, but it really sets the stage for what this game is, and what it's trying to say with its six-hour runtime. You start as a fella on an oil rig, who's taken the job to try and escape a minor charge back in Scotland. The rig's a mess, but production presses on... And everything goes to shit. You see, they drill into something that ain't oil. An air pocket? A gas deposit? You'll have to play the game to see. But it goes places I was really quite surprised to see.

I suppose you could categorize it as a walking sim, but that's kind of reductive. It's linear, but you will frequently revisit areas you've been to before as the platform continues to fall apart, completely changing your route and how the area looks. You'll also have fairly frequent action segments cut in, and these are usually comprised of climbing and platforming segments, and some segments that require stealth to get past a patrolled area. Thankfully, it does not have those god-awful "run from the scary monster" segments like in the Amnesia games where the AI follows your footsteps and dice rolls whether or not they see you hiding.

The art direction of this game is outstanding, and the use of body horror is used effectively to suit the themes they're going for. I played the entire game on PS5 in performance mode, which definitely scaled back some otherwise great wind effects, but the quality mode seemed to have an unstable framerate that felt like sub-30.

Overall though, this is an excellent horror game with a very focused scope, and while some may find it a bit on the short side, it's also not a full-priced game, and is available Day One Game Pass. I don't think it's gonna change the world or anything, but it's an above-average horror game in an inspired setting, and frankly, the world could use more games of this scope and less hundred-hour, bloated games padded out with busywork.

I found this really compelling. A well told story with some brilliant performances. It feels very British in its humour and horror, and in its distinctive undercurrent of sadness.

It kinda feels like the male version of The Descent: a personal story set against an escalating supernatural horror. But where The Descent is a group women trapped in a yonic crevasse, their relationships fraying along with their climbing ropes, Still Wakes the Deep sees men violently mutated on an oil rig when they drill into something they shouldn’t have, both a phallic setting and act of male hubris.

It's very narrative focused, a tightly controlled journey down a twisty but linear corridor, with some very light platforming and QTEs. When it does try to be more that, it's a bad stealth game, but those sections are thankfully brief.

The question I always have for these types of games is whether they're served by their interactivity or would they be better as films or novels. This game works because it embeds you so completely in its environment in a way only games can. The time and place feel so authentic, and it's incredibly engaging to move through the rig as it bends and fractures.

This isn't going to be a very impressive or in-depth review, because I'm currently suffering from Gets Light-Headed When I So Much As Inhale Disease, but I did want to throw a quick something out.

Still Wakes the Deep isn't quite the kind of horror I really like to dig into - when friends were recommending this to me, telling me it was a horror game, I went into it mostly blind and anticipating some sort of twisty, psychological stuff, which is my usual thing. This is less that and more tense chase sequences and body horror.

That said, I can't really find it in myself to care.

It's so nice - so fun - to finally have a big, well-received game like this populated by Scottish voices. I don't know if the entire cast was Scottish - the accents did sound slightly exaggerated sometimes, but that could just be Scottish VAs getting told to lean into it like you often see with Irish characters - but I hear most of them are, and if any weren't I certainly didn't notice, significant because it's almost always instantly obvious to me. The slang terms and oft-used phrases here were accurate and natural, and I know that likely doesn't matter to anyone aside from... Scottish people, but screw it, I'm Scottish people and I like hearing a Scottish guy saying "lecky" in my video game.

The atmosphere is great, and the concept is intriguing - the inspiration taken from The Thing is clear, but I've seen people making comparisons to SOMA, as well, to which I definitely concur. The supporting cast are all fairly likeable for their brief time on-screen, except when they're not supposed to be likeable, and while Caz is very much just your Average Scotsman his voice acting, courage, and connections to the other characters really lend themselves to moments of emotion and investment in what happens to him and those around him.

I haven't quite settled on how I feel about the ending - cautiously, I think I'm fine with it, though it's not what I would have preferred, and I expected more from how people were discussing it - but it doesn't particularly affect my enjoyment of the game as a whole.

Incidentally, I have no idea why oil rigs aren't a more common setting for horror. Total isolation, trapped in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by creaking metal pipes and freezing-cold wind and nowhere to go?

This was a relatively simple but still fantastic little jewel that just oozed atmosphere and the love the developers had for it. It had fantastic map design, sound, voice acting. The music was not always on, but damn did it know when to appear and when to make itself scarce. I also really loved how the game alternated between being inside the rig and on the outside platforms, which did a lot to keep the game fresh and engaging.

Some people might call it a walking simulator, as the gameplay is limited to interacting with things such as running, jumping, climbing ladders and pulling levers as well as a few quicktime events where you have to react quickly and press or hold a button to avoid dying, but I've found that horror lends itself to such a style, and I personally don't mind it much at all, specially when done well like this.

I know some people hate quicktime events, but I can't help but love them. They pull me in, make me more watchful and in a way more involved with whatever lie about.

My one qualm with the game is that at the start of the game, there were a few times where the game snagged and seemed almost to freeze, and for a few moments it really made me wonder whether that would be a constant. Thankfully it wasn't, but I could imagine some people hopping off thinking it a telltale of shitty performance to come.