A New Horror Game Corrects Something So Many Others Get Wrong
Putting players in the shoes of an engineer tasked with heading alone into a dark basement to restart an ailing generator is a tried-and-true trope in horror video games. While Still Wakes the Deep has a lot that’s very familiar to horror fans, it’s what it does with this trope of making you the poor lone sucker who needs to flip all the switches and face all the danger to do it, that sets it apart from a field of horror titles. Other games could learn from what developer The Chinese Room does with what has become a very well-worn premise.
On paper, Still Wakes the Deep is pretty standard as a horror story, and highly recognizable for anyone who’s played games like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the developer’s previous horror game. It takes place on an oil rig in 1975, and before long, spooky stuff starts kicking off. In its gameplay, Still Wakes the Deep riffs on Amnesia’s formula of only allowing you to run and hide from its lethal terrors, sneaking around things that can instantly murder you and hoping they can’t squeeze into the small spaces that you can.
You can also tell where things are going the second you meet protagonist Caz, the rig’s electrician–although, somewhat hilariously, The Chinese Room starts the game by immediately subverting that premise. The first few minutes of the game see Caz defending his job, but all he can really manage is insisting, “I’m good with the lecky.” You can guess pretty early on that the power is going to go out, and someone who’s good with the lecky is the obvious choice to go turn it back on, even if Caz is actually underqualified for the gig.