Today we archive a horror game I had my eye on for a while. Still Wakes the Deep is the lastest game from studio Chinese Room who previously made games like Amnesia a Machine for Pigs and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Many people call their game style a "walking simulator" and even the developers themselves have used that term, so I will as well.
Their games have always had a huge focus on telling a beautiful and emotional story with gameplay more at a minimum. You were just always walking towards the next point of interest and maybe you had to open a door here or there.
But with Still Wakes The Deep they actually added some more and interesting gameplay to their formula and the result is their best game yet by far. We find ourselves on a massive oil rig in the middle of the North Sea when all hell breaks loose! The entire rig gets engulfed in a thick fog and weird noises can be heard. It does not take long before crew members are taken out and a danger starts roaming around the area. When it comes to atmosphere it really reminded me of a mix between a Lovecraftian Horror and the isolation and paranoia of The Thing.
The game looks amazing with detailed enviroments and stellar voice acting. The water physics are some of the best out there and you could almost feel the cold and harsh winds coming through.
The biggest reason why I think this game is so, so much better than Chinese Room's previous titles is that there are now many more characters involved in the story. The big problem with walking simulator games is that its often a very lonely experience with a character walking through a (often beautiful) enviroment and reading pages of text or speaking their mind.
But adding other characters to interact and talk to adds so much more immersion to the overal game. It felt awesome to roam around the oil rig and see all the mates during lunch break or at their posts. And even when there's trouble it felt great to see I was not the only one dealing with the problems.
I really hope that Chinese Room will continue this route and will have more characters in their upcoming games and story too. I understand that having more characters means more production money for voice actors and animators, but it adds so much more to the experience.
The game would have been so much less interesting if we were alone and exploring an abandoned oil rig.
When it comes to gameplay you will have to do plenty of parkour, find switches and levers and even have to do some sneaking. Probably the weakest part is somewhere in the middle where you head through dark, metal tunnels and have to do repetitive switch puzzles for quite a while, but other than that the overal expeirence and flow of the game was great. I love Loecraftian horror games and this is a welcome new one and I will definitely revisit this game in the future as Chinese Room's best achievement yet!

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