Pretty much the same as the first NES Remix, if not slightly better. Like a "Volume 2".

The challenges this time around are more accessible, some teaching you certain tips to games as you go. However, the later challenges per game are quite tricky compared to the first compilation, and I actually decided to abandon this collection entirely because some of them were just too annoying for me personally. I've seen enough from this.

The additional "Super Luigi Bros." and "Championship Mode" are both nice, but honestly a bit lazy in their design. The former is a mirrored reskin of the original Super Mario Bros., while the latter is the same 3 games with the same challenges in a score attack manner. At least these games were cheap.

”Get to fuck, and when you come back, fuck off again”

Finally playing a game that isn’t voice-acted by Americans feels like surfacing from water for air.
Enjoyed this so much I played it in one sitting, probably because my favourite genre is “Guy In a Crumbling Facility”, to an extent where I’m certain they copied the homework of not only Infra but the HBO Chernobyl TV show in the game’s opening hours. Easy to bemoan the incredibly 2010’s cat-and-mouse horror gameplay during the moments you’re skirting around an enemy - as well as the fact that the entire game is hyper linear with a constant throughline of the game design yellow paint carrot-on-stick. There were certainly points where I went ah fuck this again when met with another Uncharted climbing sequence, but I felt that the entire game was paced very consistently, and the dialogue was pitch-perfect I love Roy and Caz.

Still Wakes the Deep really is only a short hop away from The Chinese Room’s prior A Machine For Pigs in schema, it feels to me that they were able to put what they learned from that project to task and lean into their strengths to make something that comes across as more whole, even if it took them surrendering A:AMFP’s fun thematics for something closer to a BBC One Original Drama.

Small notes:
-A shame that they couldn’t get Jessica Curry back on the soundtrack, which only ended up kind of middling here if I’m honest!!!!
-The rig was incredibly well-realised, I loved that you could see it bend and warp and shake in the wind and against the waves
-When the Horrific Otherworldly Entity is kind of beautiful to look at I really like dat.
-Maybe it’s just because I got motion sickness a few times, but the game feels like it could have been a VR game? The way the character’s arms respond to the environment was so Boneworks
-Enjoyed seeing real 70’s health and safety posters dotted around, they go so dumb hard
-It's not funny but I find it very funny that oil rigs have a "Mud Handling" facility