”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

slipped under my radar last year somehow but glad i played it now. such a visually striking thing with a compelling world to explore, puzzles with some actual difficulty/complexity to them, nice music, and on.

absolutely loved working my way back through the scattered locations to establish links between the languages and seeing the changes that followed. wish more game worlds felt like they actually change/shift because of things you've done tbh.

one of the best puzzle games i've played from the past few years, for sure.

This game right here is my shining example of how "gameplay isn't everything", cause yeah, this game is just a first-person "SURVIVAL" horror game made in Unreal, doesn't have a whole lot going for it aside it's light traversal system (which ever once in a while does hit), the abilities to throw objects, look at things, etc. However, (mostly) everything surrounding it is great.

This might be one of the most well acted games I've played, in a genre filled with cheese-y ass one-liner type of Survival Horror protagonists, that's not bad per se, but not believable, Still Wakes the Deep manages this, for (one of) the first times for me.

Several times during my playthrough, the performances kept surprising me, some were smaller moments, like staying under an object for a bit when an enemy is around, Caz, will mutter to himself something along the lines of "fuck" or "shit..." in such a relatable, realistic way. Bigger moments near the end of the game, they feel like HUMANS who are actively in a life or death situation, with sprinkles of that Scottish lightheartedness, which really sells it for me

I don't the story is particularly original, but I don't think it necessarily a one-to-one carbon copy of 'The Thing' as a lot of people have been throwing around, it shares the "one of us is the monster" thing - only really in passing, SWtD uses it a bit differently.

Characters aren't inherently oblivious to the happenings happening, but they aren't stupid. Early on in the game, when one of the crewmates is turned, nobody went up to him and ignored the situation as a vehicle for a violent set piece where the crewmates are just endless fodder for the script to show in front of you (very little of the deaths in this game are shown to you). At the same time however, people aren't immediately aware of the danger, such as the Boss man, carelessly saying "work will resume as soon as the drill's fixed" as if 2 presumed (and counting) deaths didn't just happen. Other than the inherent concept of someone being controlled by a foreign being, it's mostly it's own thing.

The level design is very railroaded, which other people have taken note of, and sometimes it's a little questionable, but overall I don't see "big epic video game world", a lot of it is very organic and befitting of the setting, the hulking platform in the middle of the ocean.

In short, game has passable at best gameplay, but everything is believable and interesting enough to outweigh it's, in my opinion, only weakness

A feat of gaming.
They programmed an entire solar system emulated by a pure physics engine? The worlds are unironically spheres? This is awesome.
They told you to go anywhere and somehow perfectly designed the worlds to keep you progressing at a constant pace?
The replaced traditional traversal 'upgrades' and 'keys' with learning and knowledge? How.
Mario will never do this. Mario would hate for you to learn. Mario spits on you when synapses fire.
This makes the game effectively playable only once in your entire lifetime, and that's a good thing.

This game has some set pieces and moments that are pretty astonishing.
I was hoping to take a little bit more from the story, but that's ok. I think this is a result when nearly every review says "This game changed my perspective on life! I literally never smiled until I played this game" Expectations can only be so high. I almost took a half star away for this reason.
But then I realized - name another game on this level as of 2024. There just isn't one that I'm aware of.
Breaking against the traditional game design norms can sometimes yield the most satisfying results.