Still Wakes The Deep review - the sweariest video game ever made

Still Wakes The Deep – walking into a nightmare (Secret Mode)

The makers of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture create a homage to The Thing that features no combat but plenty of scares.

Body horror’s a genre that never really goes out of fashion. It had an early peak in the 1980s with The Fly, Re-Animator, and The Thing and it’s currently enjoying another. Possessor, from the son of David Cronenberg, the utterly unhinged Titane, and When Evil Lurks spring to mind, and there are plenty of others.

Body horror in games is not uncommon either, with The Thing, in particular, being a long-standing influence on many survival horror games, most obviously in late 90s titles such as Resident Evil 2 and Parasite Eve. It’s become rarer in more modern games though, many of which have been disappointingly nervous about showing anything genuinely horrifying, but that only makes Still Wakes The Deep even more of a welcome surprise.

Unsurprisingly, developer Chinese Room cites John Carpenter’s sci-fi horror classic as a key inspiration and, alongside that, the works of Ken Loach, whose gritty realism and social commentary are not at all what you’d expect to find in video games. The result is unlike anything else you’ll play this year, although you may occasionally be reminded of their earlier attempt at a survival horror, with 2013’s Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.

Like Still Wakes The Deep, that was a walking simulator, although one that lightly stretched the boundaries of the genre, making it feel more open world. Where it was set in a deserted English village in the 1980s, this takes place on a well populated North Sea oil rig in December 1975, and its mise en scène is so detailed and textured you can practically smell it.

From the ghastly 70s curtains and carpets to the girly calendars, and the fact that everything seems to be leaking, the richly detailed world is a staggering achievement and almost as persuasively authentic as its characters. You play Caz McLeary, the rig’s electrician and no friend of the boss, who’s annoyed that Caz got himself in trouble with the police when he was back on the mainland.

Caz’s marriage is on the rocks, and getting fired – as he is in the opening minutes of the game – is exactly the Christmas present he doesn’t need. His friends and fellow crew members are just as believable, from his cockney buddy Roy in the canteen to communism-loving Trots. You can chat to a few of them over lunch, where they all seem impressively real, in the precious moments before events overtake them all.

Still Wakes The Deep – apparently oil rigs are a profanity rich environment (Secret Mode)

Those events are every bit in line with The Thing. The isolated circumstances and rapid degeneration, from complete normality to grotesque horror, are brought into sharper focus because you’re at the heart of it and must help save the rig and as many of your friends as you can. However, given Still Wakes The Deep’s walking simulator roots, you won’t be fighting any monsters to achieve that.

What you will be doing is a lot of traversal. Starting with barricaded corridors and doors, most of your time’s spent making your way through a litany of industrial hoists, air vents, teetering ledges over a stormy sea, and claustrophobia-inducing flooded corridors; getting around the rig and its inky black, oily interstices.

Without combat, moments of tension are usually characterised by having to hide and then run from a seething, mutated former crew mate. That involves stashing yourself briefly in a locker, Alien Isolation style, before legging it through cramped corridors until you can find a cupboard to hide in, or a small enough gap to crawl through that the raging, panting horror behind you can’t follow.

Despite the obvious homages to The Thing there’s relatively little gore, beyond coming across the remains of your former workmates. Instead, it’s the swearing that makes the 16 age rating seem bizarre, with its surprisingly liberal use of the c-word. It strongly suggests, as we’ve long suspected, that PEGI never properly plays any of the games it rates, with the end result being something no American publisher would ever dream of releasing.

In terms of gameplay, there are also frequent QTEs, but while these are normally the last stop along a developer’s path to mediocrity, here they’re brought to life by the startling realism of Unreal Engine 5, and the extraordinarily high quality of the voice acting. These two elements are easily the game’s strongest suit, with every character being exceptionally well written and acted.

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