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A rip-off or something else?

When I first saw a gameplay video of Still Wakes the Deep I was immediately reminded of a horror book Slimer (1983) by Harry Adam Knight. It is one of my favourite audiobook to listen. I hope Still Wakes the Deep isn’t just a cheap rip-off of that book, because it is near and dear to me! Let’s dive into it.

Story

Still Wakes the Deep tells a story of Caz, a man who just got job at an oil rig in the middle of North Sea, that is known of its treacherous weather. Soon there is an accident; the oil rig drills something and it unleashes an evil to the rig. One by one the workers are killed or turned into monsters and the few that are still alive; tries to use any means necessary to get out of the oil rig.

The story, well, it was OK. Nothing overly good, but the game had psychological elements with the horror theme, which made the story more interesting. The game tried its hardest to feel bad/sorry for the deaths of other workers, but it was hard to feel anything at all as the story didn’t introduced me closely to them. As what comes to the Slimer book, yeah it was somewhat similar. Or at least I got those vibes from it.

Gameplay, controls, AUdio and visuals

At first I did enjoy the gameplay, but it got repetitive very soon. Caz had to go from A to B and do C and D, but then it was broken and he had to manually fix it at place E and F… then there were the parts where player must avoid being caught by the monster and had to sneak to get around it. There is no combat system at all, only thing close to combat was to pick up objects from the ground and throw them to make a sound to distract the monster.

So, players must rely solely on the stealth and do some little puzzles which usually were easy to do as the solution was always nearby.

Control-wise players can run, crouch, jump, pick up items, climb ladders and other obstacles. The controls were nice, they worked and I didn’t have any problems with it.

Audio in Still Wakes the Deep was very well done. All the monster sounds to voice acting I did like. The game has Scottish Gaelic language voice acting option. I played this in English (British English) and I did like how the characters were voiced, even though they all said lots of words I didn’t understand and swore like pirates.

Visually the game was OK. It sometimes looked nice with all the light and shadow play. It was running on Unreal Engine 5, which I thought could do some amazing realistic graphics and whatnots, but this game didn’t wow me at all at that aspect. There were some blurry graphics, bugs and game-breaking glitches, so it wasn’t perfect.

But the game was designed well. Meaning, I (mostly) always knew where to go or what to follow; it was the familiar colour yellow that did it. If you don’t know what I mean, well, in lots of games (such as newer Resident Evil and Horizon -series) has objects and environments coloured to yellow for players to know that object can be used or which edges can be climbed. Without that I would’ve hated it, for sure!

Follow the yellow

Still Wakes the Deep declares to be survival-horror, but I don’t think it’s completely that. It’s a partly walking simulator as well. If you have played Carrion -game and read Slimer—you gonna love this game! The game was rather short—I played this through under 4 hours—but I also didn’t want it to be any longer either, because of its repetitiveness.

Still Wakes the Deep is available on PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X|S and Windows.

SCORE:

3/5

“players must rely solely on the stealth and do some little puzzles”

RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2024
GENRE: Horror
DEVELOPER: The Chinese Room
PUBLISHER: Secret Mode
PLATFORMS: PS5 (reviewed)
XboX Series X|S
Windows

 

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