I Played ‘Still Wakes the Deep’.

Over the course of the past year, a friend was sending me hype updates about the game Still Wakes the Deep. Trailer after trailer arrived, each looking creepier and more harrowing than the last. This game showed that it was going to be pressing in on us at all angles, throwing us into dogged traversal and acro/thalassophobia moments sure to get us shaken to our core. I was playing Final Fantasy VII at the time of release, so I wasn’t able to jump in right away, but now that I’ve had a little bit more of my time opened up after completing that, I was stoked to get into it.

In the absence of something chunky and long and open-world like Final Fantasy, I really was looking for something small and indie to get into the cleanse the palate. I wanted to jump into something that I could run through in a day or two, a few hours, and take something from it. This game really nailed that aspect. The game runs about 4–5 hours, and I struggle to see how one would be able to stretch it any further than that. I’m typically a big explorer within the environments that I’m given, and as far as I can tell, I went through each room and wandered every passageway I could and still got in under a half dozen hours. This was a perfect game to end up as a day one release on Game Pass. It was only until I recommended it last night to a friend who checked it out on the PS5 store and said it was chilling at $30 which is not a great value for this game. Visually well done, even outstanding voice acting performances don’t push this game to a place where I feel comfortable recommending it to someone to pay over $15–20 for it.

At its heart, this is a game that borders on “WaLkInG sImUlAtOr” as much of the experience within is fairly linear. There are a few times that the game lets you walk into the cabins of other workers on the rig and lets you choose whether you want to dive further into some of the offices and work rooms to read documents and computer screens, but ultimately between the way that corridors are blocked off and the way that the game baits you towards the end goal via blatant Yellow Paint markers, there is very little by way of finding your way into a fail state or getting lost. Despite the complex and winding oil rig you are on, this is no labyrinth. For me, this was exactly what I was looking for, but I can totally see it being an aspect that is a little disappointing for someone looking to get a little bit more meat off of the bone.

The toughest parts within the game are the “stealth” elements. A part that my friend got caught on for over an hour was ultimately something that I breezed by without even knowing it was a difficult part, so Alien: Isolation this is not. I think timing helps, but ultimately, this game won’t be using wily AI to chase you from corridor to corridor. There are chunks of the game where you will have to sneak, but they are laid out fairly clearly. As far as I can tell there were about five parts that made you have to be a little more mindful about how you were popping out of hiding, but beyond that, the tension comes more from the environment and the experience moreso than the threat of discovery.

Stealth games, for me, are in a kind of territory of their own. I think sometimes it can play on the player’s patience along with the knowledge of the user to understand the layout of the environments and the way that they can interact with and “become one” with the territory. I think as we press further into territory where we’re making enemies “smarter”, it drags this particular aspect of these games into the uncanny valley. It becomes more and more difficult to get immersed into games when we have enemies that are walking repetitive patterns instead of intuitively checking and inspecting the areas in which we’re hiding BUT ALSO, it really pits us up against our own perception. If we were looking for someone who we assumed was hiding out in our home, our workplace, a warehouse, etc. how would we know not to leave an area, a room, a floor? It’s all this strange element of immersion that causes us to suspend our disbelief and enjoy the content or separate ourselves and treat the game like a System of Code and either cope or don’t. To be clear: I stink at stealth games and it is not my cup of tea. So for me, for this game, it’s exactly the level I wanted it to be at.

This game does manage its tension pretty well. I was more stressed out about what was going to come around a corner at any given moment or what plan we had in place was going to fall apart, both literally and figuratively. It matched the same kind of workaround system that befell Dead Space wherein the best laid plans will often require an additional three or four extra stops along the way, hell or (in this case) high water. Though I will say, in this game, I don’t believe it can truly quantify as a ‘horror’ game. I believe there are horror elements to it, and lots of suspense and thrilling moments. Though I don’t think fear was a motivating factor in this scenario. Desperation seemed to be the prevailing draw, along with love. Even on some base level, survival. But whatever ‘things’ we saw, whatever types of transformations and new designs we were seeing, thanks to some excellent voice acting and delivery of the right level of drama, things never truly took a turn for the ‘horror’ genre. The Lovecraft name was often associated with this game as well. Maybe it’s the deep seas, maybe it’s the long tentacles that we’ll find within, but I didn’t get that sense of mind-breaking cosmic horror.

Not that anything felt easy to explain or to even summarize in terms of the ‘what’ which gets caught up in the discovery deep below the ocean, but nothing truly felt like it bent the mind to envision the antagonist. The closest parallel I would draw would be The Thing where once any shade of normalcy is lifted, we never quite get back to a place where we find our footing. There are notes we find that spawn distrust. There are friendships that we have to watch fall victim to grim endings. And each crew member working detail on the rig has a name, a personality and a role. We see some of it in this game’s prologue, the banter between work buddies and the sense of being “out with the boys”. Despite all the bullshit going on at home with Caz and the way that we see a softer and more family-oriented side, the way that he jibes and laughs with the guys gives a sense of camaraderie that is genuine and organic and while we watch the entire operation fall off the rails as the game goes on, we still hear some voices over the radio, we still hear many of the terrible things happening to people and each of those voices and each of those deaths have a name associated with it. A joke that we told with them. A way that they tried to give us solace for whatever bullshit the boss was giving us. And along the way, we can see that some of the good and some of the evil that rested on one side of The Event gets carried along with it to the next.

Overall, I did like this game a lot. I think it delivered on some of its promises, but not in the capacity that I expected. But all-in-all, the story being told is a genuinely good one and it feels like the entire team from design to acting to mechanics felt like they were on the same page in terms of delivering a complete experience. It was just the right length to feel like we accomplished something in the end, and didn’t overstay its welcome. I think the most valuable aspect of the game is that it does not waste its time trying to deliver on lore or on over-explaining the whats and the hows. It puts you in the shoes of a crew in a terrible situation and you play through it right to the end. If you’re a Game Pass subscriber, I think this is an excellent game to jump into as part of the subscription. If not, I would certainly wait until it goes on a deeper sale, as I’m not sure it goes as hard as a $30 game should. If you end up jumping in, let me know. Stoked to hear what you thought.