Still Wakes The Deep - The Definitive Review

Spoilers in the first paragraph, yo!

It wasn't long into the nasty boss's signature nasty monologue that I thought, "you know, I bet you come back as a fucking monster"¹. It shouldn't surprise you that this wasn't the most predictable thing that I had predicted about Still Wakes The Deep. This game relies so heavily on deploying the most thread-worn² suite of clichés that it's more fun to try and guess which utterly rinsed videogame horror trope it will throw at you next than it is to work through its series of busywork tasks. Still Wakes The Deep is perhaps better titled as Gen-X Ennui: The Escalation. It was somewhere between the most painfully predictable false escape and the most ludicrous use of a helicopter to inject peril into an ‘unathletic’ hero’s journey that I felt the first pang of wanting to bin this wafer-thin photocopy of a game, and when I got the deus-ex-phonecall³ message that I’d have to ‘go back downstairs’, that pang rose in my stomach. I physically sighed; the sense of resignation to more of this fucking bullshit carried a viscerality of dread far in excess of any of the game’s attempts to frighten me.

The problem here is that of unimaginative conventionalism. This game is so rigorously reliant on the absolutely standard practices of the horror FPS genre that for anyone who’s played the last 30 years of actually scary videogames, Still Wakes The Deep is little more than a greatest hits album stuck on repeat. How many valve wheels will you turn? You can measure it in wheels per minute at some points. Do you think there might be electricity arcing into some water that blocks your path? Will you need to shut off some big switch to pass it? Of course you fucking will. Multiple times. Will you have to crawl through treacherously teetering storage containers? Will doors be arbitrarily locked even after the boss tells you you can unlock them by kicking the bottom hard enough? Of course they will. How many pipes will you see? Fucking millions. Will quite hefty enemies magically move between large spaces even though the access between them is barely large enough for a human? Of course they will. Make no mistake - this game is conceptually lazy. Incredibly so in some instances. Considering that the sole focus in the interactive design is to provide a linear route of escape, it’s shocking how boring and utterly conventional that route is. It’s insulting how it blocks obviously viable paths to ferry you down some authored route that does absolutely nothing to justify its exclusivity. It’s almost amazing how it can turn the peril of an oil platform undergoing structural collapse into something so breathtakingly dull. You can almost count down to when some bit of debris will fall down as you pick your way around exterior gantries, just as you can predict how you’re going to be backtracking through new areas once you’ve pushed whatever button or pulled whatever lever is required for your current task. On top of this is the stupefying choice of adding fail conditions, meaning that in climactic sequences - which are often chases - any excitement or sense of fear it can muster is squandered if you have to repeat anything. The chases generally end in a door slam, at which point the game practically ends that chapter with abrupt changes in atmosphere, leaving you with the sense of how artificial it all is. That snarling, slobbering monster is now some faint moaning or ambient sound effect. At the very least you’d do some door banging, or some sense that the hinges might fly off, right? Couldn’t you pop one or two tendrils through the cracks? I mean, you’re shamelessly using whatever you can steal for everything else so why not add the barely-containing-the-monster door cliches too? What we have here is a game that seemingly learned nothing from Alien: Isolation. It just stole from it.

Given how much of the PR for Still Wakes The Deep was keen to show how many movies it was ‘inspired’ by⁴, it’s probably worth asserting that this game is not remotely close to The Thing (1982). More’s the pity - it’s in fact horribly close to The Thing (2011). Now in the interests of going lightly and giving my most moderate, sanitised take on the 2011 film, I will tentatively admit that it’s a fucking insulting bag of shit that underlines everything wrong with reboot prequel culture and the writers should all be prison and no, those much-vaunted overridden practical effects would have changed absolutely nothing about how terrible that film is on the conceptual level. Similarly, instead of feeling closer to prototypical FPS horror experiences like the stupendously terrifying Colonial Marines chapter of Rebellion’s Alien vs Predator Classic (2000), Still Wakes The Deep feels more like Computer Artworks⁵’ The Thing (2002), a game that in the interests of going lightly and giving my most moderate, sanitised take, I can tentatively admit is a fucking insulting bag of shit that underlines everything wrong with sequel culture and the writers should be in prison. Now, The Thing (2002) suffered from the writers being fucking idiots and thinking that a continuation of one of the greatest horror films of all time should involve ludicrous bullshit that they mistakenly think is cool. I mean things like secret labs under the ice, fucking squads of black ops soldiers to kill and a boss fight, where you helicopter around a giant tree of thing-ness, all of which convinces me that they paid no attention whatsoever the film’s core horror or understood anything at all about its real value. I mean, they didn’t even notice the facts that the film actually shouts at you when Blair has his breakdown. It explicitly tells you when Fuchs is talking to Macready. A few particles is all it takes to eventually be assimilated and given the extreme proximity of everyone to at least one of the Things going apeshit and spraying fluids etc everywhere, it’s a very safe bet everyone is infected to some extent, hence MacReady’s ending line of “why don’t we wait here a little while, see what happens?”. As for the game, MacReady is the fucking helicopter pilot for the insultingly stupid boss fight. It’s an absolutely disastrous application of the IP and should be pilloried as such, not greeted with cheers because there’s a remaster on the way. Really, it should beg the question “is a dumb-as-fuck third-person shooter appropriate for making a game from a film renowned for its ensemble cast, raw claustrophobia, intense paranoia and extreme body horror?”. If your answer is anything less than “obviously not”, then sadly we will never truly be friends⁶. 

My disdain for Still Wakes The Deep comes from a place of genuine disappointment. I still can’t quite believe that given the creative luxury to construct a single path of traversal and to be able to dedicate the entire sum of the game’s work to that path, that what is provided is so drudgingly familiar, so utterly lacking in any kind of innovation, so artificially loaded with so many drearily conventional tasks. I think even the most charitable reading of its creative mediocrity is that perhaps it includes so many overused horror and FPS tropes because there is a deeper subtext to their use, but I genuinely cannot see any. There’s no parody or satire with all those valve wheel turns or ladder climbs. All those murky rooms of pipes don’t repeat the visual signature as some fetishisation of the man-made environment, nor do they feel realistic because the path through them is so singular and yet so unimaginative. Instead of deploying familiar tropes cleverly, perhaps as semi-camouflaged references to the greats this game so depends upon, we find them peppered in an almost performative sense, as if this is how you ‘do’ a horror game as an attempt to merely join the club, so to speak. But even then, the repetition undermines any serious reading of decent artistry.  Even the much-lauded Caledonian vernacular feels as repetitive as the number of times Caz says some combination of the words ‘fuck’, ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’. It feels like it’s unable to stop showing off how Scottish it is in much the same way that Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture was unable to stop showing off how bucolically English it was. And it’s Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture that was at the forefront of my mind as my frustration with Still Wakes The Deep grew.

I wrote previously about Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture in the context of the single-player FPS, and it’s interesting how Still Wakes The Deep may have been far better if it had just a little bit of S in its FP, though I’d want to set up environmental traps to kill or contain the monsters, and perhaps even indulge in some shoring up and repairing of the crumbling infrastructure. Yet that level of interactivity had no role in Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture and the game was all the better for it. While I found the story to be generally laughable claptrap⁷ with a stupendously hammy climax (that nonetheless did its best to do the Demoscene proud), it didn’t diminish the joy I gained from just being a wandering observer in a literal green and pleasant land. With the floaty souls of departed residents setting up an accidental metagame of constructing a kind of facile sociology for the village, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture’s real contribution was dropping some weighty breadcrumbs along a winding country path towards exciting new pastures of possibility. It made a case for the explorable narrative that I found enticingly compelling. To me, it proved the value of simply being within an enjoyable virtual environment, of moving around and picking through its details at my leisure. In a sense, to invert the ludo-narrative dissonance by making the people of the story a space to explore - as much as the village - is directly opposite to what Still Wakes The Deep is trying to achieve. Thinking back, it cements my belief in Still Wakes The Deep’s retrogression, its narrow, corridor devolution from the wide open, promising fields of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture.

When I first heard of Still Wakes The Deep’s setting, I was thrilled. I love that kind of environment and looked forward to exploring it, only to find that the game offers so little exploration that it’s easy to miss the opportunities to do so between bawling superiors and urgent task-givers. This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the whole affair - that lightning-fast opening, even if you do indulge in all the conversations, allows a sniff around a tiny part of the platform. The rest will be at the game’s behest and most often in a ruined state, and The Chinese Room really missed a trick by leaping so quickly to the disaster part. By never letting us really see the Beira D as a living workplace, we don’t get the chance to bond with its 70s industrial ambience, nor the people that inhabit it. It’s such a far cry from joining the disembodied resonances of the dead of Yaughton to the places where they lived and feel some weight from their corporeal absence. In Still Wakes The Deep, the chances for intimacy are so fleeting that it’s hard to give the same amount of shits for named characters that have become monsters. This is because they are mere avatars, not characters. They are a few lines of dialogue that barely express a personality, let alone a sense of soul⁸. Once transformed, they are literally to be avoided. And the avoidance is often so trivial that there’s no sense of fear from these beasts, let alone anything approaching loss or empathy. Contrast this with Lizzie from Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, the sheer beauty of representation, the crushing implications when you realise what her distinctly different representation means⁹. The lack of any of this makes me think that Still Wakes The Deep’s biggest error was casting you as a human. Make the player a Jones-like cat trying to escape and the prospect changes spectacularly, plus those missing opportunities to wander freely and explore the modelled environment become far more viable, plus you can add in human interaction into the bargain. It opens up all sorts of consequences for interacting with cat lovers vs cat haters and so on. And that complete lack of doing anything to counteract or contain the monsters suddenly makes sense.

As you may be able to tell, I have not finished Still Wakes The Deep. This is because I cannot be fucked, and I am not sure if I ever will be. Having dutifully spoiled the ending by reading the synopsis, I’m pretty confident the game’s not going to be pulling off any magic tricks to make everything OK. It reads as pathetically predictable as the bulk of the game I’ve seen, and it looks like I may be saving myself from some of the game’s most frustrating re-run segments. I am perfectly happy to be lambasted if I have missed something, or if there is indeed some marvellous subtext that justifies the shallowness and lack of any serious creative ambition. As I said earlier, it all feels like some attempt to join a club of horror games instead of extolling the virtues of the genre, let alone pushing any boundaries. It merely seeks to qualify itself. Compared to the outright, delightful weirdness of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture it’s all so terribly familiar, so conventional. It’s so very, very safe. Perhaps most importantly, it feels like selling out. Like making something in order to achieve some commercial objective instead of an artistic, cultural one. I like to ask sometimes, what question is this videogame asking? In this game’s case, it’s “if I put lots of bits of other scary games on an oil platform, will it be enough?”. The answer, in my opinion, is most definitely “no”.

It’s interesting that in the reviews I’ve read, the most surprised praise was for the voice acting. Yes - the voices. For a horror game where you spend most of your time alone. In a way, that says volumes. But then, we still reward games for merely being competent, which Still Wakes The Deep absolutely is. But in other fields, competence is the bare fucking minimum. In movies and music, competence is expected by default. Nobody awards points to a band because they can play their instruments to a reasonable standard. Yet with games, we’ll slap an 8 on it because it does the minimum required. Perhaps I shouldn’t be annoyed that nobody seems to pick up on how the bowels of the rig echo the decaying underworld sewers of Condemned, although a few pick up the constant leaning on Alien Isolation. Few note the torch and darkness similarities with Doom III, or again the air vent crawling of Alien Vs Predator Classic. Perhaps that is the generational difference. Matt Wales seemed to find similar faults to me in his Eurogamer review. Fewer still noted how you can make an absolute mockery of the monster AI by literally touching it from a safe space with no repercussions. For Carpenter’s The Thing, that’s a death sentence. In Still Wakes The Deep it’s yet another missed consequence, another special case that only works when the game chooses to apply the context, another clumsy artifice. It breaks the game’s already gossamer veneer of fear. It melts away like a hoovered cobweb. This is horror in the way JJ Abrams did Star Wars and Star Trek - by its most facile impressions, being just enough to convince at first glance. It bears the shape, but not the substance. And don’t stop to question - it simply won’t hold up. Quick! Move on to the next button, the next phone call. The next task. The next pipe, the next door. Skip across this surface, for here, the only thing that’s truly deep is the word in the title.

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1. The thing I hate Rennick most for was being a chase-and-escape sequence in the offices, which I really wanted to pore over. Maybe there'd be some docs to see that would add weight to the conspiracy theory that the rig was in disrepair because budget was going elsewhere. But no, even as a direct lift from Alien, that would be far too interesting. Fucksake!

2. Thread-worn: literally a screw where the thread is so worn, it's no longer capable of sticking. Much like the horror in this game. Fucksake!

3. CAZ, WOULD YOU KINDLY DO SOMETHING THAT WILL DEFINITELY MAKE EVERYTHING OK BUT WILL OBVIOUSLY FAIL BECAUSE SUB-FETCH-QUEST BUSYWORK IS THE ONLY IDEA WE ACTUALLY HAVE AND FOR SOME REASON WE NEED TO STRING THIS OUT FOR MANY MORE HOURS THAN NECESSARY. FUCKSAKE!

4. It's extremely telling that the same PR campaign didn't go to the same lengths to mention the list of games Still Wakes The Deep copies. Fucksake!

5. What do you get if you cross Peter Molyneux with Elon Musk? William Latham, boss of Computer Artworks and an over-promising charlatan who never delivered on any of his grand proclamations about evolutionary magic. For all Molyneux's hubris, at least he came up with decent halfway houses and did actually deliver a wonky AI monster in Black and White and a wonky idea of an adaptive world in Fable. Latham's promise of evolutionary, procedural graphics was always bullshit and The Thing videogame is absolute proof of that. Evolva was shit, which should have given the game away. Instead of the hype-implied wild, random transformations and taut paranoia-laced horror you get derivatively dull standard monsters and a devastatingly average third-person shooter. Fucksake!

6. This upsets me so deeply, too. How can you be that fucking wrong? I mean, it's not as if an entire generation saw how fucking tiresome it is for late-80s movie IPs be reduced to a succession of thinly-themed run-and-gun platformers. The Thing (2002) is literally the contemporary version of that as a thinly-themed run-and-gun third person shooter. Honestly, I was so fucking cross then and I am so fucking cross now about having to remember it. Fucksake!

7. Seriously - Wyndham and Ballard exist and you come up with some utter fucking nonsense about spaceborne energy beings or some shit. Fucksake!

8. Most obvious here is Trot, so named because he says socialist things, who becomes the first monster you have to avoid. His character exists to justify naming Ken Loach as an inspiration. I'm not joking. I honestly believe that's why he's in there. So they can claim the reference. His commentary might be some subtext about oil exploitation in the 1970s but it’s so throwaway, gone so quickly, that it’s barely a comment on anything. Fucksake!

9. Perhaps this says more about Jessica Curry’s creativity than Dan Pinchbeck’s? Fucksake!