During an extended demonstration of The Chinese Room’s terrifying new firstperson chiller, there’s a moment when we belatedly realise we’ve been so fixated on the screen that we’ve failed to take a single note for several minutes. The latest game from the Brighton-based developer of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs combines the period authenticity of the former with the lurching horror of the latter, and the results are – clearly – deeply immersive and knuckle-whiteningly intense.
Set aboard an offshore oil platform in 1975, Still Wakes The Deep casts you as Caz McLeary, a Glaswegian electrician whose tasked with saving his colleagues (and possibly the rig itself) when they drill into, well, something not of this Earth. The game is described by its makers as “Annihilation meets The Poseidon Adventure”, though the tone is more precisely described by creative director John McCormack. “Our original idea was getting a sense of: if Ken Loach directed a BBC documentary about life on an oil rig in the 1970s and then something awful happened during filming, and they asked Stanley Kubrick to take over.”
