How do you fancy making a 1970s horror game set in Scotland? That was the question that art director John McCormack recalls being asked by Dan Pinchbeck, co-founder of the Brighton-based studio The Chinese Room, when he joined the company a few years ago. McCormack’s response was immediate: “Well, as a Scotsman from the 70s, I would say that you’ve got me: I’m in.”
McCormack had been attracted to work for the studio by its reputation for storytelling and authenticity. The Chinese Room made its name with the cult hit Dear Esther in 2012, and went on to create the Bafta-award-winning Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture in 2015, featuring an incredibly detailed recreation of a mysteriously deserted English village. Still Wakes the Deep carries on that tradition of faithful reproduction, although this time the setting is a North Sea oil rig rather than the bucolic English countryside.
McCormack says the team has spent hours talking with people who used to work on Scottish rigs to gain an idea of what life was like. In addition, as one of the few members of the team who was alive in the 70s, McCormack has found himself acting as an adviser on what things looked like then. Searching for 70s furniture is likely to bring up garish, highly stylised pieces of the kind you might find in an American catalogue, he says, but that’s not what Glasgow was like. “It’s very difficult for people who weren’t there to picture how brown things were.”
The game is set at Christmas 1975 on an oil rig off the Scottish coast, where, in McCormack’s words, the workers have “drilled into something: and it didn’t like it”. The studio is keeping the identity of that something tightly under wraps, and McCormack won’t be drawn except to say that the developers are hoping that as soon as players see it, they will turn and run. What follows is a mixture of the films Annihilation and The Poseidon Adventure, as the survivors attempt to escape the damaged, collapsing rig and its unwelcome visitor. The North Sea is just as much of a threat, and it is depicted here in all its toothsome fury, a roiling maelstrom of death ready to swallow up anyone unlucky enough to plummet from their fragile island of steel and safety. The audio emphasises the danger of the elements: opening a door to the outside invites a wall of noise, a constant, howling gale.
There is no combat in Still Wakes the Deep. “This isn’t a game where you fight back,” says McCormack. “We’re trying to do this as realistically as possible in the sense that it’s confusing, things are happening, people are dying, it’s bloody horrible, I’m scared, I’m crying, I’m broken, I don’t even know how to fight it: if there is a thing to fight.” The action is, instead, based on puzzle-solving and traversal, with the squeezable controller triggers representing the player’s shaking grip as they desperately cling on to rain-slicked ladders and hang precariously from creaking beams.
To create a counterpoint to the sudden unleashing of horror, Still Wakes the Deep begins with the mundane, and the first hour is spent slowly getting to know the other oil rig workers. The guiding principle for this opening was: “What if Ken Loach was hired to film a BBC documentary about an oil rig in the North Sea in the 1970s?” says McCormack.
But even at its most mundane, the game’s aesthetic has an unsettling quality. McCormack cites Scarred For Life’s chronicles of the darker side of 70s pop culture as a touchstone, along with the twisted world of Scarfolk Council and 1970s British television in general. “Abigail’s Party, that was a huge influence as well,” says McCormack, who adds that a lot of work has gone into capturing the look of 70s faces, veering away from the temptation to make good-looking people with perfect teeth. “In the 70s, there’s a weird, liminal feeling when you watch even things like Sapphire & Steel and The Prisoner,” he says. “There’s something off about them. There’s something weird that makes you feel uncomfortable.”
Still Wakes the Deep will be out in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox
