you are Caz McLeary, a hard-drinking, hard-working scotsman on an oil rig in the North Sea in the late 1970s. after getting into a bar fight during your time on shore, your prick of a boss fires you (he's absolutely a prick but frankly justified in this) and like ten minutes later the crew running the drill power through some kind of blockage (when they expressed concern about this the prick of a boss told them to power on through, of course). there's an explosion, and all hell breaks loose. you're rescued from the water by your coworkers and discover that something has bubbled up from the deep, a fleshy, bioluminescent substance slurping its way over the drill apparatus and slowly overtaking the entire rig. to make matters worse, it also assimilates people into swollen bags of body horror that slither and jiggle through the hallways, suspended amid networks of constantly rearticulating projectile pseudopods.
spoilers or whatever
this is a weird game for me. exerting the smallest amount of mental pressure threatens to disintegrate the whole thing into the pieces it's reassembling from the broader culture. the circle of intertexts is very good: Doom, Half-life, Amnesia, Soma, Alien: Isolation, the woefully underappreciated Forbidden Siren, and that's just talking about games. if we broaden the scope to film we've also got The Thing, The Abyss, Annihilation, and Nope playing important roles here. the result is something that chiefly excels in setting and atmosphere, but which never coheres into something bigger than its myriad influences.
technically it is very impressive and everything looks very good; the environments feel weighty and real in a way i truly appreciated. you bust open doors and crawl through vents and jump onto ledges in ways that are awkward and dangerous in a way that feels "realistic" but is not in any way particularly realist--mainly you're often aware of how long it takes Caz to do something and how humanly slow he moves, how easy it is misstep on a ledge. your primary interactions with the enemies are running and hiding from them, learning their patrol patterns and occasionally throwing bits of trash to distract them while you make a break for the exit. simple but solid enough, never as difficult as Alien: Isolation and nowhere near as overlong. there's also loads of platforming puzzles that wobble between tense and goofy, for reasons i'll discuss in a bit.
the story is pulpy in content but, as you might expect from The Chinese Room, generally solemn in tone; Caz has a wife and two girls back home, who have to live with the consequences of other drunken bar fights and Caz's inability not to piss people off. the marriage just is not doing well. then there's his mate Roy, an erstwhile fellow boozehound who found Jesus and helped Caz on at the rig when he was looking for work/to lay low. that Caz knows Roy has always carried a torch for his wife Suze makes this more complicated, as we come to understand that on some level Caz feels guilty, believing Suze might have been better off if she'd chosen Roy back in the day, rather than tie herself to this bum who can't hold himself together. other than that, there are no narrative features you might expect from this sort of game: environmental storytelling is present but very lightly and generally, and there are no journal entries, lengthy post-its, or audiologs. when the story happens, it's happening through character interaction.
the monsters are sort of ancillary to these character beats in an approach reminiscent of "elevated horror." but the draculas are only metaphors for trauma in glancing, incidental ways. Caz's prick of a boss becomes a giant mobile head reminiscent of the "kou yamibito" enemy types from Forbidden Siren 2, and while there's something clearly thematic about this petty little egomaniac becoming a giant grotesque face that stalks and murders his employees, nothing much is made of it other than that it happens. for example, it's not terribly clear why he mutates into that thing while every other unfortunate you encounter becomes one of the maggot-like bags of flesh that simultaneously evoke Half-life 2's floating "Combine Advisors" and the same franchise's "strider" enemies, which, like these things from the deep, tower over maps while you hide in corners and under rubble, dreading the moment they see or hear you and suddenly drop down to get a better look. throughout this, the changed crewmates continue to mutter things that suggest whatever has happened to them has not entirely erased their old personalities and concerns but has seriously warped their perception of reality, possibly another reference to the transformed enemies of the Siren franchise; notably, Caz's ill-fated companions tend to mutter half-coherent insults about your cowardice, the incompetence of everyone around them, and how much they just want to fucking fight you, evoking his own darker aspects.
but, uhhh, yeah, it doesn't really do much beyond that. despite the ways the monsters reflect the situation of the protagonist, there's also a distance maintained. in contrast to Caz's rather complicated backstory, the nature of the invading entity/substance is never really discussed or made clear. there's something pretty pragmatic about all these rig operators basically not taking any time to speculate or philosophize about what this shit is, they just want to escape it. and that facilitates a fun ambiguity: while we can certainly assume the rig has drilled down into some sort of ancient deep-sea ecology, or disturbed a shoggoth, the sheer otherworldiness of the the thing they've unleashed suggests they might as well have somehow cracked open a portal to another dimension.
this monster could be anything, and that's simultaneously really cool and also maybe a bit of a problem. on the one hand, the thing growing up over the drill and the derrick, all elegant, intertwined fronds and shimmering light, is very clearly designed to instill a sense of awe and wonder. then there's the things you actually deal with on the ground, these weird bubbling horrors that actively try to kill you, and there's a sense that they exist and operate as they do mainly so that they can lightly--very lightly--metaphorize all the thematic issues i described above. the pointedly reflective "hostile" enemies sit uneasily with the idea that this is some alien, Other thing that has been genuinely Encountered. contrast that with handling of similar material in Nope, where the big beautiful otherworldly thing is also the thing that will just fucking eat you. but there's also definitely a way to read this whole game as Caz's death hallucination after the first explosion, with the divergence in monster types meant to represent (i don my charitable reader spectacles) the wonder of finitude within the infinite alongside the unpleasant regrets we carry with us--though there's not a huge number of tells for this being an explicit Jacob's Ladder situation and the reading feels overall plausible but weak.
to put this all differently, the game is signaling to me that the characters are more important than the monsters, the drama more important than the pulp. and fair enough! but so much of my actual playtime is spent experiencing the pulp, it's hard not to want to do more with it. it also casts into relief other strange features of Gaminess. if i am to be focusing on Caz's tough and difficult feelings about his wife, his children, and his best friend, what am i also to do with the fact that, under my control, Caz is also one of the most inexhaustible and talented gymnasts to ever live, albeit one who often jumps to a dangling bit of wreckage, arduously climbs to his feet, and then, because i do not realize how small the platform actually is, immediately walks off the other side and plunges to his doom? what of the fact that it's a running joke that other characters think Caz is a little dim (and he knows; there's some resentment in our old pal Caz), and thus he is the one constantly being ordered to undertake the most arduous Videogame Bullshit exercises, like heading deep down into the darkened generator room to toggle some switches, and then heading to a different, deeper, darker room to toggle more switches when it turns out the first ones won't work?
there's an unsteadiness at the heart of this thing, is what i think i'm getting at. it is uncertain of how to properly hybridize its videogamey nature, and the many lessons its learned from videogames, with its A24 aspirations. to be clear: no ludonarrative dissonance here! i think games have stories and they tell them in better or worse ways with the tools at their disposal. the feeling i get from this project is they had a huge toolkit at their disposal, but only a few of the tools are treated as really mattering. given production saw the sale of The Chinese Room and exit of lead creative Dan Pinchbeck, who still maintains the writer credit, who's to say what priorities shifted and how, and at whose behest, before this thing was released? i'm not trying to cast blame here, i'm simply saying: i can imagine the muddiness i observe comes down to some very practical issues with how this thing got made.
the final product is not something i'm unhappy with, and indeed, i find a great deal of it compelling in the extreme--to mention it once more and really drive the point home, i love the Forbidden Siren series and i am so, so happy to see something riffing on that in a cool way. but Siren itself is a great example of a title that fully embraces its videogame nature to tell a story in novel, incredible, and often very frustrating ways: a multiperspective non-chronological narrative horror stealth game with a unique mechanic and batshit difficult compulsory combat sequences, filled with optional collectible exposition items that allow you to piece together what's going on even as the characters remain panicked and confused. Still Wakes the Deep ultimately takes a different tactic, opting for the simpler and more established form of the First Person Narrative Rich Experience--a noble enough goal, but it keeps its pseudopods adamantly stuck to other ideas, other features of games that don't sit so easily with the remediation of cinematic prestige.
