Tight, restricted areas; tunnels and crevices intended to suffocate all life out of anyone who finds themselves squeezing into their confinement in a weak attempt to flee from the peril following close behind. You find it hard to decide if the area you now find yourself in, dimly illuminated by the flickering lights swaying overhead, is truly better than the complete darkness you’ve just escaped. At least in the dark, you didn’t have to see their warped faces; their twisted limbs.

If you miraculously make your way back to the surface of the oil rig you’re trapped on, you’ll be faced with perilous heights threatening to plunge you into the frenzied waters of the sea below, its waves crashing into each other with waspish desperation to reach just a bit higher, high enough to suck you into their ghastly depths. You’ll want to be careful - to avoid slipping as you crawl across support beams, slimy with the sea foam that has found its way up, yet you won’t want to move too leisurely. You are, after all, being chased by your coworkers. What’s left of them, that is. 

The game Still Wakes the Deep, created by The Chinese Room, follows the story of Cameron McLeary, nicknamed “Caz,” as his life living and working on an oil rig located in the North Sea is abruptly altered by a parasitic growth that begins to consume and control all organic life on the rig. 

Before the oil rig, Caz has a normal life living with his family. This changes, however, when someone insults his wife, and he can’t stop himself from assaulting the man who’s done so. As a result, Caz becomes wanted by the police, which he manages to avoid by listening to the advice of a family friend, Ray, and joining him at his job, working as an electrician on an isolated oil rig in the North Sea where the cops are unable to reach him. Sadly for Caz, his new boss soon discovers his secret through a letter sent by the police, and threatens to fire him. This conversation is cut short, however, as Caz’s boss receives a panicked call from another worker on the rig saying that there seems to be something strange happening with the drilling process. The boss, with rising anger, erupts at the worker and orders everybody to continue as normal before leaving Caz behind to make sure they have proceeded with the operation. 

This is when everything goes haywire, as the drill hits a dangerous, seemingly organic material that finds its way to the oil rig’s surface and begins to spread a strange, parasitic infection, mutating the workers’ bodies and using them as vessels to wreak havoc upon the survivors. The fleshy organism coats sections of the rig, making it nearly impossible to avoid as Caz embarks on multiple missions in an attempt to prolong the rig’s stability until help arrives, all while being chased and attacked by the clumps of organs that were once his coworkers, still screaming and pleading for help, some using the little humanity still left in them to urge Caz to leave before he suffers the same fate. 

Throughout the story, Caz stumbles across some still-living workers and forms partnerships with them, bonding over the shared trauma they are enduring. One by one, however, they all begin to die, as Caz discovers in various ways such as watching them get snatched by the vein-like arms of the parasitic organism, finding their dead bodies - or sometimes transformed bodies, or by hearing their final words, sometimes uttered through a dying phone line, others from beneath the clump of rubble they were crushed under.

At the end of the game, Caz is the only one remaining on the oil rig. He has lost all hope for himself, but still believes he can save the rest of the world from the fleshy monster the crew has unintentionally released from the deep. His last heroic action is igniting the rig in a fiery explosion that ensures that no one there will ever make their way to land, successfully stopping the parasite from ever mutilating anybody else while sacrificing his own life in the process. 

Still Wakes the Deep is brought to life with an engrossing plot that urges the player to continue to discover the secrets of the oil rig and the endings that await each character. Little easter eggs and details are meticulously woven into the gameplay, revealing more about each character and establishing systems for the player to form connections with them, making each death more and more difficult as the number of surviving workers slowly dwindles down. The superb voice acting and sound effects demonstrated within the game also further enhance the experience, from the horrific screams of the mutated creatures that threaten to plague the player’s nightmares, to the weak, hopeless cries of the workers as they draw their final breaths, realizing that they never stood a chance against the parasite that has risen from the depths. The immersive environment and gameplay created by The Chinese Room make Still Wakes the Deep an ideally entertaining game with complex characters and ideas that leave the player theorizing long after the last explosion.