The Chinese Room drills into a rich vein of ’70s horror in terrifying first person chiller Still Wakes The Deep

By Chris Schilling

Caz McLeary ran away to sea to escape his problems. As this working-class ex-boxer from Glasgow chats with a colleague in the canteen of the Beira D, an oil rig in the North Sea just off the coast of Scotland, the nature of those problems soon becomes clear. His wife, Suze, is talking about divorce. She’ll come around, his workmate says. Not likely, McLeary responds, “if I get the jail”. His crime? Assaulting a man who insulted her. “Remember,” his friend begins, “life is like football. It’s not over…” McLeary finishes the sentence: “…until the final whistle, aye. But you’re a Barnsley fan, so you’re pretty much fucked from the off.”

Hours later, he’s running to escape a very different kind of problem, the possibility of prison now the least of his worries. The rig, we’re told, as our demonstration skips forward a few chapters, has drilled into “something”. For a good while, you won’t know exactly what that something is, but you’ll begin to see its effects, on both the rig and the crew themselves. At the controls, QA tester Tom Grant guides McLeary to duck under a gantry, grabbing a bottle to throw and distract whatever is pursuing him. A series of loud metallic thuds follows, and Grant emerges from his hiding place. As it turns out, he’s moved a little too soon: from the cacophonous noise (nigh indescribable even if we hadn’t been asked not to reveal the precise nature of the threat), it’s clear he’s been spotted. The sound only gets louder and closer as he sprints up a set of steps, just about making it to an open hatch – narrow enough to accommodate a human but nothing larger – before dropping down.

IT STARTS, AS ALL THE BEST HORROR STORIES DO, WITH A SLOW BUILD. YOU’RE GIVEN TIME TO GET TO KNOW THE BEIRA D AND ITS CREW

McLachlan:“By the end, players should feel confident that if they were stranded on an oil rig, they could at least get the power back on”

We suddenly notice that we’ve been so fixated on the screen that we’ve failed to take any notes for the past couple of minutes. Glancing down at our pen, we notice a hairline crack that may or may not have been there before. A faint murmur spreads throughout the room, and we see that some of the developers present are holding their hands to their chests. Even creative director John McCormack blows out his cheeks: “You cut that fine!” As the room collectively takes a breath, McCormack turns to address us. “My son is coming to us for work experience as a tester,” he says, breaking into a broad grin. “He’s gonna be shitting himself.”

Still Wakes The Deep, the new game from The Chinese Room, is very much in the Brighton studio’s wheelhouse. It combines the firstperson exploration of Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (which themselves dipped a toe into horror territory) with the intensity and moderateto-severe peril of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. The developer’s aim, McCormack says, is “to tell a story in The Chinese Room way, but advance the gameplay into something that was more frenetic [and] action-based.”

But it starts, as all the best horror stories do, with a slow build. You’re given the time and space to properly get to know the Beira D and its crew, in order to make the events that follow when things start going very wrong all the more powerful and emotionally affecting. “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,” McCormack says, to laughter from his colleagues.