The Babble Bruh Reviews

It isn’t every day you find yourself in the shoes of a Scottish Electrician hiding from an Eldritch Entity on an Oil Rig. But when you do it makes you think “Wow this fucking sucks for everyone here, at least the accents are fun”.

Horror games are fantastic. They come in all shapes and styles, and I love all of them. Whether you’re running from naked inmates in the pitch-dark asylum of Outlast or actively beating the shit out of flesh monsters on the spaceship Ishimura in Dead Space, there’s always a great time to be had because you’re getting a glimpse of something truly terrible that you would probably have no way of actually surviving (at least for me, anyway), and it’s just so much fun.

Still Wakes the Deep puts us right into such an awesome situation as the funny character Cameron “Caz” McLeary. Our boy Caz is pretty much a career fuck-up sitting on the end of a chain of bad life decisions that has put his ass working on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Like some other cool horror game protagonists, you’re the rig’s electrician who’s good with the “leccy,” as he says. After some standard tragic “I’m in trouble and I miss my family” backstory yapping, you find yourself on your final day of employment on the rig with some really colorful Scottish characters that I could listen to all day. One thing leads to another, and the usual Monday work activities turn into a massive shit storm when the rig’s drill strikes something it shouldn’t have. You get a really cool cutscene of you and your friends shitting your pants in Scottish, and then you wake up in the med bay where the game officially starts.

Much like Outlast or Visage, the game has no combat. It’s primarily running, swimming, climbing, and occasionally hiding while a bunch of really creepy shit happens all around you. It’s scenic, immersive, and has some good scares. Though the real treasure of this game is the “Thing” that is on the rig with you and your friends and how you have to play around it as the game progresses. The really cool thing about this eldritch monster is that you have no idea what the monster really is, and honestly, you never do. Which is good, because you can’t have an “indescribable horror beyond imagining” and then show me an octopus or something. The best I can come up with for this game’s antagonist is that it’s a growth… like a meat growth. It’s got a pulse, moves around the ship, and makes your character feel funny when you look at it for too long. It also does a really funny thing where it turns your friends into meat monsters that do meat monster things.

As the game progresses, you’re trying your best to maintain the integrity of the oil rig. It’s sinking, slowly blowing up, and has something terrible growing in its walls and parts, but damnit, you’re a video game electrician with a screwdriver, and that means the responsibility of every key station is now yours to fix. As is tradition. The fun thing is, your character Caz is very vocal about how insane this plan is, and every time he’s told by one of the still-living coworkers what he has to do to save the day, he usually responds with a quick “Fuck off, you.”

While Caz is playing the omni-engineer, the “Thing” that has boarded the ship is also growing. Getting bigger, crazier, and meatier as the game progresses, you run into more and more monsters that you have to crawl around or straight up run from so that you too don’t join your friends in the meat pile. Think of it like the Necromorphs from Dead Space combined with the Borg from Star Trek. It’s great.

All in all, Still Wakes the Deep provides a very cool and immersive cosmic horror experience that you can beat in a prolonged gaming session or maybe two if you take the scenic route. For the monster alone, I will give this game a solid 7/10.