Still Wakes the Deep Review

It's mere days before Christmas Day 1975, and poor old Caz McLeary is stuck aboard an oil rig amid a roiling North Sea. As if that alone wasn't enough of a nightmare for the protagonist of Still Wakes the Deep, then the arrival of a mysterious cosmic horror running rampant throughout the Beira D oil platform is just salt in the wound – Caz's day is about to go from bad to much, much worse as it happens. And what follows is an intense, nerve-jangling first-person horror experience that doesn't let up for long.

Taking its title from a fictional poem called 'The Trawlermen', Still Wakes the Deep instantly grabs you and immerses you inside its lived-in microcosm. It opens within the boxy confines of Caz's small room – a relative moment of quiet that does little to prepare you for the claustrophobia and constant sense of unease that ensues. Caz is already having a rotten time, before shite hits the proverbial fan. His belligerent boss, Rennick (toeing the line for faceless corporation Cadal), wants to see him in his office, and it can't be for anything good.

Cue an angry exchange liberally peppered with effin' and jeffin' (and a few choice 'c' words), and Caz finds himself fired, forced to depart the Beira D by chopper. Except there's no way he's getting out of here anytime soon; not without a fight. As Caz approaches the helicopter, all hell breaks loose, and the rig is engulfed by a bizarre, fleshy mass – a seemingly alien organism that's weaved its way through every corridor and crevice, breathing and pulsating, emanating its weird influence. It all goes a bit John Carpenter's The Thing, the rig's crew taking a funny turn.

It falls to Caz to find a way off the Beira D, but with a violent storm raging, and friendly cook Roy not faring so well in the canteen storeroom, the odds are stacked against him. It's deathly cold, it's inhospitable, the rig is being steadily torn apart and filling with seawater, and there's a murderous lumpen something after you. There's a good reason Still Wakes the Deep enables you to quickly whip your viewpoint around 180-degrees with a click of the right stick – you're being relentlessly hounded and that thing doesn't give up.

You're able to hide in lockers, cubbyholes, and other nooks, throwing objects like wrenches, hammers, mugs, flasks, hardhats, or whatever else is at hand to create a distraction. But invariably, you'll end up having to frantically sprint to safety, squeezing into a tight gap or narrow ventilation shaft for brief respite from the chase. Caz is the rig's electrician, but his fraught situation means he soon has to become a jack of all trades, firing up short circuited 'jennies' (generators), releasing the lifeboats, and draining rising water from the platform's flooded legs.

There's a lot of throwing levers, pushing buttons, turning creaky valves, and flicking switches in an effort to keep ailing systems running, to find some way - any way - to escape. The Beira D feels like an entirely authentic place; groaning and clanking as it dies a slow and agonising death – its struts, gantries, cranes, and pipework are bent and tangled like spaghetti, stairways and ladders sheared off, thoroughfares aflame beneath unending, lashing rain. Every inch of Still Wakes the Deep's setting is hostile, before you even take into account the abominations stalking Caz at every turn.

It's a desperate situation, and the rig's crew of mostly Scottish workers react believably to each unbelievable occurrence. In what's become typical of developer The Chinese Room's output, dialogue is impeccably written – everyone speaks as you'd expect. Who, trapped and hunted like this, wouldn't spout a stream of expletives? It's perfectly, quintessentially British, and it all rings true. Or, at least as true as a horror scenario like Still Wakes the Deep can be. This is practically movie-quality stuff, making it difficult to put the game down once you've picked it up. I finished Still Wakes the Deep in a single sitting, so propulsive and compelling is its narrative.

Hints of Caz's past come through as the screen edges bubble like melting celluloid, and, suddenly, Still Wakes the Deep becomes a metaphor. Is Caz really experiencing all of this? Did something else happen to him before the rig was taken over by the monster's unctuous tentacles and bloated pustules that shimmer like luminescent pearls? Is he really trying to escape his difficult past – flashbacks to arguments with his wife Suze hint at something more complicated not to be taken at face value. There's more going on here than meets the eye.

This is The Chinese Room at its finest, then. The same studio that defined the so-called 'walking simulator' with Dear Esther in 2012, firing on all cylinders to create an experience that wholly envelops you for the entirety of its lean 5-6 hour duration, right up until the inevitable denouement and downbeat epilogue. Still Wakes the Deep offers no simple answers, no neat and satisfying conclusions or Hollywood ending. Instead it delivers the walking simulator as a haunted house; one with little walking and a lot of running – a cinematic survival horror in which both the monster and the setting conspire to kill you. And it's superb.