A short review on 'Still Wakes the Deep' which I spent around 4 hours this weekend playing.

The Thing in the Sea

It's a cross between 'The Thing' and 'The Color Out of Space'; You play as a guy who's sent out to work on an isolated oil rig at sea when the drill hits the cosmic unknown and strange things start happening to the crew. The gameplay fits firmly in the walking simulator genre in that there's no combat or puzzles and progression is made by going or sneaking from point A to B. The eldritch themes are conveyed through great visual and narrative moments and the result is a compact but satisfying story.

Despite the positively gory portrayal of body transformation, the actual gameplay itself is bland and uninspired. The traversal is littered with mundane speed bumps like opening vents and operating contraptions. QTE's like losing balance when crawling across a beam are repetitive and hence predictable. There are some genuinely neat sequences and the enemy encounters are pretty cool but they're like 15% of the entire game and I simply wanted more.

Verdict

If you're like me and starved for Lovecraftian video games then it's a-ok, otherwise much of what the game offers can be experienced through some other guy's video.

⭐⭐/5