“I can’t take your call right now; I’m trying to get past Trots.” In appreciation of Still Wakes The Deep.
***Minor spoilers for Still Wakes The Deep below***
This last week has been a busy one. Summer is over, the school term is in full swing, and business is starting to pick up again after a quiet couple of months. Emails to answer, auditions to record, plus the small matter of ticking off a couple of major career goals; I’ve been honoured and humbled not only to be shortlisted for not one but two VOX Awards and - still pinching myself here - I’ve been invited to join the BAFTA Connect programme as a voice actor, giving me access to a pretty mind-blowing selection of industry events designed to help promising creatives in the early stages of their career get a foot in the door of an industry that can be pretty hard to navigate at the best of times.
But in spite of all these positive happenings, something has been lingering at the back of my mind, occupying my thoughts and clouding my perspective. A burning question that I have yet to find the answer to.
How the hell do I get past Trots?
Those of you who have played Still Wakes The Deep know what I’m talking about. For those of you that haven’t, you should. Even if you don’t like horror games. I don’t like horror games. Well, that’s not true, I do like horror games. I like acting in horror games; the menace, the extremes, the unbearable weight of bad, bad goings on you can’t quite explain. But playing horror games? That’s a different story. I am, in short, a wimp. I can handle a film (within reason - Terrifier is a hard no for me) where you submit yourself to the director’s whim and let them scare you as they please, safe in the knowledge that, however bad it gets, it’ll all be over in two hours.
A game is a different story.
With a game, it’s all down to you. Survival. Mashing the button fast enough. Aiming the pistol at the zombie’s face. Knowing when to dodge and when to get the fudge out as fast as you fudging can, scrambling pathetically to momentary safety before it dawns on you with utter despair that not only is the only way out via that dank alley with a suspicious left turn and no lighting save for that dying street lamp, but you don’t have any fudging ammo. And the last checkpoint was twenty minutes ago. And you’ve wet yourself. Ok, maybe not that part.
Resident Evil, Dead Space, even Dead Island 2; I’ve tried, but I just don’t have what it takes. I am a snowflake.
So you’ll forgive me for approaching Still Wakes The Deep with some trepidation. It is, after all, a horror game, or at least marketed as such. I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t aware of the title before release, nor was I familiar with developers The Chinese Room or their previous works, arriving late this to current gaming era’s party (see previous blog post).
But everyone on LinkedIn - where I get most of my intel - seemed to be talking about it. People who sound like they know what they ‘re talking about were talking about it. And if there’s one thing that’s certain in these most uncertain times, it’s that you should always listen to people who sound like they know what they’re talking about, especially if it’s on social media. And lots of those people were saying lots of positive things about Still Wakes The Deep. Plus the premise is killer, the ingredients straight out of the classic John Carpenter textbook: oil rig, storm, disaster, evil. With a Scottish twist. Not to mention the total gameplay time is around the six or seven hours mark. Even for a wimp like me, this seemed manageable.
So I gave it a go, not really knowing what I was letting myself in for, taking my first cautious steps down the halls of the Beira D oil rig in the steel toe boots and coveralls of Caz McCleary, who, it becomes immediately apparent, is already deep in the shite long before any monsters show up. And when I say cautious steps, I mean cautious steps. One foot at a time, tiptoeing down the stairs and peeping round corners as though an entire horde of clickers is suddenly going to explode into the cabin before Michael Myers guts me in the showers. I told you I was pathetic.
But Resident Evil this is not. No jump scares and set pieces just yet, only leaky pipes and dodgy bulbs, safety hazards piling up which point to some staggering degree of corporate mismanagement a la 1975. No, no Matty Healy in a Jehovah’s witness suit. Just shameless negligence and greed, before anyone did anything about it - it’s not fresh hell, it’s as stale as it gets. Rig workers gripe and moan as they wolf down their full Englishes in the drab canteen, all faded lino and paper thin tartan curtains, lining their stomachs before the big drill of the day; the one that everyone knows is a really bad idea. They don’t have a choice. The “pricks in Westminster” want our oil, says friendly rig worker union rep Trots (more on him later). But hey, a job’s a job. Someone called Brodie is talking about something I’ve done and someone called Rennick wants to see me about it. He doesn’t sound nice and, spoiler alert, he isn’t.
Right from the offset, there’s a palpable, pervading harshness to the environment and situation. It travels through the static of the wireless in the shipping forecast and drips down the railings on the deck. You can practically taste the salt in the wind and the nicotine in the airless living quarters. It’s enough to drive anyone to despair. Every element of the hyper realistic visuals and sound design, from the rust on the shipping containers to the constant, low hum of something not quite right, is perfectly calibrated to drive home just how isolated and exploited these people are. By the time the thing happens that sends the game into overdrive - barely ten minutes into the game - we’ve just about had all we can take. I use what tools I can find with the skills at my disposal to solve a series of puzzles (who knew an electrician simulator could be so engrossing), occasionally plunging to my death with an assortment of expletives that I can only imagine were immensely satisfying to perform.
Which brings us to Trots.
A few weeks ago, I showed my children Jurassic Park for the first time. I was intrigued to see how it held up, thirty-one years after it trampled all over the summer box office, and whether it would sustain the interest of a nine and seven year old raised on the sugar rush of Despicable Me and Loud House (Groundhog Day had been a disaster). Yes, they asked when it would finish about thirty times before Dennis (Wayne Knight) meets a sticky end, but from that point on they were hooked, never more than in the scene in the abandoned canteen kitchen towards the end of the film, where Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello) attempt to evade the two raptors who are stalking them through the rows of stainless steel appliances. They crawl on the floor, hide in ovens and try not to breathe so the raptors won’t hear them. It’s an ingenious scene that takes the brutal intensity and visceral fear of James Cameron’s Aliens, but somehow waters it down for the PG audience to give primary school kids their first taste of horror.
What does this have to do with Still Wakes The Deep? You may wonder. Bear with me.
Later than evening I find myself crawling through the vents of the Beira D once again, feeling sorry for myself after failing to save a number of colleagues from becoming snacks for evil. By this point that pervading harshness I mentioned earlier has started to seep into my field of vision in nightmarish blotches of green and purple goo, a malaise so tangible it practically drips from the screen. The closer I am to the source of the evil, the worse it gets. Right now, I can hardly see. I drop down into the laundry room and find myself face to face with Trots, my one time union rep turned hideous tentacled slug creature. It’s quite the career change. Guess there won’t be any industrial action any time soon.
The task is simple. Get past Trots, who appears to be feasting on a washing machine. I take a trademark scaredy cat step and the game immediately tells me to hide in a cupboard. Trots is on to me. I cower in fear for a second or two before nervously making my way round the perimeter of the room. Except, of course, Trots has actual eyes in the back of his head and is surprisingly nimble for an oversized slug thing, presumably due to the various extra limbs he appears to have borrowed from his victims.
“I fuckin’ see you, McCleary!”
Green and purple goo fills the screen, and I become one with the slug.
Thankfully no one is watching, because I’m not very good at this. At all. Try as I might, whichever way I attempt to make it past my unfortunate colleague, it always ends in slime. The game presents me with cupboards to crawl through and objects to throw, presumably as a distraction, but it wants me to do all this simultaneously, and I don’t have the dexterity to multitask in life or death situations, virtual or otherwise. I die. Again…and again…and again…and again. Only once do I manage to sprint past Trots and make it halfway up the stairs on the other side but, alas, he catches up with me. My heart can barely take the nail biting suspense.
And yet, I keep coming back for more. It strikes me - presumably because I watched the film mere hours before turning on the game (but a comparison that holds up, I think, on closer scrutiny) - that the Get Past Trots scene, or challenge, if you will, feels like a twisted homage to Spielberg’s masterly kitchen set piece in Jurassic Park. Sure, a few variables are subbed - kitchen for laundry, ovens for washers, precocious tweens for a fugitive Scotsman, three raptors for one Trots, island off Costa Rica for an oil rig off Hull - but the meat and bones of the experience is the same: survival in uncomfortably close quarters with a ruthless predator using wits alone, a normally innocuous and functional setting rendered nightmarish by a series of horrifying events. The trip to the power generator is another example. You could make similiar comparisons to Carpenter’s The Thing or The Fog. Even Scorsese’s Shutter Island; the ominous opening aerial shot approaching the rig echoing that film’s arrival by boat at its eponymous island. It gave me such a thrill playing it to see how far video games have come in 2024; what once was the very limit of what Hollywood could achieve is now an experience you can live out in the comfort of your own home, supercharged. Add a decent screen and surround sound, and Still Wakes The Deep is arguably the more immersive.
The genius of this game is how it works on so many levels. On the surface, you have what some have decried as a simulator on rails, one which uses a fairly simple premise as a framework to propel the player through a series of increasingly complex and disturbing puzzles and encounters. Which I find a little strange. Is a rollercoaster not thrilling because it’s on rails? Would you prefer it without? And where exactly are we supposed to go on an oil rig? By its nature, it is a restricted and restrictive location, a feature Still Wakes The Deep embraces fully. A guided experience allows the developers to focus our attentions on the game’s key themes and story, more of which later.
And then there’s the way it gets under your skin, like the bubbling visions slowly infiltrating Caz’s crumbling psyche (could the whole thing be a metaphor for one man’s slow and devastating breakdown, the colleagues he can’t save a mirror of the failures he keeps running away from? I haven’t yet played to the end, so this feels very much possible). Despite my total lack of progress on the Trots front, something that would usually cause me to hang up the controller on a game, it becomes all consuming, occupying my thoughts at the most inconvenient times. I get up to make a cup of tea between auditions, only to lose myself in a state of problem solving contemplation, suddenly transfixed by the potential of a wayward mug. My children find me frozen by the washing machine in the morning, mentally retreading steps and wondering if I’d missed a crucial void between appliances. I make a plan to try it later and see how I get on; successfully, it turns out. We are safe. For now.
Finally, of course, there’s that pervading sense of sadness and regret that shrouds proceedings, literally and figuratively. This is a man who has lost everything, surrounded people who have been stripped of rights and bled of dignity, victim to the kind of big business vampirism that is still alive and kicking today, to which we are just as powerless now as they were in 1975. This was a time when it maybe wasn’t too late to avoid environmental catastrophe, when maybe there was a fork in the road. If someone back then, anyone at all, had stopped to think how damaging all that drilling might be, we might have saved ourselves a whole lot of trouble. Alas, we took the low road.
So there we have it, Still Wakes The Deep, a game that is both thrill ride and character study, schlock-fest and thought provoking social commentary. It is quite the unique beast; one that I know, against all odds, I will be playing to its conclusion.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get away from Rennick…