Rewrite this title for a blog post. Remove any site names from it The title is: “This is one of my favorite horror games of the year”, this video game available in Game Pass ends in just 5 hours

It's been almost a decade since The Chinese Room last offered a narrative adventure since the very successful Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. The English studio makes a horrifying return with Still Wakes the Deep, an experience which sets sail on a Scottish oil tanker, and which aims to depict a nice range of fears: “Dizziness, drowning, claustrophobia, all the classic fears are present on an oil rig“, explained the game director, John McCormack, before adding: “And there is the distance that separates us from the earth: if communication breaks down, we are cut off from the world.“. And it is true that on the open sea and in the grip of the worst atrocities, no one will hear you scream. Brilliant idea. In the opinions scattered on the Internet, some will already say that Still Wakes the Deep is one of “their favorite horror games of the year.”

The encounter between Lovecraft and The Thing

Still Wakes the Deep takes us off the coast of Scotland in 1975, a setting that you can easily recognize just by listening to a few lines of dialogue, narrated with superb authenticity by a particularly gifted local cast. Besides, never before has a horrifying experience seemed to me to deliver such credible performances., and capable of infusing as much terror into the general atmosphere, already favored by excellent musical work. As for the year, it is not chosen at random: “Politics and class form the backdrop to the work environment on oil rigs. Many of them are talking about industrial action, and it is very important that this is included“, explained the director. Here we play McLeary, married and father of two daughters, who clearly has some penchant for violence since he is currently wanted by the police for having seriously beaten up a certain Billy Chamberlain. To avoid rotting in prison and embarrassing his family, he accepts the plan of his best friend Roy, a cook on the Beira D oil platform, who finds him a job there. McLeary is an anti-hero as we like them, not devoid of humor and with a composure that we appreciate in the most delicate situations.

The nightmarish adventure begins with a letter from his wife, who is clearly not very impressed by the idea of ​​him being on an oil tanker a few thousand kilometers from home. She then orders him to return to his family, a request that will be, as one might expect, very difficult to grant. At this point, McLeary is already well acquainted with the ship's personnel, saving us from tedious introductions. The horror sets in so quickly, however, that it's hard to fully absorb the handful of friendly faces you meet before the peace is swept away by the Lovecraftian substances that have replaced our colleagues' arms and legs. In the grip of a clearly supernatural catastrophe that transforms employees into deformed, mindless entities, McLeary finds himself with no way out aboard a platform on the verge of explosion and in a quagmire that clearly reminds us of The Thing by Carpenter.

Memorable if not sprawling

In Still Wakes the Deep, you are free to approach the experience from its story mode to avoid the fear of dying in the hands of sordid creatures, or to opt for the standard option, which will not put you in any case. never face a test that is too difficult. The game also manages to offer a very correct balance between the sequences of full anxiety dedicated to sneaking through conduits to avoid being surrounded by a horror, and the calmer phases of linear exploration. No need to constantly tense up like you might do in Outlast, here, The Chinese Room lets us breathe, occasionally lulling us with lovely directorial choices that leave us blissful.

The gameplay mechanics, on the other hand, remain very basic and time-consuming from start to finish. Each corridor you walk through comes with its share of padlocks to break, platform holes to climb over and monsters to dodge by crawling through a space with impossible deviation. McLeary passively and mind-numbingly follows a path constantly painted with yellow markings and whose narrowness makes the crossing all the more cramped. The victims follow one another without us really getting attached to them and bits of McLeary's past emerge from time to time without fully managing to properly cling to the narrative thread, which, as generic as it may be, nevertheless demonstrates a very touching humanity. If The Chinese Room brilliantly mastered the art of environmental narration in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, it is experienced here essentially through dialogues, often scattered in distress calls from colleagues that we barely remember. But it is very pleasant to hear a few rational voices in these labyrinths of cold corridors haunted by the impossible. And if the story of Still Wakes the Deep has difficulty gripping us until the end, it is difficult to get rid of it once the credits have rolled, however short it may be.