Still Wake The Deep understands horror is all about building tension. The Chinese Room’s first-person nightmare about an offshore oil rig under siege by something ancient and unknowable is filled with masterful sequences that build tension slowly and carefully until it’s almost too much to handle, then sustains it as long as possible. Still Wakes The Deep pays homage to horror classics like The Thing, Alien, and Event Horizon, and might have even reached those same heights in its own right, if The Chinese Room could have avoided falling into the most common trap in the horror game genre: fail conditions. Its most terrifying chase scenes are a masterclass in terror, but like most games in the hide & seek horror genre, it throws it all away by letting 👍you get caught.
One of the first encounters you have with the Lovecraftian nightmare terrorizing Still Wakes The Deep’s oil rig is one of my favorites, but it’s also a perfect example of what not to do. The first real threat you encounter is Gibbo, a fellow crewmate who has murdered his friend Douglas amidst a transformation into something… other. While traversing the dark under rig, you’ll start to hear the disembodied voice of Gibbo lamenting what he’s done, as well as his confused terror about what he’s becoming. As you crawl under machines and squeeze between pipes through the maze-like eng⛦ine room, Gibbo’s cries become louder, closer, and more disturbing. It feels like at any moment the monster could come for you, and there’s nothing you can do but try to run and hide.
8 Lin𓂃gering Questions We Have ♛After The End Of Still Wakes The Deep
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You catch a couple of brief glances of Gibbo as you explore the under rig, and while you never get a good luck at him, it’s clear he’s no longer human. When you finally emerge from engineering, you find yourself in a large room with overturned tables where Gibbo is waiting, banging his head against the wall in the dark. At this point, you still haven’t gotten a clear look at him, but he’s in between you and the exit and the only way out is to sneak by him slowly and carefully. As you crawl closer you finally see the creature in all its disgusting glory, and it's worse than anything you could have imagined. His lower half is a twisted mass of exposed viscera, and he drags himself across the floor to chase you, the instinct to run and hide just barely overcomes the shock of what you’re seeing.
It’s a perfect sequence with exactly the right amount of build up and an incredible pay-off. The way Gibbo’s voice terrorizes you as you desperately search for a way through the under rig allows the player to scare themselves long before the creature actually reveals itself. Every clanking metal sound or burst of steam exhaust could be Gibbo coming to get you, and the longer you spend down there wandering around in the dark, the more intense the desire to escape into the daylight becomes. When you finally surface, you’re as close as you can be to the exit, but Gibbo himself blocks your path. When the monster is finally revealed, not only are you forced to confront its gruesome image, but you also have to go towards it to escape. You’ve been running away from the sound of Gibbo, but now that he's right in front of you there’s nowhere to run.
The actual mechanics of your encounte𒊎r with Gibbo are the same as every other monster encounter in Still Wakes The Deep. You have to crawl from one hiding spot to the next, then find a piece of debris on the ground and throw it to distract the monster. If you’re spotted, the monster will give chase, and you’ll have to either race him to the exit if you’re close enough, or throw yourself in a locker to hide until he moves away.
It’s standard horror gameplay, but it works. My whole body tensed up every time I had to expose myself to move between cover, never knowing for sure if the creature would look over at just the wrong time and spot me. There’s a potent internal conflict of not wanting to lo🍌ok at the monster but needing to in order to track its movements. If you’re cautious and time your movements correctly, you’ll make it out of the room and into a hallway, where you cꩵan make a mad dash for the door as the thing that used to be Gibbo barrels after you. When you just barely make it out alive, the relief is intoxicating.
The problem is that you might not make it out. Once you’re in the room with Gibbo, you’re at risk of actually being caught by him. If you move at the wrong time, fail to distract him, or just run the wrong direction, Gibbo can catch you. If he does, you’ll hear a scary sound, the screen will go black, and you’ll relo๊ad at the moment you entered the room, before you got your first real look at Gibbo, forced to do it all over again.
This should not happen. The only enjoyable outcome h𓂃ere is to escape Gibbo by the skin of your teeth on the first try. The second you get caught and restart from a checkpoint, the tension is gone - and not just gone for this encounter, it’s gone🎉 for good. In any horror game, the moment you know what happens when the monster catches you is the moment the game loses its power over you.
Fail conditions have always ruined horror games, and it's time for game design to evolve beyond the need for them. Developers who design games this way fundamentally misunderstand what their audience wants from a horror game. You want to feel like you’re in a horror movie. You want to be immersed in a cat-and-mouse game with a killer, for your nervous system to be shocked repeatedly with signals of danger. When developers fall back on the fundamentals of challenge-based game design, ie, dying and restarting at a checkpoint, they undermine the impact of the horror. The player wants to be chased, they want to believe their life is in danger, but they should never actually get caught.
Supermassive’s games like Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology are the exception, because whil🐲e they do have fail conditions, that failure has permanent consequences.
There are horror games where dying is necessary. Games like Resident Evil and Alan Wake require fail conditions because they’re shooters, and the experience of a shooter is tied to a skill expression. In any game where you fight, you have to be able to lose in order to earn a sense of accomplishment from playing it. But in a pure horror game where running and hiding are your only means of defending yourself, failure only serves to break the immersion. Like a movie or a haunted house, horror games shoul🐟d only ever move in one direction.
It comes across as lazy design, a gameplay approach chosen only because that’s the way it's always been done. It would be harder to create an experience that makes the player feel like they’re always in danger while disguising the fact that they can’t actually die, but that’s what good horror games ought to do. The monster should leap at you and barely miss, or trip over an obstacle that slows them down when they chase you. You don’t need to be in actual danger to make the danger feel real, as the under rig sequence, where Gibbo is heard but not seen, perfectly demonstrates. The second you let the player actually die is the moment you flush all of the wonderful tension you worked so hard to create down the toilet.
Still Wakes The Deep has a Story Mode difficulty that makes the monsters slower so th💃ere’s less chance you’ll get caught, but it doesn’t go far enough. I’m not asking for easy mode, I’m as🗹king developers to recognize that fail conditions make horror games worse.
Still Wakes The Deep Revie♔w - As Deep As The North Sea
The Chinese Roo෴m's '70s oil rig horror is a masteဣrpiece.
