Still Wakes the Deep

An award-winning cast on a genuinely underused stage

Still Wakes the Deep sends Caz McLearey, an electrician working off a troubled past, onto the Beira D oil rig in 1975, just as a drilling accident awakens something that starts tearing both the rig and its crew apart. The North Sea setting is doing real work here — horror rarely uses industrial, working-class British environments as its backdrop, and The Chinese Room leans into that specificity with genuine care, from the rig's period-accurate details to the Scottish and English accents populating its cast. That care paid off at the industry's own year-end reckoning: three BAFTA Games Awards from eight nominations, including wins for Alec Newman and Karen Dunbar's lead and supporting performances, alongside nominations spanning Artistic Achievement, Audio Achievement, British Game and Narrative. Critics backed that recognition up with solid, if platform-variable, scores — 74 on PS5, 76 on PC, 84 on Xbox — and Steam's own massive player base agrees emphatically on the presentation, Very Positive at 87.4% across more than 11,000 reviews.

What earns every bit of that praise

Environmental design is where the game is least disputed. The rig's collapse across the story isn't a single scripted set piece but a continuous, escalating process, and reviewers across the entire sentiment spectrum credit the attention to detail in how convincingly that disaster unfolds moment to moment — weather effects, structural damage, the specific texture of an industrial workplace falling apart around its terrified crew. Voice acting is the other pillar nobody disputes, and it's worth taking that praise seriously given it's now backed by two BAFTA Performer wins rather than just enthusiastic player reviews. Sound design and music round out a presentation package that's genuinely difficult to find fault with, regardless of how a given reviewer feels about anything else, and it's the kind of package that clearly resonated with BAFTA voters as much as it did with the ordinary players filling out its Steam review page.

The complaint that shows up almost everywhere

What's remarkable reading through Still Wakes the Deep's negative reviews is how narrowly and consistently they focus on one specific structural choice rather than scattering across unrelated grievances. Reviewer after reviewer, independently, describes the actual experience of playing the game using nearly identical language: strictly linear, "on-rails" progression where doors block off any path except the single intended one, no puzzles, no combat, and essentially nothing asked of the player beyond walking forward and occasionally reacting to a scripted chase sequence. One reviewer's blunt comparison lands the point about as precisely as it can be made: it plays like a theme park's Haunted House ride, carrying the player forward in a little car while jump scares fire on schedule, because that really is close to all there is to the moment-to-moment structure. Several reviewers explicitly contrast this with genuinely interactive horror, describing Still Wakes the Deep as functionally "a movie" rather than a game whatever narrative and technical polish surrounds that format.

Length compounds the frustration for many reviewers rather than standing as a separate issue. A typical playthrough runs four to six hours, and multiple detailed reviews explicitly recommend waiting for a discount given the game's NZ$49.99 launch price — not because the story or presentation are weak, but because the ratio of asking price to actual content and interactivity strikes a specific, repeated chord of disappointment. A smaller but notable complaint concerns the creature design specifically, with at least one detailed reviewer describing the otherworldly threat as closely derivative of the practical monster effects from John Carpenter's The Thing, a comparison worth knowing about if that kind of direct homage reads as unoriginal to you rather than a loving reference.

A promotional companion, not cut content

Worth clarifying one detail that occasionally gets tangled in player discussion: ahead of launch, Secret Mode released Oil Strike '75, a free retro-styled minigame collection framed as an in-universe "training exercise" for Beira D employees, developed separately by Sumo Digital Academy. It's a charming, low-stakes piece of marketing rather than content stripped from the main game, and later updates even routed a share of its optional charity-DLC revenue to Whale and Dolphin Conservation. It's easy to see how a player who discovers it only after finishing the main game might read its existence as evidence of missing content, but that's a mischaracterisation — Oil Strike '75 was always its own separate, complementary release rather than a piece of Still Wakes the Deep itself.

Verdict

Still Wakes the Deep earns its BAFTA recognition honestly on craft, atmosphere and performance — this is genuinely one of 2024's best-acted, best-designed horror experiences, and the North Sea oil rig setting deserves more company in a genre that too rarely looks past haunted houses and abandoned hospitals. What keeps it from an unqualified recommendation is a specific, remarkably consistent structural complaint from its own reviewers: there's very little game here beyond walking through a beautifully realised disaster, and at four to six hours for a premium asking price, a real and vocal share of its audience feels that ratio doesn't add up. Go in treating this as an interactive horror film with award-calibre performances, buy it on a sale rather than at launch price, and it delivers exactly what its reputation promises. Go in hoping the North Sea setting and the disaster unfolding around you will also ask something of you as a player, and the remarkably consistent minority making that exact complaint have a genuinely fair point.