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During an extended demonstration of The Chinese Room’s terrifying new firstperson chiller, there’s a moment when we belatedly realise we’ve been so fixated on the screen that we’ve failed to take a single note for several minutes. The latest game from the Brighton-based developer of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs combines the period authenticity of the former with the lurching horror of the latter, and the results are – clearly – deeply immersive and knuckle-whiteningly intense.
Set aboard an offshore oil platform in 1975, Still Wakes The Deep casts you as Caz McLeary, a Glaswegian electrician whose tasked with saving his colleagues (and possibly the rig itself) when they drill into, well, something not of this Earth. The game is described by its makers as “Annihilation meets The Poseidon Adventure”, though the tone is more precisely described by creative director John McCormack. “Our original idea was getting a sense of: if Ken Loach directed a BBC documentary about life on an oil rig in the 1970s and then something awful happened during filming, and they asked Stanley Kubrick to take over.”
In our exclusive cover story, we find out about the meticulous research that went into crafting this memorable setting (the studio believes that by the time the credits have rolled “players should feel confident that if they were stranded on an oil rig, they could get the power back on”), and why the game’s otherworldly presence is not necessarily the deadliest threat McLeary will face – particularly when the frigid waters and powerful currents of the North Sea come into play.
Elsewhere in Edge 386, we talk to Bossa Studios head Henrique Olifiers on why the creator of Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread pivoted to co-operative survival with the luxurious Lost Skies. Another Brit studio making waves is nDreams: we visit its Farnborough HQ to profile a team at the vanguard of VR development, and discover why the telekinesis-powered Synapse is shaping up to be one of 2023’s most exciting shooters. We catch up with Tunic creator Andrew Shouldice following the game’s recent BAFTA wins for a fascinating Making Of feature, showcasing an abundance of early sketches and concept art. And in Time Extend we consider how UFO: Enemy Unknown established a strategy formula that would become a genre of its own.
In Play we deliver verdicts on Street Fighter 6, Diablo IV, System Shock, Amnesia: The Bunker and more, while the coming attractions in Hype include Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, Die Gute Fabrik’s Saltsea Chronicles, Blasphemous 2, and one of the year’s brightest indie prospects, Cocoon. All this and much more is in Edge 386, which is on sale now.
