Look behind you. I don’t want to! You must. You must! In Still Wakes the Deep, a horror game set on an oil rig, there is a button you can press that allows you to look behind you. They don’t tell you this at first. They don’t tell you this when you’re learning how navigation prompts work or how to crouch. They wait for about an hour – it feels like about an hour – until everything on the rig has started to go wrong, until you’re deep in the machine somewhere, knee-high in freezing black water, squeezing through the very tightest of mechanical spaces. Then they teach you.
Personally, I have never been less pleased to discover a new in-game power. The lights flicker. The water churns. The entire rig squeaks and groans – this incessant resettling of metal and cabling is real, by the way; the team picked it up from a documentary. And then the prompt: hey, you can look behind you if you press this button. But why would I want to do that? Why would I need to do that? Take that button away!
“We got you!” says Rob McLachlan over Skype when we’re discussing my play session later on. McLachlan is the lead designer of Still Wakes the Deep at The Chinese Room. Neat, precise, and polite, there’s clearly a splinter of anarchy in McLachlan somewhere – as there should be. “That’s exactly what we wanted,” he tells me of my reaction to the button prompt. “We were thinking: where can we teach the player to do this? So if you’re in the middle of something stressful, that would be a really bad time to teach this.” He pauses, still delighted. “I’m really glad that worked for you.”
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