First of all, Still Wakes the Deep is an incredible artistic achievement. It may be The Chinese Room’s best ever game, blending the tense creeping horror of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs with the evocative, beautifully researched world-building of Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
And there are familiar themes here: a sense of weariness about industrialisation, remote places that howl with the absence of far away loved ones. A shockingly effective sense of place that grounds the whole thing. Whether or not you have any lived experience of Scotland in the 1970s, Still Wakes the Deep will make you believe you do. But I think it could have been bolder. More on that later.
Along the East Coast of Scotland there can be found some of the most beautiful places on Earth. Soaring cliffs topped with the ruins of forgotten castles. Sleepy villages hidden away from the world as they nestle in the crags of natural harbours. Every town having a big successful chippy that all the tourists go to, and the small, actually good chippy off the main street that all the savvy locals go to. Arbroath, with its grin-inducing duality of being a location of great historical importance, where kings were made, and also the host of Pleasureland, a comically dilapidated indoor amusement park that feels like a living Reeves and Mortimer sketch.
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