I played Still Wakes The Deep!
It was pretty good!
I think there’s something deep (ho-ho) in the Scottish psyche (mine, my parents, my parents’ friends, songwriters, authors etc.) that yearns for the grim isolation of an island, an oil rig, or a misty hill. If I think about it for long enough something starts to tick inside me, mechanically putting the pieces together to solidify the idea that I deserve to live somewhere horrid, and also secretly that somehow I’d thrive there because it is my natural environment. Like the penguin, I fear that one day I too will waddle away into the ice-covered rocks and cold water and find myself deeply, uncomfortably home.
Still Wakes The Deep is a capital-S Scottish game, with great (and famously hard-to-replicate) voice work all round, and an incredibly unique Scottish Gaelic text option. Possibly the first game to ever have this, and while Scottish Gaelic text is not a particularly historically accurate inclusion it is culturally incredibly important. Honestly I’d love for more games and studios to think about their setting in a more considered way like this - yes, this is a game for an anglophonic audience, but it is choosing to communicate a cultural and linguistic context that is important in understanding (and respecting!) the world in which it takes place.
Oh that’s not that big a deal, you might say, it’s not even a Scottish Gaelic dub. It’s a really big deal! Scottish Gaelic is a language that has, to use the scientific term, “fuck all” speakers, and hasn’t really had representation or support to keep it alive in Scotland. To include the language in any capacity at all was a massive step, to include a full Gaelic subtitling effort that you need to play through to get that 100% cheevo trophy is incredible.
Get your culture up to get your money (trophy/cheevo score) up.
We’ve got the good out of the way, now to set sail to the less good parts.
So in a game like this where we are mostly interacting with an on-the-rails story experience there needs to be special attention paid to the writing and to the character writing, which I think uniformly falls pretty flat here. There are phenomenal character moments, absolutely, and there are phenomenal performances, but there is too much pure game-y writing and the drama and characters on the Beria oil rig suffer for it.
For a story like this to work for me (I should stress that this is not a rule!) I think there needed to have been a lot more emphasis on why the characters are acting like they act and with what additional motivations; I dearly wanted these people to be bigoted, sexist, cowardly, inconsistent, and still be worth saving from horrid sea monsters.
Having the accent and the dialects on full display places us into a strong geographical context, sure, but there needed to be an emotional context for character actions, and there needed to be the potential for character actions to refute the natural progression of the game to create story moments. Instead the story moments are almost always mechanical (go here, fix this, go here, fix this other thing), the characters’ issues secondary. I never felt like I was needed to help someone, only that I was needed to repair some shit. It’d be nice if we got something more like ‘Jonesy, the Partick Thistle nut, was on the radio for a bit with me but he’s gone and turned the dive platform into a church to the gods of the deep and he thinks that letting women vote is what damned us all, go see if you can talk him out of it stupid bastard has turned the generators off’ and less like ‘we need you to go turn the generator oan pal’. It’s like the game keeps on crossing over from realistic, grounded problems to gamey location-convenient ones, rarely rewarding or surprising us and instead just funneling us from problem to problem until the end.
Too many characters were also squeezed uncomfortably into a fixed ‘box’, something that works fine in other games like, say, fighting games, but not so much here in a dramatic story game!
For example, Rennick, our oil rig boss man, lacks internal sense. You can be small and bitter and a huge fan of free labour and the carceral system, and desire nothing more than to be a well paid administrator of a rusting leviathan eating the very heart of the planet, but you also need to operate in your own best interests and express yourself in a way that describes those interests implicitly or explicitly. Instead he’s just pissed ALL THE TIME, we spend a lot of in-game minutes getting shouted at by Rennick but there’s no content, no meat there to develop who Rennick is or why he is how he is.
You have a communist and an EDL supporter as two of the characters-turned-monstrous but the surface is allllll there is to these men, there’s little in the way of secret thoughts exposed or motivations uncovered. When they transform, they are unleashed, and what that looks like is... the same, but gone goo mode. Creature-maxxing with limited dramatic meaning.
Lookin' braw, big man.
In a game like this, where this narrative and performance is pushed to the front of the experience, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the characters have more to work with. Rennick could be religious - many will immediately be familiar with the performance’s flavour of particularly joy-hating calvinist choler - but he can’t be, because the Religious One is already filled up by another character like they’re slots in a boy band. Single-note characterisation means we just don’t have contradictions to work with or untangle, no internality to explore, and that just lets the characters and the setting down a lot.
This is actually normal, in Scotland.
Cameron McCleary, our focal character, is vaguely motioned at being a not-entirely-nice man, but as the picture becomes clearer any ambiguity is removed as it turns out that he’s mostly pretty neat if a little rogueish. What a charmer, but also like… for a game like this, my big question is ‘why’? Why can’t he be a dick? Why is his heart in the right place, can’t his heart be in the wrong place and through these horrific circumstances shunted into being a slightly better person, can we not better demonstrate that here he has become capable of being the kind of person he maybe wishes he was more like at home? Can he be disliked by more than the EDL guy and Rennick, two objectively foul beings? Where’s the tension? The more I played the more I was struck by the wasted potential, the performances and setting straining against the too-familiar foundations of go-here-do-this gaming.
I wanna reiterate I did have a good time, and you should definitely give it a go, but like man there was so much more to explore here.
As a wee postscript, I don’t necessarily understand the feeling of cringe that people get when they hear their own accent or language in a game/movie/etc. Like… one day, you won’t live in a global America - please get used to the sounds that you make and please take them seriously. Also please then hire me, I'd love to give VO a punt again but I come with a pretty distinct accent.
Some context for hing.
