The Chinese Room returns with the world’s most atmospheric oil rig.
I don’t want to!
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.
Then they teach you.
And then the prompt: hey, you could look behind you if you press this button.
“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.
“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?
He pauses, still delighted.
“I’m really glad that worked for you.”
How are they going to do it?
How are they going to stage it?
And then the monster attacks.
(Sorry for spoiling Cloverfield.)
But yes, first, it takes its time.
You’re a Scottish guy called Caz working on an oil rig in the 1970s.
The boss wants to see you in his office.
Your friend, the cook, wants to see you in the canteen.
Hey, your friend mentions he needs someone to pick up his insulin, so he’s diabetic?
It’s Christmas, looks like there’s haggis for Christmas dinner.
Okay, classic Cloverfield delaying tactics.
But there’s more, and this is a trick that only Still Wakes the Deep can play.
Even pre-disaster, this stuff is already terrifying.
Because you’re on an oil rig.
And oil rigs are terrifying places.
(I remember him from doing a lot of the art for the Fable games.)
“That’s one instinct,” says McCormack politely.
“But I think another is just exposing the horror of the rig itself.”
“That’s what we want,” he says.
“The rig and the water.
That’s the thing.
“It’s the fact that you’re on this rip-apartable thing suspended above freezing death temperatures.
The two things should coincide.”
So the horror, in RPG terms, should stack?
“In early designs we were really explicit,” says McCormack, nodding.
“You should be terrified all the time.
Being in the water’s terrifying.
Being out of the water’s terrifying.
We sort of listed all these phobias.
How can an oil rig exploit vertigo?
We just listed them and said: yep, an oil rig can do all of these things.
And then the supernatural stuff takes a load of other ones.”
It’s an enviable position for a horror game to be in, but it brought its problems.
Over time, the team realised they needed moments to calm you and ground you for a few seconds.
And that’s hard on an oil rig.
Particularly this one: lashing winter, the grim 1970s.
Even the Christmas trees scattered around the place look slightly uncanny.
The result is a game where even the calmest moments are slightly odd, slightly precarious.
Pre-disaster, just getting from A to B is tricky, for example.
Gantries, a bit of mantling, moving under, around, through.
This was a thing we were constantly fighting - those two different impulses.”
How realistic is all this?
Did the team do a lot of research into rigs in general?
She trails off slightly at the thought.
And then things go wrong.
Brilliantly, Still Wakes the Deep keeps you in first-person and denies you any kind of overview.
But it transforms the rig.
Back inside doors are barricaded, friends and colleagues are suspicious and frightened.
Old paths cannot be used and new paths are hard to find.
Ladders have a little handle on the side to drop them.
Grates must be unscrewed and then pried off the wall.
But why would I need to?
They seem to know what I’m anticipating so they can frustrate my expectations.
More than anything, this is what I’m curious about.
How do you pull this sort of thing together?
Iteration and playtesting, apparently.
“Before you get close to making a game right you make it wrong first,” says McCormack.
“We were very good at that,” laughs McLachlan.
“It really is just a loose blueprint.
it’s crucial that you experiment early.”
“We condense it too,” says Dodds.
“It’s quality care and density and curating the experience.
That cross-disciplinary line is the moment it all clicks for me, actually.
It knows that the Shipping Forecast, deployed at just the right moment, will be completely unsettling.
In games, in art, there is a rich pleasure in being deeply, utterly manipulated like this.
Go here, do that, look behind you!
The disciplined eye and the wild mind, as the poet said.
True for Cloverfield, true for this.
