Still Wakes the Deep lead designer Rob McLachlan on walking sims, VR and more
Inside The Chinese Room's moody, atmospheric and terrifying (in parts) game
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, the 2015 open-world game by UK-based developer The Chinese Room, was a masterclass in non-linear storytelling. Relying on the sprawling environment and clues hidden therein to advance the story, it was less of a ‘game’ to be played per se than an immersive and interactive world to be experienced. More crucially, it represented a high watermark for so-called ‘walking sims’ — a category that includes the studio’s Still Wakes the Deep (published by Secret Mode) that released exactly three months ago. If you haven’t played it, I’d urge you to do so and then return to read this. Whatever you decide, here’s a little synopsis.
Still Wakes the Deep is a psychological horror game set on a Scottish oil rig in 1975. Players control Caz McLeary, an electrician who took the job to avoid legal troubles at home. When the rig drills into something mysterious deep underwater, it unleashes a terrifying entity that begins transforming the rig and its crew into nightmarish horrors. Caz must navigate the increasingly dangerous and alien environment of the rig, avoiding monsters and solving puzzles to survive. The game relies on tension in the absence of combat, relying instead on stealth and exploration.
There’s a lot to unpack here and rather fortunately, we’ve got Rob McLachlan, lead designer on the game (and currently lead technical level designer at the studio Half Mermaid) to help out. “It’s been great reading reviews,” he offers about the feedback received on the game, “But above all, the personal stories of players and their emotional reactions to the story have been for me the high point. I'm really glad too that a large proportion of players are completing the whole game!” Rob joins the likes of Citizen Sleeper solo dev Gareth Damian Martin in acknowledging the role of a much-maligned subscription service in his game’s success. “Xbox Game Pass was great to get on, as it grew our player base into new people who'd never heard of The Chinese Room and maybe had no strong feelings about horror games, but thought they might give Still Wakes the Deep a go.”
Over the past couple of years or so, my position on horror games has evolved from one of a complete refusal to engage (see: my abandonment of the Resident Evil Village demo barely 10 minutes in) to one of cautious curiosity. A combination of two other factors compelled my to give Still Wakes the Deep a go on, you guessed it, Xbox Game Pass: The special place in my heart occupied by Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and the setting of the new game. The former was immersion personified and gave players one of the most detailed versions of a sleepy English village to explore, while the latter was going to be the complete opposite: A closed experience on a grimy and dank vessel.
“The very first pitch was along the lines of ‘The Thing on an Oil Rig’, which came from Dan Pinchbeck (founder and former head honcho for The Chinese Room) in the summer of 2019,” recalls Rob about the original plans for the game, “We were working firstly towards the idea of Still Wakes the Deep being a VR game, and some elements of this remained, but a lot changed from the first pitch around the horror, the intended gameplay and things like water — not least the switch to a flatscreen experience and a more linear story.” Inspiration for the game, as per an Xbox Partner Preview, came from a variety of sources: Aside from The Thing, there were Rosemary’s Baby, The Poseidon Adventure, Kes and a bunch of others.
And you can pick up on these over the course of the game. Speaking of which, it takes only around 10 or so minutes into Still Wakes the Deep till you realise that while it is as visually rich as The Chinese Room’s widely-praised earlier outing, it is nowhere near as open — whether narratively or spatially. Story-wise, Rob’s mention of a more linear story tracks, but it’s with the environments and level design that the developers really channelled the idea of claustrophobia. Dominique Buttiens, principal environment artist at The Chinese Room, had in the past elaborated in a PlayStation Blog entry that this depiction was based on her own personal experience. She wrote:
When our main character [Caz McLeary] enters the engineering sections of the oil rig, you immediately feel trapped. The halls are narrow, the ceiling is low, every surface is metal and there’s a lot of heat and moisture trapped in the air around you. Since there are no windows, you lose that sense of where you are. Now imagine moving through this space, while you’re up to your knees in a mix of water, oil, rust, and dirt, and you realise there’s something else in there with you. All you want is to get back to the open top of the rig for a breath of fresh air, but the only way through is by entering even narrower spaces.
Still Wakes the Deep does a pretty damn good job with the ‘something else in there with you’ in tiny, suffocating spaces part Dominique mentioned in her blog post. But if that wasn’t enough, the devs had their sights on making things even more challenging.
“We had a stamina system for a very long time, and bits of it are still in there,” reveals Rob, “Also Caz used to get blown around by the wind, and had to grip onto things to walk into the wind.” Eventually, the team found that it was tough to keep slowing down the character this way, particularly when the momentum of the story began to be affected. “It was just more frustrating than cool,” he admits, drawing attention to a divisive (among the dev team) section where Caz is tasked with swimming against a strong current that did make it into the game’s final cut.
“[Also,] some of the monsters used to have greater capabilities in their perception and their reaction to things you did, but these made the encounters a bit too punishing and unpredictable,” Rob adds, “We didn't really want a trial-and-error experience, so we made our encounters more consistent and reliable.”
Hindsight in game development, as with most things, is a marvellous thing, and I venture to enquire what he’d do differently if he had the chance to make the game again. “I’d love to make travel over the rig more seamless and more free — enabling players to choose their routes between places, and backtrack as they saw fit to reach important story locations,” says Rob, adding, “It'd be a huge change though!”
Staying with the making of the game, that each developer approaches their craft differently is obvious. Nevertheless, it’s always fascinating to learn about the process and connect it to a game you’ve played. And so, what came first? “The setting [of an oil rig] came first, then the characters started to arrive,” explains Rob, “And the last piece of the skeleton was the overall arc of the story. From those high-level story events, we started building all the key parts of the rig.” If you’ve ever played Still Wakes the Deep, you’ll know just how much the setting, the location and the loneliness of an oil rig contributes to the overall experience.
“All the time we were doing this,” Rob continues, “We were discussing player capabilities, how interactive the rig could be, and everything from character backstories to time of day. The nature of the horrors you find and how those play out. It was a long dialogue between our dreams, our capabilities, and our budget!”
When inviting dreams, capabilities and budgets to the table, there’s bound to be a few difficult conversations that are had. What, I wonder, was the toughest part of making this game? “Working to the fidelity level demanded by our ambitions [of how we wanted the game to look and feel] was tough, and expensive,” he says and elaborates, “Water was hard and time-consuming. Even some of the most impressive water tech demos have technical limitations that mean gameplay is not straightforward to add.”
Beyond ol’ H₂O, he identifies interactions (particularly when dealing with doors) as being particularly onerous, but not a unique problem. “[As] usual in game development, [this is] one of the hardest things to get working; we went through a lot of different iterations of the door system, and could have even done with one more.” I hope you’ll remember this the next time you go effortlessly through a door in some game you’re playing.
Upon completion of my playthrough, I was left wondering if I was missing something. An alternate or secret ending maybe? An object or some lore that puts some of the events into perspective? A key flashback? “One of the most important things for us when making Still Wakes the Deep was ensuring that as many people as possible completed the game on their first playthrough,” states Rob, underlining the joy he expressed earlier in the piece that a large percentage of players were finishing the game.
“While there are places off the beaten track that give you even more story, you can have a truly memorable experience just by playing the game once. We've loved to hear people's theories and interpretations of the events of the game, whether they've played through one time or 10 times,” he adds.
It was back in 2017 that reports began suggesting The Chinese Room was “done with walking simulators”. So, what brought about the change of heart? “I think to an extent we've stayed true to our word; there is a lot more interactivity in Still Wakes the Deep than in previous Chinese Room games,” replies Rob, “I think we saw ourselves and Still Wakes the Deep as a step on a trajectory that will take The Chinese Room to even greater heights of interactivity, without losing the special things that make our games attractive to players.” And he’s not wrong; the game forces you to navigate against time, deploy stealth and related mechanics to get out of tough spots, and of course, swim against currents.
There’s a bit more to it, I suspect, and so I push deeper to find out what he makes of the whole ‘walking simulator’ tag. “While initially a bit of a pejorative name, I don’t feel insulted by the term. I happily play many games with the tag on Steam,” he admits, “For me, it denotes a genre of game that attempts, more or less successfully, to establish an extreme sense of place and immersion; where you can take on the role of someone else — sometimes just an observer — and experience an atmosphere or vibe, whether with an accompanying story or not, which welcomes you in and encourages involvement, rather than placing obstacles in your way.”
It’s worth noting that The Chinese Room that made such games as Dear Esther ann Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is extremely different to the one that made Still Wakes the Deep. At the same time as the studio suggested it was done walking simulators, co-founders Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry took the decision to lay off the entire staff. It had simply become too expensive to run an independent studio that made admittedly niche games.
“Most of us had played Rapture and Esther. Many of us also joined The Chinese Room to make games like those previous classics, with a strong, genuine, human and emotional story,” Rob offers when I ask about how the new Chinese Room was able to make use of the studio’s past experience. “Dan was the human link to the previous games, and shared many of the lessons learned from those years of development.”
Besides, it wasn’t as though the new version of the studio was full of newbies. “We had a lot of experience brought together from other studios and other genres too. I think in the end, we struck a reasonable balance between what we knew The Chinese Room was good at, what our players wanted, and innovation that would draw even more people to play our games.” And as we know, the result was Still Wakes the Deep, which you really ought to go play if you still haven’t.