With the surprise announcement of a Still Wakes the Deep DLC during this year’s string of summer games showcases (but not actually shown during a showcase, funnily enough), fans of The Chinese Room’s cosmic horror game rejoiced. It raised the assumption that the DLC might possibly solve the one thing that Caz was unable to on that ill-fated night on an oil rig in 1975: what exactly did the Beira D drill into?
In Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest, we play as Mhairi 11 years after the Beira D was sent sinking to the bottom of the ocean in order to prevent the mysterious infection that turned its crew into gruesome monsters from spreading to land. Mhairi, Rob and Hans are part of a saturation dive expedition to retrieve the rig’s data logs so that they can understand what happened there over a decade ago. In the meantime, their secondary objective is to collect the personal items of the deceased crew and take pictures of any bodies found so that their families can find some form of closure.
It’s perfectly reasonable to expect that, because Mhairi has been sent to the Beira D to obtain answers, that this DLC would answer at least some of the details omitted in the base game. While it was understandable that Caz, an electrician on the oil rig who was just trying to survive and get home, wouldn’t have uncovered any scientific explanation as to what the Beira D had drilled into that day, Mhairi instilled some hope into players. After all, Ellen Ripley wouldn’t have learnt what the Xenomorph in Alien was if it hadn’t been for the science officer on board. Unfortunately, Siren’s Rest does not accomplish this even in the slightest. So, if finding out more about the entity itself is a reason for purchasing this DLC, then I do not recommend it.
The secondary reason, for me, was to find out more about the Beira D’s ill-fated crew, as the personal stories in the base game were easily a highlight. While there’s not even so much as a tribute to Caz, which was disappointing, Siren’s Rest does focus more on the side characters who we also grew to love and care for in the base game. You can go out of your way to explore hidden rooms in order to find the personal effects of the crew, where Rob will usually give some backstory to the person it belonged to if it can be identified. I loved the added touch of Rob and Mhairi having clearly done their research into those who were on board the Beira D, showing that this mission isn’t just about finding out what happened to the oil rig, but also making sure the grieving families of those who perished with it are given answers. Mhairi and Rob clearly care a lot about the mission and this shows in their dialogue and how Mhairi keeps bringing up how she wishes they could do more for the families, it reflects the wide devastation that the incident would have had while the base game was hyper-focused on Caz’s family.
However, despite Siren’s Rest’s focus on the crew, even here I felt like we weren’t given much more content; hearing about each crew member was a treat, but there wasn’t much of this. At one point, you can find a body clutching a lighter in an air vent. On top of the obvious Die Hard reference, the lighter has ‘World’s Best Mum’ inscribed on it, which takes us back to Finley’s complaint in the base game that someone had stolen her lighter, prompting Caz to lend her his own. Coming across the unfortunate lighter thief in Siren’s Rest showed me how much better this DLC could have been if we had seen more of this environmental and literal storytelling.
Instead, we spend most of the three hours in this DLC swimming around the sunken wreck of the oil rig. While we do come across one of the still living, mutated crew members, this isn’t until halfway through the DLC where the encounter promptly consumes the entire gameplay focus, abandoning the hunt for personal effects and bodies. I think the main problem with Siren’s Rest is that it feels very directionless. Rather than focusing on one thing, this DLC just seems to scream “more”, without specifying what ‘more’ is exactly, and more importantly, ‘why’. Because this DLC offers no further scientific clarification on what exactly happened on the Beira D, and not a justifiable amount of emotional exploration of the other crew members, it feels very pointless besides possibly dipping its toes into the idea of expanding on the base game’s plot.
While we don’t spend a lot of time with Mhairi, I’ve found her to be less than compelling as a protagonist. Caz had a very fulfilling backstory and while he wasn’t a character that a lot of people could sympathise with to begin with, being on the run from the police after assaulting someone, he very much became a character that I loved by the end of the game and desperately wanted him to make it out alive. While we do eventually learn Mhairi’s backstory as the DLC progresses, she just doesn’t feel as competent as Caz. While Caz was an electrician thrown into chaos, fighting tooth and nail to stay alive, the game also made use of his background by implementing broken fuse boxes, among other things, into the gameplay. Mhairi, on the other hand, in the first instance she encounters an air pocket in the sunken oil rig, immediately takes off her helmet to take a deep breath of that decade-old, toxic air. And then lies about it later. Which I don’t blame her for, because I would also be too embarrassed to admit that to my co-workers.
It was a nice change to switch up the ‘walking sim’ gameplay-style to a ‘swimming sim’ instead, but unfortunately the swimming mechanics really aren’t designed very well. While it was really fun to work my way around the rig, squeezing through every nook and cranny to find an entrance into a blocked room, the controls could also feel really janky in tight spaces. I discovered why a lot of games with swimming mechanics have an ‘up’ and ‘down’ button, as just using the joystick was not precise enough to level Mhairi with something I was trying to interact with. And for a game that encourages exploration so that you can locate more crew items and bodies, it sure does make it difficult to determine which direction is our main objective, and which is a diversion to explore more. At one point I had to reload a checkpoint because I accidentally followed the main objective route and wasn’t able to turn back to explore a room I had missed.
In terms of audio and visuals. While the visuals make a classic horror game mistake of being too dark to see anything in an attempt to generate more fear, the audio once again does a great job at building tension. It very much sounds as though the oil rig is waking up again as we explore. And knowing that there was bound to be a monster appearance at some point, I was constantly listening out for telltale signs that I would be walking into an area where one is lurking, unable to tell if a sound was the monster roaming around the corner, or just the pipes settling. Jason Graves’ composition is also once again impactful, generating pure stress during the more intense moments, and helping to really shed some tears in the emotional finale.
While Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest had an emotional send off to the crew of the Beira D in its finale, I was still left feeling unsatisfied. The DLC had hinted towards two things: finding out about what happened to the Beira D, and uncovering the crew’s stories. And it failed in both of these. Ultimately, I was left wondering what the point in this was, besides just providing more Still Wakes the Deep content for content’s sake.
Jess reviewed Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest on PlayStation 5 with a provided review copy.
