Xbox Game Pass’ new horror game is like a playable John Carpenter movie

As someone who loves both gaming and cinema, I’m always excited when those two worlds connect. Sometimes that’s with great film adaptations of games or vice versa, but I’m even more interested when I can feel the influence of cinema history in a game’s DNA. Something like Until Dawn, for instance, calls back to the golden age of gory slasher flicks with memorable results. It’s rewarding for me as a fan of both mediums, letting me draw direct connections between them.

Recommended Videos Still Wakes the Deep is a period piece set in 1975 about an oil rig off the coast of Scotland. Players take control of worker Cameron McLeary, who quickly finds himself at the center of a nightmare when a disaster damages the rig. He’s left trying to escape the wreckage — a hard task made more difficult by the fact that he’s being stalked by some kind of supernatural flesh beast.

There’s a lot to love here, though there are some missed opportunities as well. On the positive side, it’s an effective horror game filled with tense chase scenes and pulse-pounding stealth sequences. The latter brings me back to Alien: Isolation as I cower under metal grates while an erratic lump of flesh hovers around me. The formless design of its monsters especially adds to that tension since I’m never too sure when it has its back turned to me or is looking straight at me.

Its promising narrative setup doesn’t entirely pay off either. At first, it feels like the story is going for a meaty social commentary on dangerous labor conditions. Cameron and his colleagues are overworked and dealing with incredibly dangerous conditions with no protections. The introduction of a monster ratchets that idea up in the same way the best genre movies use horror as commentary, but it stops short of actually saying much on the topic.

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