A trailer for Still Wakes the Deep
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GamingTranscript
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00:39Hi I'm Rob McLaughlin.
00:40I'm lead designer on Still Wakes The Deep at The Chinese Room.
00:44Still Wakes The Deep is a first person narrative horror game.
00:46It's about the unknowability of the universe.
00:48You're on a cracking and crumbling rig in the middle of the North Sea.
00:52There's a storm going on that's extremely cold.
00:54If you fall in you've got a five minute survival time.
00:57Martin Lane's character is Kaz McCleary.
00:59He's a working class ex-boxer from Glasgow and he's run away to an oil rig to escape his problems.
01:04But he's becoming estranged from his family and his problems are catching up with him.
01:09The way we describe it to ourselves is if Stanley Kubrick lost his mind
01:13shooting a documentary aboard an oil rig this is how it would have looked.
01:17We took a lot of inspiration from sort of 70s naturalism like Loach and Lee
01:23and then we moved through to a more sort of transcendental experimental aesthetic
01:28from directors like Kubrick and Dario Argento.
01:32I think the thing that I was most interested in from the beginning was the isolation.
01:37The feeling that you're on the oil rig on your own.
01:41We actually just leaned into the oil rig environment.
01:44An oil rig is a kind of scary place anyway.
01:48The interiors are claustrophobic and hot.
01:52They're steamy, they're dark.
01:54With the exteriors you're outside against the elements.
01:57With the North Sea they're a crazy storm.
02:00So yeah, I mean we didn't really have to do too many tricks.
02:03Just imagine what it's like to be on an oil rig.
02:07And that's even before things get weird.
02:12Oh Jesus!
02:22So the Chinese Room is coming back to narrative horror.
02:24This has huge significance for us.
02:26It's part of an arc that started with Dear Esther and Rapture and A Machine for Pigs
02:31and we're really pleased to be carrying on that legacy.
02:33Still Wakes the Deep is an evolution of the Chinese Room's games.
02:38We've gone from Esther and Rapture which are very much in their walking sim style.
02:45And I love that. I really like those styles of games.
02:48But again what drew me to the Chinese Room was this kind of game.
02:51A much more first person narrative game.
02:54And when I heard about the plans for it and how they were going to expand on those things
02:58I was super excited.
03:00I think with all of the Chinese Room's titles, narrative is at the core
03:04and that guides the entire experience from how we're doing storytelling through the environments
03:09our characters, trying to build authenticity in our story.
03:13On Still Wakes the Deep we had three core art direction pillars.
03:17So the first was making it personal.
03:20The second was authenticity.
03:22And the third is a terrible beauty.
03:24We did a lot of research.
03:26I mean before starting this project I had no idea about how oil rigs worked.
03:31What they looked like, what the experience of living on one would be.
03:34We were really lucky because there was a lot of archive footage from the 1970s on oil rigs.
03:40BP have a huge online archive.
03:44It's amazing stuff which is almost exactly what we want about exploration in the North Sea
03:49and setting up oil rigs.
03:51It's really fascinating to learn.
03:53Another aspect of research which kind of plagues me a little
03:58is that I'm forever looking at and taking pictures of pipes, signs, things like this.
04:05My holiday photos are just my family, my wife, my son
04:09and then hundreds of photos of boats or cranes and things like this
04:15which do come in handy.
04:17We've created virtually a whole oil rig for you to explore
04:20and you'll gradually open up new areas.
04:22You'll visit a lot of the iconic places that you'd find on an oil rig.
04:25So you'll get to stand on the helipad in the teeth of the storm.
04:28You'll get to see the derrick stretching up into the fog
04:30and you'll get to clamber along the side of the flare stack
04:32out to the flames treading out over the North Sea.
04:35One of the challenges for us and one of the things that we spent a lot of time on
04:39was the evolution of the rig.
04:41So you'll return to places that you've seen before
04:44but they'll have been changed by the destruction of the rig,
04:47the gradual sinking and tilting of the rig,
04:49the flooding of the rig and the damage that happens as a result of the events that you witness
04:54during the course of the game.
04:56There were two quite big distinctions that we wanted to make
04:59when doing our research on oil rigs.
05:01One is to make sure that it didn't feel American and it felt distinctly British,
05:05particularly Scottish because that's a huge part of our game.
05:09But also things were very different in the 1970s
05:13so in Still Wakes of Deep our characters aren't typical glamorous,
05:17good-looking people necessarily.
05:19We took a lot of inspiration from BBC documentaries, news footage
05:24and even my stepdad features in one of the background characters.
05:27At the core of it, it's a very human story.
05:30Although there's a cosmic and horror element,
05:32it's really about getting to know the people on the rig, the crew
05:36and understanding how they care about each other and want to survive this event.
05:40So our third pillar, Terrible Beauty, I'll probably try and keep that mysterious for now
05:45but it's a lot about the duality between something that's fascinating and mesmerising
05:49but also something that's horrifying.
05:58Is it alright to say I'm kind of terrified?
06:01You know, now it's finally, people are actually going to see it
06:04and it's no longer this kind of like fun thing that I do every day.
06:09We're still making the game but what I think I'm going to be really proud of
06:12is the attention to detail in storytelling
06:15and explaining our characters through the environments.
06:18I think we've got a really strong pedigree here at The Shining's Room
06:21about working with horror and about working with narrative
06:24and I'm really pleased that we can continue this with Still Wakes The Deep.
06:27So much of our attention has gone into this game
06:31and now it's in a state that we're really happy with.
06:34Hopefully people will like it.
06:36We'd like as many people as possible to play Still Wakes The Deep.
06:40You don't have to be a hardcore gamer.
06:42You just need to be someone who's really willing to experience a new story
06:46from a new perspective in some extraordinary circumstances.