‘Still Wakes The Deep: Siren's Rest' DLC Review: Dreading Water
'Siren's Rest' is a great DLC for 'Still Wakes the Deep', though it's not without it's foibles.
Still Wakes the Deep wasn't just an acting masterpiece — it was 2024's best indie horror game, even in the face of a packed field. The fact that it finally received DLC with Siren's Rest, released today (June 18), is no surprise, even if its announcement just last week proved to be.
Taking place ten years after the tragic, spooky, and body-horror-laden events that led to the demise of the Beira D oil rig off the coast of Scotland, Siren's Rest promised to carry the strengths of its forerunner underwater, as you hop into a diving bell to inspect the wreckage and, it seems, bring closure for the victim's loved ones, or at least some answers.
In its 1.5-to-two-hour runthrough, it pretty much nails it, even if it doesn't learn from the occasional missteps that took the shine off Still Wakes the Deep's otherwise insidious storybuilding and atmosphere.
Simply going back to Still Wakes the Deep fills you with dread. As soon as you choose Siren's Rest from the opening menu — complete with the intact Beira D oil rig — the game immediately plunges you beneath the waves and you think ah, well, this sucks already, as you relive flashbacks of the main game.
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It's May 14, 1986 — less than a month after the Chernobyl disaster, but also a few days before I was born, so it's a bad time whichever way you look at it. You're Mhairi, a plucky young explorer in a diving bell, being lowered by your coffee-obsessed colleague Hans, who patches through on comms.
Meanwhile, fellow underwater compadre Rob is already outside, having plotted your descent to the Beira D. Conversations are impeccable and believable, but also uneasy to listen to; from the beginning, you realize the team has no idea of the horrors that occurred on the platform before its capitulation, but then again, why would they?
Once you're given the freedom to move, you'll most likely go to the video settings and switch to performance mode to overcome the shoddy frame rate. Much like the original game, Siren's Rest thrives away from 'quality' mode, but only if you keep motion blur and film grain on for that perfect, throwback look.
Set design is impeccable, but it struggles to perform in quality mode.
There's more than a touch of Control in this DLC's art direction, between its all-caps titles for its acts and the ominous red lights provided by flares — which become an ever-greater part of the experience — yet it quickly establishes itself as independent from both Still Wakes the Deep and other underwater exploration game, even those grittier outings like Soma or Narcosis. The combination of now-outdated technology, such as your umbilical cord and aging torch, along with the sheer grubbiness and low-lit details of your surroundings, only enhances the direness that your 'adventure' promises.
Admittedly, the umbilical cable is one of the first things to break immersion. Initially, it acts as an unknowing antagonist — it looks like an otherworldly tentacle that'll give you the occasional accidental jumpscare in the first few minutes of your trek — but once you get into more complex terrain, it doesn't work like it should, routinely snagging on invisible elements or parsing through solid walls — far from ideal, given Siren's Rest's major focus on optional discoveries.
Still Wakes the Deep is, ironically, alive and well in the death and decay of past characters. Between Mhairi, Hans, and Rob, you identify the bodies of the fallen along the way, though only a small handful are on the main story route.
Level design, especially in the early stages, thrives on your indecision. Exploration is regularly a binary choice of direction, where the optional dead-end goes on for just a bit too long before you learn if it's a discoverable extra or the core path. You might find yourself turning back to make damn sure you haven't missed a collectible or, more gruesomely, a dead body to photograph.
Say cheese!
You really don't want to miss these sidebars, either. Characters of the dead are given backstories, like an episode of Bones played out in real time. The highlighting reticles for discoverables are thankfully forgiving — ideal for the murky depths that would otherwise hide them. Nonetheless, after the first 15 minutes, you already feel like you've missed something.
Siren's Rest's story building is unsurprisingly excellent, but in offering a less linear approach than its predecessor, you're prone to missing key sights, sounds, or jump scares.
The creeping increase in otherworldly formations is immaculate, underpinned by blink-and-you'll miss-them suggestions of horror, usually enhanced by gorgeous lighting. However, the 360-degree field of vision from your underwater antics means you can miss what you're meant to see, rather than what you're distracted by. The first two potential 'scares' were lost on me as I wasn't facing the desired direction; I assume I was unknowingly drifting towards an animation's designated trigger point.
All the while, prompts continue to break immersion by taking up too much room, or staying on screen; sometimes, they appear too late. Then there are the glitches and oddities — I can forgive the umbilical's apparent understanding of quantum physics, but a couple of other issues required restarts. In one case, opening a specific rusted door made the right analog stick stop working. One open route sees your torch go out and randomly kills you, with no prompt or reason to believe you've done anything wrong. Sure, it's probably a case of poor signposting, but the following reload trapped me behind a wall.
Siren's Rest effortlessly shifts reality with gravity-defying rooms and spaces.
Then, as things ramp up in the third act — and without spoiling what's to come in these later stages of Siren's Rest — luck plays a significant part in the experience, to the point you don't know what you're doing wrong. Still, you get there in the end.
For $12, Still Wakes the Deep's Siren's Rest DLC has some great moments. However, it falls a tad short, both in length and in comparison to the original game — not least with those extremes of fear, loneliness, and inhumanity, which never feel dialled anywhere close to 10.
Still, after completing Siren's Rest, I restarted the original campaign. I'm already two hours in, and not only does this latest outing make me appreciate The Chinese Room's 2024 masterstroke, but it'll force me to return to Siren's Rest very soon, and with fresher memories. Maybe the second time's the real charm — it's already proving to be the case with Still Wakes the Deep.
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