Review: Still Wakes the Deep (PC) - A well optimised Unreal Engine 5 horror game

It's been some time since I stepped off the decks of Sevastopol station in Alien: Isolation. I missed that feeling of unease walking through dark corridors, metal clanking on metal and sudden jolts as pipes erupt behind the eerie ambiance. For me, that game did horror just right, and in many ways became the benchmark on what Sci-Fi survival horror was all about for a whole generation of gamers.

Fast forward to 2024, I knew nothing of Still Wakes the Deep until the release of the trailer, it convinced me that this could be a return to that same format, horror done right.

"You are an off-shore oil rig worker, fighting for his life through a vicious storm, perilous surroundings, and the dark, freezing North Sea waters. All lines of communication have been severed. All exits are gone. All that remains is to face the unknowable horror that’s come aboard." - The Chinese Room

The Chinese Room, a Brighton (UK) based developer, is behind the game. Founded in 2007 after a Doctoral research project at University of Portsmouth, so quite close to home for me. Some of The Chinese Room's previous releases include Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Dear Esther and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

As you will see from this review, it is refreshing to see a developer embrace and optimise Unreal Engine 5 the way it has been done here. It's all too common to see Unreal Engine-powered games release with a multitude of issues from stuttering to janky physics and generic world-building, vertical cropping when playing on an ultrawide monitor, frametime pacing issues... The list goes on.

None of these issues are apparent in Still Wakes the Deep, the developer seems to have gone the extra mile to put the effort in to optimise CPU and GPU utilisation, as well as present a visual quality level that I can only describe as often photo-realistic, which is exactly what we expect nowadays when referring to Unreal Engine 5. Where there are some visuals flaws, these are typically development decisions made to stick to a performance budget, as well as an aesthetic art-style. More on these later.

The development team went the extra mile in research to craft the fictional Beira Delta oil rig, the attention to detail is next level, and the team put out some interviews and videos showcasing the extent to which they went to deliver a realistic depiction of what life was like on an oil rig in 1975, which is when the game's events takes place, take a look at this exclusive look by horrorvisuals where the devs talk about the how and the why:

"Authenticity was the number one driving factor behind every decision" - Jon McCormack, Creative Director @ The Chinese Room

This review was completed using a review code supplied by Secret Mode, the publisher. This game version is 1.1 (build 30995), and as always, the release version of the game may differ, although all of my findings have been reported to the team, and many of them are being addressed in an update post-release I am told.

System requirements / Specs

To keep things balanced, I played the first half of the game at 3440x1440 using DLAA and DLSS3 Frame Generation. The second half of the game was played using DLDSR, an Nvidia technology that renders a game at a much higher resolution, in my case 5160x2160 using the 2.25x option in the Nvidia Control Panel of Nvidia App beta, which can then be paired with DLSS Performance for higher fidelity than DLSS Quality at 1440P.

DLAA at 4K resolutions seems to introduce too much mouse input latency for camera movement which is something that is seen in most games that utilise high amounts of ray tracing, especially path-traced games and higher end Unreal Engine 5 titles.

Character development

This is a game all about the characters, the narrative builds not only on Caz McLeary, who you play, but also your colleagues on the Beira D oil rig. Some of them play a key part in your survival, whilst others fill in some necessary backstory.

You begin to appreciate their existence as opposed to taking advantage of their skills for the sake of progressing into the next part. This is helped by the fact that all of the characters are animated convincingly, voices are also authentically Scottish and with characters voiced by the likes of Alec Newman, Neve McIntosh & more, as well as the mannerisms and banter that comes with this sort of work environment.

You can skip scenes of dialogue, but I highly recommend not doing so, as it does help in building a bigger picture as to why Caz is on the rig in the first place, as well as filling in some additional narrative that completes the experience. It's a short game after all, and by listening to all of the workers on the rig and checking out their bunks for bits of information, a greater sense of insight into that world is gained I found which helps with immersion.

Performance & Unreal Engine 5

The game uses version 5.3.2 of Unreal Engine, and even though 5.4 is out, no game currently released uses it. I mentioned earlier that The Chinese Room have optimised the game to a high degree. There is no visible shader pre-compilation step on first-run that notifies you on the main menu or during gameplay, it's not clearly indicated, but initially I thought maybe the seemingly un-skippable intro/caution screens were where shader pre-compilation was happening, but does not seem to be the case considering I accidentally discovered you can skip them by either pressing one of the mouse buttons, or pressing X on the controller. The usual ESC or space or Enter does nothing, makes sense....

Jumping into a new game, I saw no shader or unwanted/immersion breaking traversal stuttering. Whether I was playing with or without Frame Generation, in DLAA or with DLSS, everything was buttery smooth. Mouse camera movement is also well adjusted, although the default sensitivity at 50 I personally felt was a little too slow and increased that to about 70.

There are areas that can be improved still, though, and I raised these with the developer who said they are looking into these for a future update.

For example, the game was updated during late-stage development to include DLSS 3.5 which supports Ray Reconstruction, but there is no Ray Reconstruction built into the current version of the game. This will be added in a future update. Ray Reconstruction is supported by all RTX cards and cleans up the RT de-noising artefacts such as those seen in the GIF above, as well as a small improvement to performance.

There is FSR 3 and XeSS as well, and whilst AMD has decoupled FSR 3 Super Resolution from FSR 3 Frame Generation, the feature has not been applied to the game yet. Our contact at Secret Mode, the publisher, relays that this is something they are exploring with a view to add in a future update.

What this currently means is that if you want to use FSR 3 Frame Generation, then you also need to be using FSR 3 Super Resolution, which isn't as temporally stable as DLSS Super Resolution. RTX 20 and 30 series owners may be waiting a bit before jumping in if they want to enable Frame Generation or wait until modders inject FSR 3 Frame Generation support for all GPUs.

The full range of GFX options are as follows:

Native AA for all of the upscalers is included, so DLAA for Nvidia, FSR 3 Native AA for AMD and XeSS Ultra Quality for Intel. All native AA methods apply similar performance costs, so really are best suited to GPUs that have enough performance budget to account for this.

As a side-note, the DLSS dll file version included in the game is 3.7, which means the new DLSS Preset E mode is used out of the box. Nvidia Game Ready driver v555.99 supports the game, too, so be sure to be updated at launch.

System resource usage is also healthy with some of the lowest VRAM and RAM usage I have seen from a modern game. A mere 4.3GB of RAM being used by the game's process, and 8GB VRAM at 3440x1440 shown above using DLAA on the EPIC graphics preset. At 5160x2160 only the VRAM increases by up to 2GB, whilst CPU and GPU utilisation remain consistenly excellent.

Granted that typically we find memory usage is dictated by the quality of the textures, and this is a game set in a relatively small fixed location that loads in and out assets when travelling between main areas of the oil rig hence the loading screens. The texture quality is mostly excellent, with only a few flat areas if you scrutinise up close. They look aesthetically "Unreal Engine", if that makes sense, which has always been the case for UE powered games.

I found that the framerates never really dropped below 120fps when using either 3440x1440 EPIC settings with DLAA + Frame Gen, or 5160x2160 using DLSS Quality with Frame Gen. RivaTuner RTSS reports the 1% lows and average fps to be well above 100fps at all times, too, which indicates a consistent and clean frame pacing experience.

There are minor frame hitches as you traverse through areas that load the next scene, and as Alex at Digital Foundry often points out, this is expected behavior on PC on all systems anyway, even if the consoles have no such hitching in the exact same places. The PC versions of these games still need some work in this particular area.

I even played with DLAA at 5160x2160 during my second play-through, I discovered that whilst there is some mouse camera movement latency at this resolution, latency is basically non-existent when using a controller, which makes sense as we have observed this in plenty of other games. This is also why on consoles, even at 30fps, it is a fine experience if it's a consistent 30fps render, again, just as outlets like Digital Foundry have shown time and time again.

To mitigate any noticeable mouse input latency for those who only use mice and keyboards to play games like this, DLSS Performance at 4K or above is an excellent option and produces images that are just as crisp and clean as the other render options discussed until you whip out a magnifying glass and start zooming in beyond 200% at the pixels...

What this 5160x2160 + DLAA play has shown is just how powerful the RTX 4090 is, look at the average and 1% low figures above, and look at how easy the game still is on VRAM whilst applying DLAA at native resolution above standard 4K.

The only time the 1% lows dropped was when moving between loading screens, which is to be expected. There does appear to be an internal framerate cap, even after I disabled Reflex, my NVCP framerate cap and VSYNC. No matter what I tried, the framerate would not go above 144fps, not that this is an issue in such a game where you don't need super high framerates.

But what about the performance scaling? What do the numbers look like if I compare performance at native 3440x1440 vs 5160x2160, both with and without DLSS Frame Generation whilst keeping DLAA enabled?

For this test I chose a static area with consistent volumetrics flowing around the screen and recorded the average numbers. A mouse (Endgame XM2we 1000Hz) and keyboard were used for this:

Key:
Frametime: The amount of time each frame remains on-screen.
Render latency: The amount of time it takes to go from one frame to another from the frame buffer.
Average PC latency: How long the PC takes to respond to user inputs (mouse and keyboard).

The results are slightly skewed in that it is not possible to keep Nvidia Reflex enabled when Frame Generation is off since the setting does not get remembered by the game currently. Once The Chinese Room update the game to fix this known bug, these metrics will be re-evaluated.

Neveretheless, 75fps with Frame Gen disabled using DLAA at 5160x2160 is great to see. I even played some more areas with the mouse using these settings and whilst there is some camera movement latency, it was easy to adjust to after about 15 minutes - In a slower paced game like this, that's not a problem at all, but I still feel a controller offers the best experience due to the excellent haptics and conveinence of being able to slouch back and play.

Finally, I had a Q&A with Secret Mode, who confirmed the following in relation to UE5's implementation in the game, as well as some other details discovered through additional research:

• Ray Reconstruction is not enabled yet, it will be in a later update.
• Software Lumen Global Illumination + Reflections are being used.
• Nanite is used to great effect
• Mirror reflections are not featured due to both framerate cost and artistic decisions.
• High Quality Translucency Reflections are not being used for glass.
• VSMs are in use for shadows.

Ultrawide

This needed its own section, all too often we see Unreal Engine powered games releasing with butchered ultrawide support. There's either little in the way of FOV adjustment, or the vertical resolution is cropped out to make way for the extra width.

Not here, the game properly supports ultrawide monitors with no vertical cropping going on.

HDR support

I am happy to report that HDR works rather well in this. Usually, it's a lottery on whether you will get good or bad HDR implementation, but with the QD-OLED set to its 1000 nits mode, the game automatically recognised the peak brightness was 1000 nits, and I manually set the UI brightness to preference.

With HDR enabled, and on an OLED display, fire/spotlights and other strong light sources have piercing brightness yet still are detailed up close as you emerge through the darkness. It really sells the horror atmosphere in a game like this, when done right.

A little PSA for anyone who has not yet delved much into gaming with HDR on Windows, be sure to use the Windows HDR Calibration tool to first profile the HDR capabilities of your display, then once done, enable Windows HDR mode (not Windows Auto HDR or Nvidia RTX HDR) and then go into the game and enable HDR. This is the only way to properly experience game-integrated HDR, all other methods are not real HDR.

Gameplay

Comments online have floated the idea that Still Wakes the Deep is just a walking simulator, on one hand I guess some could class it like that. Unlike Alien: Isolation, you don't have a slew of weapons to shoot your way through imminent peril here, your mission is to survive, and to guide Caz through the drama that unfolds.

There are enough interactive elements for the gameplay to not feel like a drag, there is some super-light puzzle solving but the bulk of the gameplay revolves around your interactions with the rig's crew and finding a way off the rig.

Other elements of gameplay that I thought were a nice touch are things like levering off vents with a screwdriver, but before that you need to unscrew the cover. All of this is animated rather nicely:

There are monsters in the game, but rather than the need to shoot them, you must evade them, in similar vein to the Xenomorph in Amanda Ripley's adventure. The Alien cannot be killed with normal weapons, so running and hiding is the only option.

Speaking of hiding, I found it funny that you are given yellow lockers to hide in here, yet at no point during my playthrough did the chance come up or even the need to do so. It feels like the lockers were an idea someone had and then implemented, but the actual script never incorporated their effective use.

I am a die-hard FPS gamer, yet if there's one thing that I learned from my playthrough of this game, it is that you don't always need guns to be able to be engrossed in a first-person shooter that has no shooting. It is a game that puts story building and immersion above everything else, with the cinematic choreography that follows closely behind.

On top of that, scenes where you are running from a monster chasing you can also feel unnerving, that feeling of tension where you wish you could run a little bit faster to get away quicker, the fast-paced musical score kicks in during segments like this adding to said tension.

These chase scenes, like shown above have an additional level of immersion in that you have a dedicated button to look back as you run to see if the thing is catching up with you or not. A button that I used sparingly whilst sitting in the dark, headphones on and running.

Other areas are slower paced, you need to sneak and distract, yet even these segments are full of ambient noises and background hum of the inner workings of the rig:

I saw online that the dev team referred to Reverend Frank Scott from The Poseidon Adventure as the "perfect archetype" to Caz McLeary, which I think perfectly describes our protagonist.

There will be an update post-launch, too, the technical additions are not yet confirmed, but what I have been told is that there will be a new toggle when starting a new game, or through the options menu mid-game, that allows you to reduce or remove the yellow painted marks on surfaces indicating an area you can climb or grab onto. I know many gamers who dislike this sort of handholding and it's nice to see this being addressed. Other yellow areas will remain, though, such as valve handles and ladders, as these are authentic to real oil rigs.

Audio

Conducted by Jason Graves, the music as well as general audio in this game are fantastic. I really cannot stress this enough. On a half-decent pair of headphones or speakers, the cinematic presentation of all sounds from the dribbling of stormy rainwater and crashing waves to the loud thuds and cracks of background ambiance as you creep through the sections of the rig keep that sinister vibe constantly flowing.

Even as I started a second playthrough during my review write-up to jog my memory, I forgot about some jumpy moments and was startled by them the second time round.

The game has a healthy selection of audio options to tweak, too, as well as catering to those with hearing accessibility needs. These are settings I haven't seen on many other games, so it is clear a conscious decision was made to include them rather than just bundle in the basics.

Just walking around inside a locker room gives a genuine sense of unease, the storm brewing outside, the noises of gas and water pipes behind the walls, the ambient churning of the heater you just turned on, get too close to the windows and the patter of rain comes through, get too close to the metal doors and the patter changes to reflect rain hitting metal. The level of authenticity is unlike most other games I have played.

Controller support

Controller support is also very well integrated in this game. I played chapters of the game with two controllers, the new wired GameSir Kaleid (review coming soon!), and the wireless EasySMX X10. Both were superb and general controller support was perfectly configured by default in the game, nothing needed changing.

I also liked the way certain control actions are integrated, like using a fire extinguisher, or flicking a power circuit lever requires holding the right trigger, then moving the left stick down as opposed to just "Press X to activate" - Interactive actions like this are more involving which again, improves immersion with the game world.

Here is some footage of a section of gameplay, recorded in the third person to show just how responsive the camera movement and general control mechanics are out of the box, shame my own responsiveness didn't save Caz here, oops:

The haptic feedback is very good, too. As action pans from left to right or right to left the vibration motors on either side of your controller pan as well, with large impact events rumbling the larger motor and smaller events rumbling the smaller motors. Even as you enter and exit sealed turn-hatch doors, a subtle rumble echoes through your hands as the door opens and shuts, even walking over a piece of loose debris activates gentle haptics.

The game offers two controller hardware profiles independent of Steam Input, XBOX and PlayStation, although I do not know if Adaptive trigger features are supported since I do not have a PS5 to test with sadly.

Replay value

Whist I am playing it a second time round solely on controller, I do feel that there currently is little replay value in this story. This second playthrough has allowed me to pay attention to other details, though, which is interesting as I rarely find that to be the case in many games. Cyberpunk 2077 being the only exception in recent years. There are no parts of the game that requires you to make decisions along the way that could lead to different endings, and there isn't a New Game+ either once the story concludes.

I have raised this with the publisher, so it will be interesting to see what they come back with.

Conclusion

Still Wakes the Deep came as a big surprise to me. The trailer set the expectation of an immersive survival horror, with vibes of Amnesia, Alien: Isolation, The Thing and others in this genre, a strong expectation to have, but rarely truly realised in the release version of a game. To play review code that is this well polished is something special indeed.

Not only that, but the technical aspects are well-judged. Some minor bugs aside, and a couple of instances of Caz either getting stuck or losing the ability to pick up objects in one instance, the bugs were few and far between. I identified some quirks of the main menu screens, some of which are already known to the development team, who have said will be fixed in an update after the launch date, and I was able to still complete the game without any of them majorly affecting the overall enjoyment of the game itself.

If I did have to complain about any specific bugs, then it would be that sometimes I like having subtitles disabled, and you can't seem to do that in the PC version of the game as it doesn't save that setting. These sorts of bugs should have been easily spotted during playtesting for QA as they are very basic and checked within seconds.

Having said that, we have seen far worse from even triple-A titles from big development studios that should know better, yet here we are with a game that is reasonably priced unless you are on PC Game Pass in which case it's included in your subscription anyway, offering a ~7-hour cinematic escape into a genre that genuinely left me feeling sad that the story ended, a genre that isn't often done that well due to the overuse of generic horror tropes or lack narrative engagement to this sort of level.

A future DLC could be nice, perhaps the ability to play as some of the other crew members during that fateful day. Food for thought.

This year's Summer Game Fest has just been done, and most games shown are running on Unreal Engine 5. In a previous year I'd be sceptical of the trailers as we PC gamers have been burned one too many times, but having recently played Hellblade 2 , the new demo for The Alters, and now this, I think it's safe to say that UE5 is shaping up to be a formidable force in delivering excellent performance and polish when optimised well.

It's going to be a seriously exciting year or two for PC gaming, this much I am certain.

The verdict score was originally an eight, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt it should be a seven. Even though the game is excellent, the inability to use DLSS Quality on day 1 could greatly impact some GPUs that can handle DLSS Quality, but not DLAA, and using DLSS Balanced can result in reduced temporal image stability at lower resolutions.

I know people, including myself, who don't like seeing subttles onscreen during cutscenes as it is distracting. These menu setting bugs are easy things to check and it takes no time to do so, they should never have slipped through QA testing, especially when so much of everything else is done so right.

To end, I leave you with the above, 50 minutes of pure gameplay from my personal channel, playing at 5160x2160 with DLAA in HDR using a wireless controller, be sure to watch on a HDR display if you can for the best viewing experience. None of what it shown is a major spoiler as it's early in the game, but the choice is yours all the same.

Update - 2024.06.18:

It has been brought to our attention that the Game Pass version of the game is missing key features, chiefly all third party upscalers, this is a big issue as you can imagine, and I cannot recommend playing it on Game Pass until this is resolved.

I've already mentioned that Secret Mode has confirmed an update is coming to fix the bugs I found specifically in the Steam version as they are already known to them, so here's hoping they address the Game Pass version's missing features at the same time.