Still Wakes The Deep: Siren’s Rest Review

Siren's Rest, Still Wakes the Deep, Still Wakes The Deep Siren's Rest

Intro: A Dance With The Dark

Games with an eerie Lovecraftian twist have been some of my favorite game experiences to date. From the decrepit streets of Yharnam in Bloodborne to the endless seas of Dredge, it has always peaked my interest to explore the parts of the world that mankind was never meant to touch and the horrors hidden just beyond the veil of our own consciousness. In today’s review, I will be covering a game that very much pulls from that same realm of madness. Alone at sea with nothing but the skeletons of the past to keep you company, will you lay them to rest or will you join them? Welcome to Still Wakes The Deep: Siren’s Rest.

Story: Denial In The Face Of The Truth

To understand where we’re starting in the Siren’s Rest DLC, you have to have some prior knowledge of what happened in the events of the Still Wakes The Deep base game. If you haven’t played it yet, I recommend you stop reading this review right now and play it through as the events are directly connected and the DLC occurs in a world after the events of the base game. That’s your warning. I promise there’s spoilers ahead. Just go play it first. It’s amazing I promise.

Now that we’ve weeded out those that haven’t finished the base game, we can really get into the story of Siren’s Rest and what has happened in the years since the Beira D oil rig fell into the sea. At the end of the base game, our unlikely hero Caz ignited the oil rig and seemingly destroyed the Lovecraftian horror they had awakened from the ocean floor. Siren’s Rest picks up more than ten years after Caz’s sacrifice and puts you in control of a specialist dive team as they attempt to both understand what caused the oil rig to collapse, while also chronicling the final resting place of the Beira D’s crew. You play as Mhairi, the leader of this dive team as she attempts to navigate the screeching wreckage and find out what mysteries lay in the darkened claustrophobic corridors that remain of the Beira D.

This has you cutting your way through the rusted metal corridors with a precision welding machine, logging and capturing the final resting places of the crew we grew so attached to in the base game, as well as navigating the endless darkness that seems to be pulling at you from every side. The world of Siren’s Rest is a much more confined adventure then the base game in that you are almost always squeezing through tight spaces and the rusted remains of the Beira D. When it was above the water’s surface, you had more freedom in being able to get a bit of sunlight to work on your tan but the opposite is very much true in this DLC. Your adventure starts and ends at the bottom of the sea and it really builds off the looming dread that this version of the seafloor sells so well. Those that suffer from thalassophobia or claustrophobia will dread the world that the developers have created here and I have to give them props for the eerie silence that seems to follow the player as they navigate what can be vividly described as a rusted sarcophagus.

The story has the same ups and downs emotionally that the base game sold so well and I have to commend them for tackling yet another aspect of the human psyche that we all run from. While the base game had Caz morphing into the man he always wanted to be, Siren’s Rest deals with the denial of acceptance even when the answer is right in front of you. Though it doesn’t have as much of the creature horror as I would have liked, as there is barely any, it does an okay job at closing out the story of the Beira D in a way that makes Caz’s decision echo throughout not only his personal life, but the lives of all those that were lost that day.

Gameplay: Too Short With Not Enough Horror

The problems really start to rise in my opinion when we get to how long this game actually is. I will admit that I sectioned off the second half of my day to play this DLC and was disappointed to find that the campaign took me a meagre two hours to beat while exploring nearly every nook and cranny of the sea floor that was accessible. I will say that I almost immediately loaded up another playthrough and went through it again in the same amount of time to get the other ending, but at the end of both my playthroughs I was still only looking at about three and a half hours total.

Granted this is only a $13(Â£10) DLC with a huge amount of deals going on right now to get the base game and Siren’s Rest packaged together for around $24, but I would have liked more content. It very much plays like a narrative driven game, and it doesn’t have nearly as much of the “action” orientated sequences as the base game. It sucks because the whole concept of Siren’s Rest is honestly amazing, but unfortunately it’s a more relaxed version then what I expected. It’s heavy on the narrative, and while I enjoyed both playthroughs thoroughly, I wanted more of what made the first game so terrifying.

The gameplay loop is simple and you are going to be getting the majority of your entertainment from reliving the events of the base game, not so much learning about anything new and nefarious. If you enjoyed the emotional tones and the dark setting of Still Wakes The Deep, you’ll feel right at home here. Just don’t go into it expecting as many horror elements as you might be used to. It is very much a DLC filled to the brim with atmospheric horror, as opposed to the intricate seesaw of cat and mouse the base game was so good at. That aspect is pretty much entirely absent and the gameplay suffers because of it. You are very much a rat trapped in a cage, and while that idea is terrifying enough, it needed a little bit more to make a real impact from a gameplay perspective.

Ending Thoughts: A Conflicted Tale of Accepting Loss

I find myself very conflicted with rating this game. On one hand, Siren’s Rest has built one of the most convincing terrifying underwater playgrounds I have seen in years. It is bleak and beautiful in the same breath and really does an amazing job at bringing you back to the events of the first game in the most depressing way possible. On the flip side, the gameplay is relatively tame. I don’t mind an “on the rails” narrative adventure, and they do a great job at that aspect of the DLC, but the gameplay and lack of many of the horror elements present in the base game are bound to make fans drawn to it’s Lovecraftian undertones a little disappointed. I enjoyed my time putting the crew of the Beira D to rest, but found myself wanting more at the end of my journey with nothing left but a bleak, endless sea.