HR is Having a Field Day: Still Wakes the Deep as the Lovecraftian Banal
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #177. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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We are what we’re afraid of.
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When I say “bad coworker,” we all have someone who immediately springs to mind. Someone who you turn corners to avoid running into, or whose emails you are consistently tempted to flag as “spam.” The coworker who you want to disagree with even on the rare occasion that they make a good point, because you just can’t let them have it. Whether this is a battle you fight today or a specter from your past, most of us are deeply aware of what it’s like to be stuck on shift with someone who you just cannot stand. The idea of being confined with them for even a second longer than you have to be sounds very close to your own personal Hell, and you are so glad when you get to go home each day, away from them. But what if you couldn’t do that?
This is, in a nutshell, the conceit of Still Wakes the Deep, the new horror game from The Chinese Room (notable for having made Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Dear Esther). In the game, you play Caz, an electrician living and working on a deep-sea oil well off the coast of Scotland. A botched drilling session leads the crew to unleash some form of Lovecraftian horror, replete with the standard visual distortions and body horror of this brand of scary. You, as Caz, have to find your way off the rig as the eldritch horrors of the deep consume your crewmates, turning them into gloppy, tumor-laden larvae who navigate the ship using tentacles that look uncomfortably like uncoiled intestines. Throughout, Caz and his fellow survivors comment on how their crewmates have changed, become different and monstrous.
Except, really, some of them haven’t. Yes, they’re certainly . . . more liquid than they were before, but the true horror of the game lies within the fact that these monsters ultimately reflect the men they were on the rig and inscribe the same patterns of harmful behavior as they did before their en-tentacling. The monstrosity of their external forms simply amplifies their most negative traits as coworkers.
This is not immediately evident in-game, since the first few monsters Caz encounters are not crew members he spent a lot of time with in the short beginning of the game, before shit hits the fan. The monsters, most unsettlingly, retain the ability to speak, and each monster has its own thematic refrain of negative emotion that colors each encounter. Some monsters weep about having killed their friends, saying over and over again that it wasn’t really their fault, while others relentlessly pursue Caz through shipping containers while screaming in anguish about how they are being abandoned. One monster in particular, formerly a person named Muir, complains again and again about how no one will help him, even as he drags his coworkers, supposedly the ‘help’ he seeks, off to their gruesome deaths.
It was not until one of the later encounters, with one former crewmate named Adair, that the function of allowing them to speak becomes apparent to the theme. In his former life as a not-tentacle-monster, Adair hated Caz. As a gruesome slug that haunts the area around the ship’s generators, Adair is transfixed not on the idea of hunting and killing in general, but specifically on killing Caz. His vendetta against his coworker was transformed, along with his physical being, into his driving purpose in life. And once you start thinking about the monsters in that way, their plaintive cries make sense. The one who grouses about never getting any help? There’s one of these people with a chip on their shoulder in basically every meeting ever. The one who makes life harder for others but never takes accountability? We can all think of an email chain full of their excuses. Still Wakes the Deep is essentially just being stuck in Hell with all your worst coworkers.
This may at first seem like a cheapening of the existential anguish that tends to pervade Lovecraftian works, where horror is something totally beyond the ken of mortal minds. I argue, however, that looking at this game as a take on when the cosmic becomes banal, is extremely exciting for the directions cosmic horror can begin to move in. I have argued before in this column that cosmic horror needs to get as far out from under the racist legacy of H.P. Lovecraft as possible (also because his prose is pretty bad), and I think Still Wakes the Deep goes a long way in doing so, through flipping the script of inscrutability on its head. These monsters aren’t incomprehensible – we have to make small talk with our personal versions of them in the break room. The horror of this game is effective not because we can’t really comprehend it, but because we know it so very well already. Caz’s attempts to get off the rig mirror our own attempts in our lives to get away from bad coworkers, and more abstractly, to get out from under the shackles of capitalism. And what’s scarier than that?
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Dr. Emma Kostopolus is an Assistant Professor of English at Valdosta State University. Online, you can find her nowhere, but check out her film reviews for Ghouls Magazine and her recent article for Computers and Composition Online. She’s also the co-author of Ace Detective, a murder mystery dating sim you can play at oneshotjournal.com.
