Visiting a virtual North Sea platform in a game may be a bit of a busman’s holiday for your average offshore worker.
Unless you’re a professional athlete, criminal or soldier, it is unlikely your place of work has ever been the setting for a video game.
But for many oil and gas workers that is about to change through the release of a new first-person horror based on a Scottish offshore platform.
A trailer has been released for Still Wakes The Deep, providing a first glimpse of the North Sea-focused game scheduled for release early next year.
Devised by developer The Chinese Room, it is set on the fictional “stunningly-realised” Beira D platform in December 1975.
In the game the player takes on the role of an offshore worker and must “navigate the collapsing rig” in order to save the remaining members of the crew.
At the same time they will have to contend with an “otherworldly horror on the edge of all logic and reality”.
It is this aspect that will likely draw comparisons to the mystic force that is key to the plot in Amazon Prime TV series The Rig.
Like The Rig, starring Martin Compston, Still Wakes The Deep also features “an authentic cast of Scottish actors” who “struggle for survival on an unstable oil rig, where one wrong step could be your last”.
A description on the PlayStation website says: “Still Wakes The Deep is a return to the first-person narrative horror genre for The Chinese Room, creator of critically acclaimed games such as Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther.
“You are an offshore 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 and all that remains is to face the unknowable horror that’s come aboard.
Survive Still Wakes The Deep ‘if you can’
“Search for your crew and help them survive if you can. Run, climb, and swim through the flooding corridors and storm-lashed outer decks.
“Face a terrifying, unrelenting foe. And pray that, one day, you get to see your family again.”
Still Wakes The Deep will be available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC when it hits the shelves in 2024.
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