Still Wakes The Deep has stealthily released to positive reception, with a strange exception.
Still Wakes The Deep is the latest game to come from award winning game studio The Chinese Room. These are the same developers who made Dear Esther, and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, and they had also recently been tapped to finish production on Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2.
However, Still Wakes The Deep is still closer to their wheelhouse. It’s an horror survival game, casting you as an oil rig worker in 1975 named Caz. Caz is left to fend for herself alone, when the rig she is working on is suddenly beset by terrifying creatures.
Intriguingly, there is no combat system in Still Wakes The Deep. Caz has to stealth her way around the rig to escape the monsters, as well as solve some environmental puzzles. As you can imagine, a premise like that could create a fascinating experience. But, because it deviates from the norm, it could be a divisive experience, similar to how gamers and critics experienced Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga.
Still Wakes The Deep was released earlier in the week, on June 18, 2024. As of this writing it has a MetaCritic of 74, from 35 reviews. But of course, that isn’t the full story.
That’s the MetaCritic if you were only paying attention to the PlayStation 5 metascore, which is what the MetaCritic website defaults to. As it turns out, on Xbox, it received a MetaCritic of 84, based on 12 reviews, and on PC, it has a MetaCritic of 76, from 25 reviews.
In the meantime, user review scores on MetaCritic give it an 8.5 on PC and PlayStation 5, and a 9.4 on Xbox. It all averages out to an 8.5 user rating overall.
But then, you may be looking for a third opinion, and we’ll be glad to furnish it for you. The Chinese Room themselves tweeted about receiving a Very Positive user review score on Steam, based on 235 reviews. So, this game may not be for everyone, but those gamers who played it, really liked it.
Overall, it does seem that Still Wakes The Deep was well received. Some of the criticisms leveled against it are that it doesn’t live up to its potential, it’s too linear and old fashioned, and at least one criticism of apparent technical issues. But it’s hard not to notice that there’s a gap between how the game was reviewed on PlayStation 5, and the reviews it got on PC and Xbox.
And it’s also hard not to notice that this game happened to get marketing help from Microsoft, thanks to a deal with its publisher, Secret Mode. Microsoft featured it with its own trailer in last year’s Xbox Games Showcase.
We want to believe that reviewers in game outlets try to make their reviews in good faith. But there’s something to be said in having an implicit, unexamined bias that affects reviews of games. In more serious settings, the healthcare industry still reckons with the consequences of implicit bias creating disparities in how some people receive healthcare over others.
The Chinese Room is now owned by Microsoft, and Still Wakes The Deep was not published by Xbox Game Studios. But at least on the surface, these metascores seem to indicate it may have received more scrutiny from reviewers who played it on PlayStation 5 and associated it with the Xbox.
There will be some level of plausibly deniability on this, since reviews are inherently subjective. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be possible to notice patterns on bias, and that these possible biases don’t have consequences for the gamers and the people making games.
In any case, if this made you curious, you can buy Still Wakes The Deep on your preferred platform of choice below:
Xbox Store (also included in Game Pass)
