The Chinese Room has critics dead to rights. If the most common critique of their output is that they only make Walking Simulators, the developer has now produced a Diving Simulator with very little exploration on foot. Got ‘em.
A decade after the events of Still Wakes the Deep (2024), an expedition is charted to explore the wreckage of the sunken oil derrick Beira Delta. Emerging from a diving bell, saturation diver Mirah must explore the remnants of the cursed oil machine, which is now buried in a trench under the North Sea.
We return to some of the same spaces as in Still Wakes the Deep, in an entirely new context. The familiar areas, from the once lively dining hall to the machinery-filled engineering rooms, have been ravaged by time and undersea conditions. The walls of the oil platform are now fossilized over with all manner of barnacles and a coating of rust.
We stay tethered, almost as an amusing admission of what the design philosophy, to a long and ropey umbilical cord that trails behind us during our swim. As we enter these old spaces, navigating the rooms through ducts and vents for more efficient travel, we search the vessel for the data log of the crew and gather their effects to return them to their families.
As the ending of Still Wakes the Deep leaves a lot of ambiguity about what has happened and what would happen from here, the alluring prospect of Siren’s Rest then would be for it to offer something more conclusive, a narrative expansion upon our previous understanding of the story. The Chinese Room, amusingly, refuse to plunge the same story for extra meaning, which makes the prospect for this new couple hours of gameplay more questionable — this is an aside that references the prior story, not quite an additive sequel that is interested in answering more questions. If anything, it provides more questions of its own.
Scaled back from the original release are the hide-and-seek games with Cthulhu-like monsters. But something still wakes below the deep and this allows for one (1) extended sequence using flares as a diversion, to swim through some spaces without being consumed into the ethereal consciousness of the Lovecraftian sea.
Like the original game, Siren’s Rest still has the same exact selling point: the voice-acting is fantastic and fills in the spaces in-between exploration of the wreckage, so that it does not feel like such an isolated and lonely voyage. The DLC handles this better than the original, too, which utilized phones in each space of the oil derrick (which was actually a great concept for marking progress but involved stopping and starring at a phone for exposition dumps).
Siren’s Rest meanwhile keeps us closer to the story by allowing us to slowly submerge and uncover who this diver is and what relation she may have to the events of the first game. It’s ultimately short, satisfying, and clear in its design; more limited than the original design, which did feature more traversal oriented puzzles (usually: Interact with the yellow thing), but the design feels more immersive because of it.
Over two separate dives, we sift through the wreckage of the past, take photos of decomposing dead crew members and do a lot of using a torch to open doors that lead to more doors to open with your torch. It’s repetitive, literally in its reengagement with the same areas and themes and also its content loop, which is confident that the story is always enough, but the game also feels shallow, for something that is about exploring the deep dark recesses of the past.
The reliance on horror is backseated for contextual atmosphere. This is what these games can do more effectively, anyway, if the only idea for horror is to hide and run from it, but it gets claustrophobic in its single-minded and calcifying design, which feels just as fossilized and dead in the water as the poor lost crew we’re investigating.
5/10
Reviewed on Xbox