Scope One: The Horror of Still Wakes the Deep

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Still Wakes the Deep, Dagon, The Horror at Martin's Beach, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Firewatch, and Life (2017). It also contains minor spoilers for The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

If you've never been out to the middle of the ocean, the sight is sublime. On land, the features are distinct enough for us to perceive our surroundings as a field of many objects: hills, valleys, houses, and postboxes, for example. At sea, there is only a single heaving carpet of blue spanning from horizon to horizon. If we were to travel a mile along any compass heading, the view would be the exact same, as though we'd become stranded in an anti-space where there is no travel.

Vast bodies of water are examples of what the English philosopher Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects". Morton tells us hyperobjects are:

"Things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans".

They go on to say that:

"A hyperobject could be a black hole. A hyperobject could be the Lago Agrio oil field".

Among other properties, Morton describes hyperobjects as having viscosity, i.e.:

"They "stick" to beings that are involved with them".^[1]

If your ship or platform collapsed in the middle of the ocean, you certainly would be stuck, your body entangled with the depths. I recently wrote a series of blogs on Civilization VI, and the most sobering quote in that game may be Thomas Gibbons' "There is nothing but a plank between a sailor and eternity".^[2] It's only natural that H.P. Lovecraft, with his fear of unfathomable expanses, also had his mind dragged into the sea.

Famously, in The Call of Cthulhu, the eponymous god lies sleeping beneath the Pacific, but the author has other stories of ichthyic grotesques lurking in ocean trenches. In Dagon, the ocean belches up a shrine to a hideous fish god, complete with a towering obelisk. In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the worshippers and offspring of Dagon's species wreak terror on a Massachusetts seaport. In the Horror at Martin's Beach (co-authored with Sonia H. Greene), a sailor has a close encounter with a trashing fifty-foot leviathan, only to find out first-hand that that was a juvenile of the species. In these flashes of terror, Lovecraft becomes a stenographer for his anxieties over the occult, the unknown, and the animals of the sea. Moreover, the fiends in these stories are not only ocean-dwellers; they are also the ocean made sentient. Like countless sailors before him, Lovecraft looks into the water and sees a cold and capricious executioner.

The Chinese Room's 2024 exploration horror, Still Wakes the Deep, comes from the oceanic and Lovecraftian traditions. Its protagonist is Cameron "Caz" McCleary, a Glaswegian electrical engineer stuck in a fraying marriage. After a local, Billy Chamberlain, insults his wife, Suze, Caz beats the man black and blue. With a spouse and two children to provide for, the ground between him and Suze crumbling, and impending charges of assault, Caz abandons his family over late 1975. He will be spending his holidays on the Beira D oil rig off the Eastern coast of Scotland. In Scottish folklore, Beira is the remorseless bringer of storms and winter.^[3]

The police follow Caz's scent to the rig, pressing his irate manager, Davey Rennick, to fire him. Rennick also demands the drillers aboard the rig go ahead with their surgery on the seabed despite red flags about the operation. As the disgraced Cameron boards a helicopter back to the mainland, the drill unseals a curving, fibrous spire from beneath the ocean floor. The tremor throws Caz from the helipad, and beams fall like guillotine blades, cutting off sections of the rig from each other.

Cameron tries to evacuate himself and his brothers (and one sister) in oil, but the lifeboats aren't up to code and tear loose from their strings. Water floods the Beira's netherregions and shorts electrical systems. As something organic and necrotic spreads through the raft, Rennick morphs into a floating clump of skin, tethered to the decks by oleaginous string. Cameron's British nationalist coworker, Addair, is transformed into a psychotic spillage of flesh. Most of the other men don't fair any better, although Addair and Rennick were monstrosities long before the spire got involved. All will stalk any whelp daft enough to get close. Us, for example.

The monster maze trope has been thoroughly exhausted by the incumbent generation of horror games. The Chinese Room was using it as far back as eleven years ago in Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. But Still Wakes the Deep does more than lock you in a mansion with a ghoul; it gives you no exit. Intolerable terrors threaten to engulf Cameron, and one slip could send him tumbling into the capacious hyperobject below. Our fall from the helipad proved that such a plummet is possible, and the drowning of our coworkers reminded us it could have ended much worse for us. The game further dangles the possibility of burial at sea in front of us with claustrophobic underwater treks and platforming around sheer drops into the abyss.

The fictional energy supplier that owns Beira D, Cadal, has a name with the same ring as "Calor", Latin for heat and one of the UK's largest liquid petroleum peddlers. There's another root. Scots Gaelic is an indigenous language of Scotland, and in that tongue, "cadal" means "sleep". "Sleep" is a common metaphor for death and the inverse of the "wake" in the game's title. That title is also a pun. The rig is like the stills of alcohol production in that it must imbibe liquid products and separate them. For example, filtering oil from natural gas or usable fossil fuels from waste products.^[4] Our still has disturbed something that should have been left to slumber in the Atlantic, much like Cthulhu should have stayed slumbering. "Still Wakes the Deep".

The name Still Wakes the Deep also appears in one stanza of the in-universe poem "The Trawlermen":

"We do not miss you, precious weens, [sic] though as we sleep waves break the bow;

Though storms gather beneath the grow of winter and woollen gathers now the clouds,

And still wakes the deep, and still on we plow".

Poetic monologuing is the calling card of The Chinese Room and was a dye in their previous titles, Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs. A Machine For Pigs was also a sequel to one of the most reputed Lovecraftian video games of all time, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. In the quote above, the author of The Trawlermen, Craig Henry Campbell, speaks to the activity of the ocean still not ceasing: "Still wakes the deep". The sea was churning long before we got here and will keep on turning over long after we are gone.

While we tend to think of the natural world as composed of the organic and mortal, natural entities like rocks, seasons, and oceans can't ever die because they weren't ever alive. In other words, the North Sea is a threat you can never kill. A kaiju or the Rennick head are scary, but you could pierce them or burn them or cut them. How do you pierce a liquid? How do you burn water? Where video games use scale, it's usually to astound, to give the player a cornucopia of jobs to solve, or to let them feel like they own a small kingdom of treasures. Still Wakes the Deep is the rare game that uses scale, both spatial and temporal, to petrify.

The two protagonist objects of the story are the ocean and Beira D, but I've talked much more about the meaning of the North Sea than I've talked about the rig, so let's fix that. As Half-Life couldn't help invoking Chernobyl because it was a story set in an imploding nuclear research facility, Still Wakes the Deep inevitably disturbs the history of oil rig disasters by acting out a tragedy on a drilling platform. In Britain, the history of oil rig accidents is as old as the history of the structures themselves.

The shortcoming of rigs was that once their wells were dry, they were left nothing more than expensive hunks of metal. "Jackup" oil rigs changed things. Rather than the station bobbing on the surface or its feet drilling into the ocean bedroom, they stand on the sea floor. When jackups exhaust the supply of oil in one place, they can float to another.^[5] In 1964, the steel barge Sea Gem was transformed into a jackup rig, and it became the first rig to find oil in the British North Sea. Just a year later, Sea Gem's operator, BP, tried to relocate it, and two of its legs crumpled due to missing and defective tie-bars. As on the Beira D, thirty-two workers slid off its sopping deck and into the freezing Atlantic. Like Cameron, nineteen of them were pulled from the grasp of the sea, but like his brothers, thirteen of them never resurfaced.^[6] In Still Wakes the Deep, Finlay will tell you that corners have also been cut with the construction of the Beira D, and the place is already falling apart. Sadly, the loss of life on Sea Gem did not compare to that on Piper Alpha.

In the mid-70s UK, there was a thirst for oil that could not be quenched. In 1947, Zionist forces began invading Palestinian villages, tilling the soil in preparation for the partitioning of Palestine. During this period, Israel violently expelled 750,000 Palestinians in an act of ethnic cleansing.^{[7][8][9][10]} This colonisation opened the door to a series of unremitting conflicts between Israel and several incensed Arab states. In 1967, Israel waged their "Six-Day War" against a number of those states, capturing territory from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. In 1973, a coalition of Arab countries attempted to resecure some of that land in the Yom Kippur War, and several Arab countries placed an oil embargo on supporters of Israel during the war, triggering the 1973 oil crisis. While Britain was not on the blacklist, the boycott still led to financial turmoil for Britain, as it quadrupled oil prices which also drove inflation. The United Kingdom had also been reliant on importing hydrocarbons from European neighbours who could no longer play salesman as they were under embargo.^[11] The UK needed oil fast.

In 1975, the country tapped its first North Sea oil field: Argyll. Soon after, it brought the largest of the North Sea oil fields onstream: Forties. A year later, in the Piper oilfield, about 120 miles from Aberdeen, Scotland, production began. Piper Alpha was a seemingly inexhaustible plume of black gold, at one time decanting 10% of the world's oil. It was later retrofitted to condense and export natural gas.^[4] Most oil wells are also natural gas wells, but some simply burn off the gas and keep the oil.^[12][13] Piper Alpha had not one but two pumps for natural gas extraction, denoted A and B.^[4]

On 6 July 1988, Pump A was taken offline for maintenance.^[4] As part of this maintenance, its safety valve was removed and replaced with a blind flange, but one that was not leak-tight. Although, whether the flange was the cause of the following accident is unknown.^[14] During the handover from one shift supervisor to another, the former manager didn't communicate that Pump A was inoperable to the latter and documentation about the state of the rig was not made readily available to engineers.^[4][15] The shift workers were no wiser to Pump A's dormancy. That night, it was Pump B draining effluvia, but when it tripped and wouldn't restart, the crew fell back on Pump A, not knowing it was missing its safety valve. This set off a chain of explosions and fires that killed 167 and injured countless more. Because of the layout of the rig, this combustion took out electrical power and radio communications and put a barrier between the crew and the fire suppression systems. As on Beira D, no lifeboats or helicopters were able to launch from the platform to evacuate crew.^[4]

Still Wakes the Deep internalises that modern industrial accidents are never just about some freak anomaly and are always a story of compounding negligences. If Chernobyl had just been a poorly planned experiment, there would have been no explosion that April morning. For the meltdown to happen, you needed a reactor without a containment structure, an indifference to safety procedures, and a flammable neutron moderator, among other shambles. For Piper Alpha to happen, it didn't just take a missing part; it also required lax training, undercommunication from management, a normalisation of keeping automatic safety features offline, a poor replacement part, poor locational design within the rig, a laissez-faire response to previous accidents and complaints, and false assumptions about the ease of evacuation.^[4][16] Beira Delta was harpooned by the sea. However, its death toll is also enumerated by lifeboats unfit for purpose, corners that were cut with its structural integrity, and a manager who places "getting the job done" above the safety concerns of his crew.

The game serves a slice of what it must have been like to live aboard Piper Alpha before and during the fire. It does it with some shockingly period and geography-accurate interiors and voices. Britain is a beautiful and quirky exhibition of dialects and accents, but its media favours a South-Eastern "received pronunctiation" over all other lilts. The BBC voice and dictionary are cast as the most professional envelopes for speech and the ones that are the most comprehensible, but if Caz wasn't telling other characters, "Just here to fix the lecky" or "Kiss the weans for me", it wouldn't be 1970s Scotland. As for the interior design, there are places in the UK that still look like the quarters, kitchen, and rec room of the Beira today. When I first walked into the pool hall, I could smell the stale beer rising out of the carpets. The lever arch files they have in the offices are the exact right type. All this washed away in a flood of negligence and extranaturalism.

Maybe there is a third object in this story apart from Delta and the sea: the helix twisting through the rig. While I love Lovecraft, a lot of art spun off of the author's stories fails to capture what made them sublime. Cthulhu sends chills down spines because he is incomprehensible, but he can't feel unknown if he is one of the most depicted creatures of nerd culture. He can't be unfathomable if he keeps being illustrated. And we keep depicting him; we keep illustrating him.

Still Wakes the Deep rediscovers the despair of the Old Ones not by copying them but by replicating their most disturbing elements. Its red and black and blue tentacle activates the memory centres of Cameron's brain and rewrites human DNA outside of phenotypical laws. It is something I don't know. When we enter its sphere of influence, colourful distortions appear in our vision as though Cameron were pressing the corner of his eyeball or staring into the sun. The auras help us keep a bead on the Rennicks of the rig during the stealth sections but also show that the spire and its offspring are capable of altering us in ways beyond our understanding. The irony is that while the proliferation of the deep's fibres is a tragedy, the Beira D collecting its bounty would be, too. The Attendants of Cadal are subject to a bloodletting, but then what else is Cadal's treatment of the North Sea?

We can track overdrafts of sin throughout many horror plots. Blood debts are paid with sacrifices, and those who flout social conventions are brought to violent atonement. Some people think that climate change represents a similar reciprocity between nature and people. When we scald the planet with fossil fuels, it burns us in turn. As in horror fiction, the fine we're levied might not be fair, but that doesn't mean it's not a system of morality, even if a medieval one. In Still Wakes the Deep, Cadal, like many a fossil fuel proprietor, drills down into the Earth, but for once, the Earth drills back.

At the end of this story, Cameron will swallow Cadal's moral arrears, but he has his own account to settle as well. Caz left his family out to dry during the holidays, but the massacre aboard his workplace is making him think about the world he'll leave behind for his children. Textually, it will be one of chthonic terror, but subtextually, this is a 20th-century man realising that his gift to his children will be malodorous pollution. When he falls unconscious near the obelisk, psychedelic recollections of his family haunt his dreams. There are horror media like Life (2017) or Dead Space where would-be rescuers arrive at a monster's hunting ground only to become further victims to it or even spread a plague. In the Piper Alpha incident, some of the lifeboat sailors who went to save the crew were also lost.

Caz, however, sees this twist coming. He has spent a whole game trying to flee the oil field, but looking to avoid a contagion of corruption and finally protect his family, he resolves to stay there forever. He sails into the black mast with his cigarette lighter in hand, sending it up in a pillar of flame. I'm getting visions of Firewatch, another story about a man who abandoned his family for a remote natural location. Henry's watchtower could even be mistaken for a rig if you squint. Both finish on fire.

Firewatch and Still Wakes the Deep use a common story structure in which a character attempts to ignore an urgent life issue, only to find that dereliction worsens the problem. Eventually, responsibility holds their shoulders, forcing them to confront it. In the middle-of-the-road drama Firewatch, the confrontation involves Henry flying back home to his dementia-stricken wife, but horrors tend to have more violent resolutions. During his confrontation, Cameron pays for oil with blood. It shouldn't fall on him to make that sacrifice, but then, when have the people with the most blame for killing the planet ever paid for it? Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press (p. 1).
2. Bassett, F.S. (1885). Legends and Superstitions of the Sea and of Sailors in All Lands and at All Times. Belford, Clarke & Co. (p. 7).
3. Mackenzie, D.A. (1997). Scottish Wonder Tales from Myth and Legend. Courier Corporation (p. 22).
4. Piper Alpha: The Disaster in Detail by Fiona Macleod and Stephen Richardson (July 6, 2018), The Chemical Engineer.
5. Speight, J.G. (2015). Subsea and Deepwater Oil and Gas Science and Technology. Second Edition. ScienceDirect (Section 3.2.2).
6. Burke, L. (2013). The Sea Gem: A Story of Material Failure. Memorial University of Newfoundland (p. 1-4).
7. About the Nakba by UN Palestinian Rights Committee Staff (June 27, 2024), United Nations.
8. Nakba of 1948 and Today Are Not Separate Events, but Ongoing Process of Palestinian Displacement, Replacement, Speakers Tell Panel, Urging Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza by UN Staff (May 17, 2024), United Nations.
9. The Nakba did not start or end in 1948 by Al Jazeera Staff (May 23, 2017), Al Jazeera.
10. The Palestinian Nakba: What Happened in 1948 and Why It Still Matters by Institute for Palestine Studies Staff (2021), Institute for Palestine Studies.
11. Zakariah, M.H.B. (2011). The Oil Embargo Following the Arab-Israel War of October 1973: British Economic Experience and Reaction. Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (in Asia) vol. 5, issue 2 (p. 92-120).
12. U.S. EIA Staff (2023). The Distribution of U.S. Oil and Natural Gas Wells by Production Rate with data through 2022. U.S. Energy Information Administration (p. 9).
13. Gas Flaring by IEA Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed October 30, 2024), International Energy Agency.
14. Cullen, W.D. (1990). The Public Inquiry Into the Piper Alpha Disaster Volume One. UK Department of Energy (p. 85).
15. Ibid. (p. 121).
16. Ibid. (p. 194).

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.