Reviewer's Note: Given certain story & gameplay critiques I'm compelled to make, there will be some SPOILERS for this expansion and Still Wakes the Deep.  Read on at your own risk.

Apropos of the original's setting, there's an easy parallel in comparing Still Wakes to oil remediation: separating its shallow mechanics from a more nuanced character-focused script amidst a series of explosive set pieces.  Fusing John Carpenter's The Thing and disaster flicks could pique anyone's interest; even if the means of maneuvering Caz McCleary around the Beria D oil rig were basic and scripted, there's something to tangibly interfacing with that groaning behemoth.  So, it begs a question: what's the appeal of returning after The North Sea already claimed her?

For Siren's Rest's protagonist, Mhairi (pronounced "Mah-ree"), her motivation is clear – though initially kept hidden.  The year is now 1986, over a decade since the Beria D's calamitous fallout and subsequent sinking.  As the leader of a saturation dive crew, Mhairi, alongside Rob, is tasked with descending over 150 meters and scouring the wreckage.  The task is both forensic and personal in nature: swimming through this metal carcass to disinter what happened via official recordings, collecting personal memorabilia, and photographing any human remains.  There's hope – however slim – of finding answers and giving the victims' families solace.


Even the advertising is upfront about this: it's more exploratory and atmospheric (pun intended) by design.  Those grotesque, pulsating flesh webs from before have essentially fossilized; most of the original 1970s décor has decayed; croaking and creaking from the Beria D now comes from the elements slowly destroying it, rather than from managing against violent waves.  Instead of the balance between circumnavigating these environments and jamming the control stick a certain way to forestall a calamitous meltdown, now you're swimming through burial grounds and prying open a rusted door or locker. 

In some respects, Siren's Rest can be considered a more audacious type of epilogue – and more reminiscent of The Chinese Room's earlier projects.  Perhaps foregoing Still Wake's blockbuster expectations with a more grounded backdrop and less-conventional pacing could grant its familial themes more breathing room.  Given the role of a sanitation diver, it makes sense for Mhiari's tools to be limited to a welding torch, heavy-duty crowbar, helmet flashlight, underwater flares, and a long umbilical cord; that said, grounded realism goes out the window when playing around with the cord's physics.  But these limitations aren't given any meaningful nuance; underwater navigation and Thalassophobia can only go so far when most interactions are jamming left, right, up, or down on the control stick for a couple of seconds.  There's no shortage of that in Still Wakes too, but at least the end result was more than prying open another lock.


Any tangible gameplay wrinkles here are either lateral or subtractive.  The brief moments of detaching the umbilical to explore air pockets are condensed retreads of the original without any newfound tension – like potential suffocation, for example.  Aside from a mini-quicktime event with the control stick, the second-most popular mechanic is burning off rust clumps on an iron bar or door.  Its sporadic chase scenes are, well, chase scenes.  And the one big stealth event lasts roughly five minutes.  Sure, 'stealth swimming' is tangibly new, but the monster you're eluding has no personality – unlike the pained pleas of the original's possessed crewmen. 

At least there's personality within this small crew.  For as limited as the screentime is between Mhairi and Rob, Lois Chimimba and Lorn MacDonald inhabit their respective roles.  Chimimba's softer cadence compliments Mhairi's reflective moments when coming across another skeleton, reminiscing about that crew member's surviving family.  The problem is leaving all of that as filler dialogue only papers over its protagonist problem.  There's a strange mismatch between what the average player who's completed the main game and Mhairi herself knows.  On a fundamental level, all she accomplishes is finding knickknacks that she has a thin emotional connection to and a fragmented explanation by the end, ultimately capped off with a contrived A/B choice.  It's so perplexing, especially since Still Wakes' conclusion was perfunctory but still successful.


The confused ending is endemic of the entire project, sadly.  Instead of a deliberately-paced & pensive exploration on the lingering fallout of one corporate-driven decision, it feels more like a meandering swimming tour that can't sustain its sub-two-hour runtime (three hours for a completionist).  That's quite damning for an expansion selling at $12.99; of course, pain-staking environmental detail like this doesn't come cheap either.  Even the recycled assets are a non-issue because of how they're utilized in this new backdrop.  Shelving the dollar-per-hour value argument, it's still an aggressive asking price for something that feels fundamentally conflicted.

Still Wakes the Deep: Siren's Rest isn't the worst expansion, just one of the most pointless.  Between reused assets, a loosely-connected side story, and what seem like leftover gameplay concepts, nothing here is elegantly fused together; they're useful materials in their own right, but ill-suited for the depth it's trying to explore.  In one respect, The Chinese Room is subverting common DLC standards.  The problem is such "ambition" looks more like hubris over time.  As the descent continues and outside negative pressure multiplies, its initial intrigue quickly begins to crack and then subsequently crumples like a soda can.

Contractor by trade and writer by hobby, Lee's obnoxious criticisms have found a way to be featured across several gaming sites: N4G, VGChartz, Gaming Nexus, DarkStation, TechRaptor, and Cubed3! He started gaming in the mid-90s and has had the privilege in playing many games across a plethora of platforms. Reader warning: each click given to his articles only helps to inflate his Texas-sized ego. Proceed with caution.