Last year's first-person horror Still Wakes the Deep combined three of my favourite things, namely Scottish people, oil rigs, and The Thing. It's the best game that The Chinese Room has made yet in my opinion, and my only real complaint (if you can call it that) is that I would happily have played more of it.
And as it turns out, we are getting another slice of offshore Caledonian terror far sooner than you might have expected. The Chinese Room recently revealed Still Wakes the Deep is getting an expansion, and you'll be able to dive into its murky depths next week.
[Spoilers for Still Wakes the Deep follow]
Titled Siren's Rest, the DLC takes place 11 years after the events of the original, placing you in the role of Mhairi, a saturation diver leading a team to investigate the wreck of the Beria D (Does it count as a wreck if it's an oil rig? Answers on a postcard please.) now scattered across the floor of the North Sea. Your mission is to uncover what exactly happened to the crew and recover their remains.
The DLC, which The Chinese Room says will last around 2 hours, adds some light detective elements to the experience. You'll need to photograph human remains and collect mementos of the dead. Also, since the Beria D is now a broken, twisted mass of steel, you'll need to navigate through it carefully, using tools like a cutting arc and a crowbar to break through blocked-off areas.
Honestly, it sounds brilliant. Also, terrifying. The original was intense enough when you were above the water, so adding in full-blown thalassophobia and specifically deep-sea wreck diving—pretty much the most dangerous thing a human can do on this planet—should ratchet up the tension substantially.
Still Wakes the Deep: Siren's Rest launches Wednesday, 18 June, and will cost $13 (£10), on launch. If you already know you want to play it, you can grab it at a 15% launch discount, bringing the price down to just over $11 (£8.50). If you haven't played the original, that's currently 50% off too, available at $17.50 (£15).
This DLC isn't the only project set to emerge from The Chinese Room this year. After a long and turbulent development that resulted in an entire change of studio, the much troubled Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 is finally set to launch this October.
And it seems the troubled sequel might have flourished under The Chinese Room's stewardship. Fraser Brown played several hours of it back in March, and that hands-on time allayed many of his concerns:
"I'm still shocked by how good the combat felt. Powerful, tactical, delightfully over the top," he wrote in his Bloodlines 2 preview. "And I loved exchanging barbs and pleasantries with Seattle's secret rulers. The writing is playful, the mysteries compelling, and the systems underpinning these chats are exactly what I want from an RPG."
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