Still Wakes the Deep was provided by Secret Mode for review. Thank you!
This review used an LCD Steam Deck. OLED details will be coming later.
Still Wakes the Deep is a challenging game to write a review on. Much like The Chinese Room's earlier releases, Still Wakes the Deep is a walking simulator at heart, with a firm reliance on the game's story to drive it. Therefore, I will try my hardest to minimize spoilers in this review while still giving my opinion on the game. But long story short, Still Wakes the Deep is yet another feather in the cap of The Chinese Room's portfolio.
For me, The Chinese Room set their bar high for their games with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (EGttR). I adored that game, despite my struggling with "horror" games. EGttR bridged the gap between being a little creepy but at the same time being quite beautiful, and the visuals were stunning for the time.
Still Wakes the Deep borrows some pointers from EGttR. It is a visual masterpiece, with a fantastic focus on realism, making screenshots on the highest quality settings fool you into thinking they're real. The voice acting is also another highlight for me, going with Scottish actors instead of the usual British. The voice actors do a good job of bringing their characters to life with their personalities and keeping you immersed in the story and situation, which needless to say, is not a good one.
To briefly touch on the story, as I don't want to spoil it, it's your classic "dug too deep" scenario. Caz, our protagonist, is a worker on a North Sea oil rig, which is managed by a rather ruthless character named Rennick. Upon encountering a "blockage" while drilling for oil, Rennick orders that it be pushed through with the drill, unleashing a rather "otherworldly horror," as the game's developers put it. The rest of the story follows Caz and the oil rig crew attempting to survive and escape before it's too late.
You will also gradually learn parts of Caz's backstory, such as why he is on the oil rig and his family situation, giving you an idea of why Caz has to fight to survive.
While EGttR was a sedate adventure, carrying an eerie vibe, but with no real enemies that could harm you, Still Wakes the Deep features enemies and could best be described as a mix of the Amnesia games and EGttR. While parts of it are very much a walking simulator, a fair bit of the game is firmly grounded in stealth, avoiding enemies, and a bit of psychological horror. Although, I wouldn't say the game is quite as creepy as Amnesia. The enemies are obvious, and if you are seen or an enemy gets close, you are pretty much dead. You can take your hands off the controls and just let it happen, which lowers the tension a little.
Still Wakes the Deep is a masterclass in storytelling through the video game medium. I expected it from The Chinese Room, but the visuals, combined with the voice acting and that little bit of terrifying horror, really help you to be immersed in this world.
The story is a little out there, but I think the way the characters react to the situation helps it feel much more grounded than it perhaps is. There's no wise-cracking, jokes, or 'light-heartedness' to take you out of the situation. Terrible things are happening, and the crew all act like that's the case. The game also airs on the short side. You will likely be done with the game in about 6 hours, even less if you aren't a chicken and just go for it. You can also ask for a hint on the objective at any time, telling you exactly where you need to go, so you won't get confused over where to head next.
While some argue that the game's price is high for just 6 hours of gameplay, I think it's a fair price for a fairly unique experience. There's no recycled content or gameplay here; it's 6 hours of solid story all the way through, and it's worth a look if this is your kind of game.
Still Wakes the Deep has a nice array of settings to mess with and does support modern upscaling techniques such as FSR3, DLSS, and XeSS. Unfortunately, these settings aren't useful on the Steam Deck, as we have to run at an absolute minimum to get a playable experience.
By default, FSR3 frame generation is used, but as the Steam Deck generally runs the game at sub-30, the input lag it introduces is pretty bad, probably not far off 500ms, so I recommend turning it off and just accepting some frame drops from 30 FPS.
However, the controls on the Steam Deck are perfect, and the interface can be scaled to suit your needs.
In your SteamOS settings, set an FPS Limit of 30 FPS and 60/90Hz and remove any TDP limit.
We'll want to reduce all the graphical settings to their minimum for the most playable experience. I keep FSR3 on Performance, as I found Ultra Performance to add an awful amount of noise to the screen that ruins the quality of the image. I also disable Frame Generation to reduce input lag. Lighting Quality has to be on high, as the only choices are High and Epic and Epic uses Ray Tracing, which we don't want to be enabled.
These settings allow portions of the game to run at a smooth 30 FPS with minimal input lag. However, at times, you will see dips as far as the mid-20s. Fortunately, Still Wakes the Deep isn't exactly an "action" game, and these dips shouldn't affect you too much. The game still looks pretty great on these lowest settings on the smaller screen and remains playable.
I did end up giving the game a lower visual rating due to some issues with FSR and how far away this is from the maximum quality, but it still looks quite good on the smaller Deck screen.
As for power draw, it's a pretty mixed bag depending on the area you're in, ranging from 16W-25W, but I would say it airs more on the 20-25W side of things, especially when you're in the outside portions of the game. So don't expect more than 2 hours of battery life from an LCD Steam Deck and 2.5 hours from an OLED Steam Deck.
Temperatures, like the power draw, vary. In quieter sections, expect around 75C, but outdoors, it can go up to 85C. I noticed 90C several times in loading screens, so expect the fan to kick in loud.
Still Wakes the Deep has quite the suite of accessibility options, you can adjust the size of subtitles, if they have a background to them, and the opacity of said background. You can adjust the interface size by using objective text and markers. Closed Captions are available if you want sound effects to be shown as subtitles. There are colorblind filters, the ability to disable flashing lights, the ability to disable camera shaking, and the option to increase the time before you must react to button prompts.
You can't fault Still Wakes the Deep for being accessible—except for those of us who might be terrified by it!
Still Wakes the Deep is yet another fantastic story The Chinese Room tells. I had high hopes after Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and although Still Wakes the Deep is another style of game, it retains great storytelling and visuals that immerse you in the game world.
It's a little on the shorter side, but the game is packed with a great tale, voiced lines, and good world crafting. There's no filler here, and I think it's well worth the price if you're after a solid narrative game with some horror elements.
As for performance on the Steam Deck, it's not the best. Holding 30 FPS is impossible without FSR3 Frame Gen, and that introduces significant input lag. Personally, I didn't mind the occasional drops in frame rate, and the controls work perfectly fine. All-in-all, the game is playable, but you might prefer to play on a more powerful device to enjoy the beautiful visuals more and get the most from this experience.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back.
In an era of otherwise relatively mindless military shooters, BioShock stood apart as a thought provoking, politically charged RPG-hybrid that took direct swipes at the rugged individualism of libertarian politics. The game pulled no punches in its stance on “utopia” under a stateless society that lacked authority. You'll spend a dozen hours exploring the underwater “paradise” of Rapture, the once-breathtaking dream of one man fed up with taxation and regulation, long abandoned by all but the most fervent devotees and burnt out Splicers (addicts to genetic modification that lose all sense of self). As Jack, you find Rapture crumbling at the seams when you descend into its belly after a plane crash leaves you stranded at sea.
BioShock Remastered is a fresh coat of paint on the otherwise unchanged masterpiece. 2K updated the textures and shifted the art design in some key areas, giving the then nine year old game a much needed overhaul that brought the timeless classic into the modern day. Does the extra polish stand up to another 6 years of aging? Let's load it up on the Steam Deck to find out!
BioShock Remastered is currently listed as Unknown in the Deck Verified program. Thankfully, Bioshock Remastered works on Deck without any extra setup!. The official controls work flawlessly out of the box with Xbox One glyphs indicating controls and the game runs smoothly, taking up the full 1280x800 screen during gameplay with menus at 1280x720. There are no middleware incompatibilities either. The only hiccup preventing this game from verified status, if 2K chooses to submit it, is if you exit the game without using the Quit to Desktop option in the pause menu or at the title screen, a mouse/touchscreen-only dialog box to launch in safe mode appears.
As an added perk the game supports Cloud Saves which is personally a must for me, as I switch between the Steam Deck and my PC regularly. Gyro controls function flawlessly, although you may find the game’s aggressive auto-aim fighting you from time to time.
BioShock has always had a well optimized, albeit buggy, PC port. A 2007 game with only mild changes for the Remaster, the Steam Deck does not struggle to run it at all at maximum settings. Because of this, there really wasn’t a need to change anything whatsoever to get this running fantastically. With cool temps of around 55c and 8W - 12W drain (around 4 hours of battery), it is already an excellent way to play. Valve’s Proton (7.0-3) works swimmingly as well, so no need to download another compatibility layer like Proton GE. All that said, it’s possible to command another hour out of the game with near-silent operation if you’re willing to make a few changes.
While BioShock isn’t an intensive game and commands a respectable three and a half to four hours of battery life at 60 FPS with maximum settings, it is possible to squeeze a little extra juice out of the battery with some tweaking.
Lowering the game’s settings to their minimum, except anisotropic filtering as this helps immensely with the detailed texture work in the game, and capping the framerate at 40 fps, squeezes out an additional watt or so of power, bringing battery life to approximately 4:30. Those savings are negligible considering that screen brightness makes up the majority of the game’s power draw in all but the least demanding areas. Quirkily, enabling antialiasing and distortion at the same time actually lowers GPU usage, possibly due to no AA being applied to distorted parts of the screen.
All testing was performed with the screen brightness and volume at 50%, as the difference between minimum and maximum screen brightness can have an impact of ~2w of power draw.
For true battery hounds, the game’s resolution can be lowered to 928x580 with FSR set to a Sharpness of 2 at 40hz to muster 5 total hours of battery life. This odd resolution is the next lowest from native that does not stretch the aspect ratio of the screen in strange ways. Ultimately I can’t recommend this option except under extreme circumstances because of the massive impact of the gleaming, intricate, and flawed city of Rapture.
Through testing, I noticed that attempting to manually adjust TDP or GPU clocks impacted frametime stability in an unacceptable way, even when the settings should have been far above what was needed to run the game smoothly. Something about BioShock Remastered’s engine does not play well with Valve’s performance tools.
If you enjoy tinkering with the performance overlay, you may also run into a bug where it remains on screen even after being toggled off. Setting the overlay to its maximum setting, then lowering it to Off, setting it to 1, then lowering it to Off again consistently cleared this issue up for me.
The controls were designed at a time where controllers were built less precisely and layouts weren’t standardized. The jump button is mapped to Y by default, which feels unintuitive in the modern landscape. Additionally, the game’s auto aim is so aggressive that it often overrides the more precise aiming afforded by the Steam Deck’s incredible joysticks and gyro aiming. Thankfully, autoaim can be turned off in the settings, but the archaic bindings cannot be fixed unless you’re willing to rebind controls using Steam Input. Doing so would make the in game prompts not match what you need to press. A more modern layout might look like jump on A, interact on X, reload on B and first aid on Y, with gyro mapped to R4.
As a quick aside the original BioShock is playable on the Steam Deck as well, but it isn’t a pleasant experience to launch. It requires extensive interaction with touch screen setup menus before the first launch, and the menus require mouse interaction that doesn’t work properly with the touchscreen. To access any menu options, you have to manually map the right trackpad to the mouse, go into settings, and then enable “Xbox 360 Controller” mode before you can navigate the menus with a controller. Upon booting in, I attempted to open the performance overlay, but pressing the “...” button froze the Steam Deck’s UI - while the game kept running I couldn’t even put the device into sleep. The only way to escape was to hard restart. In addition, the game only displayed in 4:3 in the middle of the Deck’s screen. Despite the “Playable” rating on the Steam store, I cannot recommend the classic release of BioShock on the Steam Deck.
BioShock was one of my fondest gaming memories growing up and the ending sincerely made me cry. It was a work of art then and remains a hallmark of its genre now. Bold, beautiful, unapologetically political and uncompromising in its vision, it is a treat to play on the Steam Deck. I envy anyone who is experiencing it for the first time and feel camaraderie with anyone playing it for the second, third, or in my case fifth time. Having it available on the go is far beyond what I ever thought possible playing it 15 years ago, and every minute I spent testing for this article brought a smile to my face.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
If you enjoyed this review, be sure to check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety game reviews and news that are sure to help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got your back!
