Still Wakes the Deep’s Siren’s Rest DLC Still Isn’t Scary Enough

Still Wakes the Deep surely tried to be scary. It had a remote setting, cosmic horribly deformed monstrosities straight out of The Thing, and comically thick Scottish accents, but it was a lot more frustrating than freaky. Almost every bit of tension was squandered by its annoying trial-and-error stealth sequences that punished every slight blunder. Its Siren’s Rest DLC had a chance to fix that fatal error, but it’s not just lacking in quality scares like the base game; it’s boring.

Boredom is baked into the very premise and where a lot of its issues arise. Siren’s Rest takes place a decade after the oil rig from the base game collapsed and tasks a new character, Mhairi, with diving into the undersea wreckage to gather a data logger and, optionally, memorabilia to send to the families.

RELATED: 5 Best Immersive Horror Games (Including The Midnight Walk)

It positions itself as a mystery à la Fullbright’s 2017 hit Tacoma where players are meant to slowly piece together what happened alongside the protagonist, but nothing about it is mysterious. The “mystery” is just what happened in the base game. There’s nothing to solve or uncover, and collectibles offer no insight to both new and returning players. Mhairi has revelations that the player doesn’t and that schism all but neuters the creepy secrecy that a game like this is supposed to have. In the core game, it was at least a little spooky to wonder what wretched hell had been unleashed as the chaos slowly unfolded across the oil rig, but that is absent here.

This expansion could have doubled down on some different angle for the story, but it hardly makes a case for its new bits of narrative. Mhairi’s personal connection to the catastrophe is initially unsaid but later mined as the Eldritch entity begins to warp her mind. It hardly goes past the bare essentials of her wanting the barest form of closure and has little nuance, some of which is handicapped by Siren’s Rest’s brief runtime. Still Wakes the Deep’s relationships had all sorts of complexities and were a substantial part of the experience, so it’s puzzling to see this expansion whiff so hard in that regard, especially given developer The Chinese Room’s storytelling background.

Siren’s Rest doesn’t even offer any of its own new gameplay thrills, either. Most of it has Mhairi swimming through wreckage with no real physical threats following her. Drowning is sometimes possible, but the forgiving timer makes that implausible and the absence of resources means there’s no chance to make tough choices. The stealthy monster parts in the base game were poorly tuned and had shallow mechanics attached to them, yet they at least raised the stakes and could sometimes appropriately elicit the intended pressure. When there’s little physically pressuring the player in a horror game, the whole thing falls apart.

A malformed, otherworldly beast makes an entrance in the final section of the game and offers some scares, as players have to scurry between bits of cover to avoid a grisly death. But even this is mishandled and echoes a lot of the same issues found in the original title. One slight slip-up spells death and this punishing nature is neither engaging nor frightening when it falls apart at a moment’s notice. There are no close calls because its lack of mechanics means success is binary. You either sneak by or you don’t. There’s not much room for player input.

The presence of the creature is mishandled in a narrative sense, too. Still Wakes the Deep’s finale was memorable because of the sacrifices it required to keep evil at bay. However, it clearly did not work because those evils are still around and trying to snack on Mhairi many years later. And thus those sacrifices were in vain, retroactively lessening the impact of that original climax.

It’s disappointing for Siren’s Rest to not right the wrongs in Still Wakes the Deep. The Chinese Room went through great lengths to make a horror story and put the characters first in the 2024 title, but didn’t flesh out the actual gameplay nearly as much, leading to an uneven experience that constantly got in its own way.

Instead, aside from the lively performances from the new cast, Siren’s Rest is worse in almost every single way. There’s nothing to truly discover or solve since the tragedy at hand is just what happened in the base game, making it a poor story-heavy walking — or swimming, technically — simulator. It still lacks core survival horror mechanics, so there’s even less of a reason to scavenge through the rusted debris. The one stretch with a true fanged menace is tedious because of the nebulous vision cone and immediate death that comes with the slightest misstep. Not even the malevolent corruption is nearly as visually captivating. Without having thoughtful threats or a narrative to unpack, Siren’s Rest is an underwater experience that is, ironically, incredibly dry and shallow.