Xbox Partner Preview: The Unexpected Inspirations That Make Up Still Wakes the Deep 

Even Wakes the Depth doesn’t feel like how we expect games to feel. Fresh from seeing brand new gameplay during the Xbox Partner Preview show, this game is somehow simultaneously a panicky horror experience, a ‘70s period piece, a deeply British, deeply personal character study, and perhaps even an oil rig explorer. It’s increasingly rare to see a game that simply doesn’t feel like it’s drawing on the same pool of inspirations as the rest of the medium. 

That’s why I asked the developers at The Chinese Room to put together a list of the various inspirations they had coming into this project – the results are a “reading list” of movies, TV shows, books, and more that help piece together this incredibly unexpected game. On this list alone, you’ll never have played anything quite like this… 

The premise is inspired by… The Thing

Our project elevator pitch was: ‘”The Thing” on an oil rig’. It was just a short sentence, spoken in seconds. This phrase ignited a creative fire in everyone who heard it. John Carpenter’s 1982 film “The Thing”, and its predecessor novella “Who Goes There?” by John W Campbell, are touchstones for the overall atmosphere of Even Wakes the Depth. The character drama created by a group of professionals who are cut off, alone and fighting what seems like an insurmountable foe is just right to propel our story. The backdrop is one of fear, paranoia and isolation. We also see the destruction that occurs to human crew members. – Lead designer Rob McLachlan (He/Him/His)

The atmosphere is inspired by… Rosemary’s Baby  

There is something about some ’70s media that feels inherently wrong, as if the artefact itself is cursed. Every frame of “Don’t Look Now” and “Rosemary’s Baby” is imbued with a sense of dread.  Innocent domestic or everyday scenes that are not overtly scary become even more unsettling as if there is something lurking beneath the surface.  In addition to the period aesthetics, these films have also influenced Even Wakes the DepthWe have used recurring images and motifs in order to unnerve our players. – Associate art director Laura Dodds (She/Her/Hers) 

The authenticity is inspired by… Kes

Ken Loach’s early film work had an almost documentary style that grounded its story and characters in a way that felt startlingly realistic to the audience of the time. This naturalistic style of shooting and performances in local dialects and languages broke down barriers between viewers and characters, allowing us to empathize better with them. This is something we’ve tried hard to incorporate into the game experience. We wanted to give the game a human touch by placing it in a real world with people who are living their lives. – Creative director John McCormack (He/Him/His) 

The game structure is inspired by… The Poseidon Adventure

We were asked to consider the North Sea as a potential second antagonist from the very beginning. The waves should be feared and the players trapped in the dark cold water that floods the platform. The 1972 film “The Poseidon Adventure”, created by the ‘Master of Disaster’ Irwin Allen informed both our dramatic structure and the intensity of our gameplay. The ominous lead up – where the viewer knows something is going to happen, but the characters don’t – is a great bit of narrative tension to keep our players engaged. Gene Hackman’s Reverend, swimming and swinging through the upturned environments of the SS Poseidon, is a perfect archetype for our unathletic hero, Cameron McLeary. – Lead designer Rob McLachlan (He/Him/His) 

The beauty and transformation in horror is inspired by… Annihilation

One of our development pillars was ‘a terrible beauty’. This dichotomy of disgust and attraction was captured in media. A common thread between very different visuals – the rainbow shimmer of “Annihilation”, the burst of florals and bright colours in “Midsommar”, and the sumptuously staged dioramas from “Hannibal” – was the theme of transformation. The theme of transformation was a common thread in many visuals, from the rainbow shimmering “Annihilation” to the bursts of florals and bright colours found in “Midsommar”, or even through sumptuously staged dioramas like those seen on Hannibal. – Associate art director Laura Dodds (She/Her/Hers) 

The audio is inspired by… The Southern Reach Trilogy & the natural world

Jeff Vandermeer’s vivid descriptions of a supernatural event that has twisted nature were highly inspiring to the game’s audio direction. He sometimes describes literal sounds, such as when he writes about an ‘essentially indescribable’ creature and “the sound that it made, as if the wind and the sea had been smashed together, and in the aftershock there reverberated that same sonorous moan.” 

Nature was also a huge inspiration. Elephants can express an enormous range of emotions through their vocalizations, making them both endearing as well as terrifying. Or how synchronicity ultimately establishes itself in nature after a chaotic event, such as planets orbiting after the big bang – this concept has driven some of our audio systems. The same goes for how sounds in nature don’t tend to happen in isolation: a contact call will elicit a response, an event will trigger a warning; this drove the way we thought about and implemented our ambient audio. Even though we were alone on an isolated oil rig and we felt like we had no one to talk to, we still considered the massive metallic structure a breathing, living organism. Audio director Daan Hendriks 

The darkness of the ’70s was inspired by… Sapphire & Steel 

There was something about the science fiction that Britain was producing in the ’60s and ’70s that made it stand out. There was an in-built, oppressive darkness running through each show from “Doctor Who” to “Doomwatch” that left a permanent mark on the viewer. None more so than “Sapphire and Steel”, which was both impenetrably baffling and unnervingly hypnotic to experience at the time. The ‘alien forces’ being battled in the show felt more like cosmic ghosts that haunted the surreal, liminal world with a creeping dread that seemed impossible to grasp. There’s an aspect of this that we’ve tried to bring into our antagonistic force on the rig. Creative director John McCormack (He/Him/His) 

The sense of reality unravelling is inspired by… Suspiria

You can also find out more about the following: Even Wakes the Depth we took inspiration from films of the ’70s where the mise-en-scène becomes increasingly psychological in its expression of terror and reality coming undone. Suspiria’s lighting was seminal particularly for its use of colour, mostly garish reds and vibrant blues, to create hypnotic and terrifying sequences.  The set and the spaces of the dance school begin to have a dream-like logic as the protagonist Suzie descended further into the nightmarish realm. Flashes of this can be seen in Kubrick’s maze sequence in “The Shining” and, to a much larger extent, in “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Associate art director Laura Dodds (She/Her/Hers)