Still Wakes the Deep

Still Wakes the Deep runs about six hours, which for someone who plays in the gaps between bedtime stories and actual sleep is basically a perfect length. It's set on a collapsing North Sea oil rig in the 1970s, and the body horror creeping through the crew is about dread more than combat. No combat here. There's only running, hiding, and occasionally climbing somewhere you really don't want to be. The Scottish voice cast sells the claustrophobia even when the visuals are doing the heavier lifting. It won't stick with you as long as the genre leaders above it, but it respects your time, which counts for something.

Five or six hours, start to finish, and almost none of that time gives you room to breathe. You are a worker on a North Sea oil rig when something goes wrong in a way that the word 'wrong' does not fully cover. Still Wakes the Deep has a very specific thing it wants to do and it does it without overstaying its welcome, which as a time-limited player I find genuinely refreshing. The Scottish voice cast grounds the characters quickly, so when things start going badly you actually care. It is not a game you replay. But the first time through, the pressure is real. Worth every evening you put into it, and at PS Plus it costs nothing extra to find out.