呼び声に耳を傾け、深淵を目覚めさせる：セイレーンの休息

Had UK-based developers The Chinese Room wanted a bit of a rest on their laurels after the ecstatically received それでも深海は目覚める, well, the sheer number of laurels available would have made for a pretty comfy nest. They hit best of the year and game awards lists with equal regularity, scooping, among others, best indie at the 2024 Horror Game Awards, best creature design at the NYX Awards, a 2025 Bafta for best new IP, and a New York Times best of the year pick. Luckily for us, they’ve wasted little time getting back to work, and just over a year after Still Wakes’ release, we can submerge ourselves once more in the mystery filled waters around the cursed oil rig with new DLC—Still Wakes the Deep: The Siren’s Rest. Sagar Beroshi and Patrick O’Halloran from The Chinese Room came by Intel Gaming Access to dish on their literal deep dive into the horror genre.

Rolling in the Deep

Sagar, the lead on narrative for the title, explains the gripping plot of this new chapter. “Siren’s Rest is set a decade after the events of the base game. The main character is Mhairi, who is the leader of a saturation diving expedition to a wreck at the bottom of the North Sea. People died in this disaster, and Mhairi is trying to record as much as she can of their passing (plus trying to make sense of what went wrong) as she carefully swims her way through a heaving, rusting twisted wreck. Mhairi has her own reasons for going, and she may well find more than she bargained for.”

As Mhairi, you’re tethered to a diving bell by a cable carrying both oxygen and comms from your team. It’s your literal lifeline, and, without giving too much away, figures heavily in the tension stakes. Patrick led the development of new features required for the DLC, and, when asked for a particular development challenge, did not hesitate. “The umbilical cable! Creating an umbilical cable that attached to the player all the way back to the bell, which would behave physically, was a big technical challenge. We used a hybrid approach of a skeletal mesh with ragdoll physics close to the player, and further away using a breadcrumb system that used spline meshes.” It pays off, with the cable underlining how vulnerable the divers are in what feels like a completely alien—and hostile—world.

“Most of all, this game is influenced by the feeling of thalassophobia,” Sagar affirms. “That’s a five-dollar word, but it represents a feeling many of us have felt when swimming in the sea, and realising with dawning dread that there is an entire universe lurking in the murk below. It’s fundamentally a Dante’s Inferno story: the deeper our protagonist goes into the sea, the deeper she goes into her psyche, and the more the horrors emerge.” And we’re right there with her.

Don’t Let Me Down

This psychological dimension—playing with our deepest fears of open water as well as the terror of might be lying in wait in the rig—relies on total immersion, and PC performance really matters there. “We really want players to be able to play the game with great performance as that will always be the best experience,” Patrick agrees. “We also want to create beautifully realized environments and effects for our game. Frame generation and upscaling technologies allow us to push visual fidelity while also having great performance. For this reason, we tried to give players on PC as many options as possible so they can get the best possible experience on their hardware.”

“The team at Intel were very helpful in testing our integration of IntelⓇ Xe スーパー・サンプリング2（XeSS 2),” Patrick continues. “We routinely shared builds with them so they could help us find and resolve issues in order to get the best possible performance and image quality using XeSS 2. Collaborating with Intel we found there were a couple of things that were capping our frame rate. We resolved those issues so that the frame-rate is unlocked when using XeSS! We were also able to track down some issues using the XeSS Inspector tool.”

With all shipshape for Siren’s Rest, what’s next for the studio? “It’s not every day you get to launch a game, or even a DLC,” Sagar says, “so, we’re enjoying the reactions to it coming in, and having the opportunity to talk more about it to communities like this. Beyond that, we in The Chinese Room have another major title coming up this year, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2, and are planning what to do in the future. Watch this space!” We definitely will, but from dry land, if you don’t mind…

Purchase Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest on Steam