Digging Deeper: The Inspirations Behind Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest

Again in 2023, we shared a few of the inspirations behind our narrative horror Still Wakes the Deep, which impressed its themes and construction, each in its grounded ’70s setting and its extra fantastical horror parts. We took inspiration from all kinds of sources, from traditional horror movies like The Factor and Annihilation to extra uncommon sources like Kes and Rosemary’s Child.

For our new story enlargement, Siren’s Rest, we needed to discover the Beira D oil rig in a complete new setting, which comes with its personal set of inspirations. Set in 1986, 11 years after the occasions of the unique recreation, you’ll play as saturation diver Mhairi, who units off on a journey beneath the North Sea to find what occurred on the Beira D. The ocean is a wealthy vein for exploring every kind of tales, and these are just some issues that helped us craft this new story:

Thalassophobia

The concern of deep water is the origin of the total psychological palette of Siren’s Rest. And for any gamers who haven’t felt this… we hope that Siren’s Rest will give them an opportunity to get a style of this phobia.

We trawled by tons of of articles of individuals experiencing this situation, folks creating artwork about it, portraying it in a wide range of thrilling and sensual methods. One factor that struck us: many thalassophobic pictures juxtapose a human with some yawning abyss or some looming kind. The feeling you’ve got isn’t simply that this can be a scary setting – moderately, you are feeling a way of enveloping dread for the particular person. Whoever that particular person is in that {photograph}, regardless of how nonchalant they seem… you are feeling that they’re in means over their heads (actually). They’re dealing with their doom. That sense of overconfidence towards the unknowable depths is one thing we needed to seize in the recreation.

Even simply a picture like this we discovered on Reddit of an oceanic abyss will get the inventive juices flowing. Additionally, do you know {that a} thick mysterious cloud referred to as a brine pool can kind in the backside of the sea that creates these strange images? We needed to carry that rigidity, between magnificence and dread, at the coronary heart of each visible design alternative.

‘Final Breath’ (2018) and Saturation Diving

Saturation diving – named for the approach used to increase how lengthy a diver can stay underwater – is a unprecedented occupation. Harmful, meticulous, weirdly poetic – every little thing deserving artwork to be made about it. It’s as harmful as an astronaut happening a spacewalk… however far darker and much much less well-known. You’re underneath super strain, actually, that messes along with your psychological state. You see issues. You hear issues. And all you might be is a tiny flickering flame amid the everdark. This rigidity, loneliness, and thrill  are all portrayed fantastically in the documentary ‘Final Breath’.

And for a extra day-to-day clarification, just check out this Reddit AMA that was carried out a couple of years in the past. Understanding what it means to dwell and work underneath such excessive circumstances helped floor our narrative in actual human stakes, whilst the story veers into the surreal.

‘Blue Planet II –The Deep’

This episode of ‘Blue Planet II’ served as a robust entry level for us into the thriller and otherworldliness of the ocean’s most unreachable locations. Nature’s personal degree design and artwork design is off the charts! The unusual colors, mysterious beings. Our fantastic Earth with its unattainable underwater geographies supplied us with a visible vocabulary for portraying the backside of the sea not as some unusual spectacle, however with this all-consuming silent awe…

Dante’s ‘Inferno’

As clear a metaphor because it will get, proper? Dante’s descent by Hell, in gripping 14^th Century poetic language, of accelerating delusion as one strikes additional into tender darkness – influenced how we approached the construction of Siren’s Rest.

“Love, which shortly arrests the light coronary heart,
Seized him with my lovely kind
That was taken from me, in a fashion which nonetheless grieves me.”

‘The Descent’ (2005)

This movie is twenty years previous and nonetheless stands up extremely effectively. It’s a Dante’s ‘Inferno’ story introduced as much as the modern-day. Undoubtedly not for the faint-hearted, for certain! Its traditional construction and masterful rhythm of constructing tense progress in unfamiliar, claustrophobic bodily areas is a big inspiration.

Submerged corridors, the pitch-black crevices of the story’s setting, technical, refined characters whose psyches are run ragged, the mixture of terror and hope and dread – it’s all there.

‘The Lighthouse’ (2019)

A latest darkish masterclass in isolation, craving, and the thoughts methods that these emotions can conjure up. The movie portrays two males (performed by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe) unravelling underneath the weight of routine, myths, and their very own unusual firm. These parallel the emotional present operating beneath Siren’s Rest – a deep, nearly delirious human longing – for connection, for redemption, for closure…

A central relationship between two characters who’re equally remoted, equally alone with their ideas and expectations – that caught with us. The surreal juxtaposition between the uncooked, unforgiving atmosphere, the arcane chores wanted for survival, and the distantly heat conjuring of misplaced recollections… we definitely hoped to seize that.

The Unexplained Ocean Sound, “Julia”

Typically even only a sonic phenomena can function an inspiration. A low-frequency sound, recorded by NOAA on March 1st 1999 and dubbed “Julia”, stays unexplained. The sound was loud sufficient to be detected throughout the Pacific Ocean and lasted for about two minutes and 43 seconds. An absolute treasure trove of unusual explanations exists, spanning from large sea creatures to aliens, naturally.

Julia’s inclusion in our early discussions round Siren’s Rest served as a logo of the unknown – the uncanny concept that one thing is perhaps on the market, huge or silent, past our comprehension…

Màiri Mhòr nan Òran

The Hebridean poet Màiri Mhòr nan Òran shares a reputation with our protagonist, and her work contains a lot of the emotional tone of Siren’s Rest. Her verses, rooted in exile, land, and longing, converse to the cultural and private ruptures at the coronary heart of this new story. They anchor the narrative in a Scottish id that feels each deeply native and profoundly mythic – a legacy we really feel extremely privileged to painting.

The Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest DLC enlargement arrives as we speak for Xbox Sequence X|S and Xbox on PC.