Still Wakes The Deep - Release Date Trailer

This eerie and atmospheric announcement was the second of three trailers that Big Farmer made for Secret Mode and The Chinese Room for Still Wakes The Deep, their narratively harrowing and disturbingly beautiful horror game. Working from the key idea that this games was a Scottish “The Thing” set on an oil rig, we designed and delivered this triptych of trailers, each with a unique narrative focus designed to quicken the pulse and hold audience attention.

For this second trailer for Still Wakes The Deep, we started to reveal more - but never too much - of the sinister secrets of the rig. We wanted to start moving the viewer from the unsettling fear of the unknown in the first trailer into hints of real horror. To bring the vision of our creative team to life, we layered some custom cinematic sequences with gameplay and this unforgettable, imploring voice over.

The central theme of this trailer is the idea of fleeing - marked by hurried abandonment, the sense of running away from or into the unknown. In act one, each scene has subtle signs of being left in a panic – forgotten shoes, a running shower, a steaming coffee sat untouched on the table. Act two is introduced by the alarm sounding and follows with gameplay clips as Caz fights for his life amidst gory scenes. The VO - a powerful reading of a letter from his family - perfectly accompanies this trailer, reminding the viewer of what he has left behind in the past and urging them to take the next step into his present.

With this narrative concept at its core, the team worked on gameplay capture and edit, audio, and carefully crafted in-engine cinematics for multiple shots - including lighting, cameras, shaders, set dressing & VFX. Bringing it all together, the result was this incredible trailer that sets the viewer's feet down upon the oil rig itself, with all of its horrors beginning to unspool before them.