Still Wakes the Deep is a horror video game developed by The Chinese Room and published by Secret Mode.
You are an offshore oil rig worker, Cameron "Caz" McLeary, fighting for your life through a vicious storm, perilous surroundings, and the dark, freezing North Sea waters.
All lines of communication have been severed. All exits are gone. All that remains is to face the unknowable horror that’s come aboard.
Sheffield-based Sumo Digital were on a roll in the 2010s, delivering the best Sonic racing game, an innovative snake adventure, and high-profile titles for both Sony and Microsoft. Off the back of Little Big Planet 3, they set about reinventing the series as a 3D platformer (building on that one yeti level in LBP3, of all things), which released in 2020 as a cross-generation PS4/5 game with a fairly stupid title.
Sackboy (now firmly tied down as an individual with a distinct identity and gender where previous games usually tried to stay pronoun-agnostic) is chilling in Craftworld in a town entirely populated by other Sacklings who are near-identical to him, apart from colouration and eg. a silly hat. We do briefly see the character trait that he likes to paint, but for the rest of the game he fills the role of generic hero. Generic heroes need generic villains, and so Vex the cosmic clown monster shows up out of nowhere. To be fair he is played with aplomb by Richard E. Grant, following in the footsteps of Hugh Laurie in LBP3. He enslaves all the Sackers and forces them to build a big machine that steals creativity or something, look, it’s not important, you never see it anyway. Now Sackboy has to travel themed worlds and collect MacGuffins, meeting an eccentric character or two per world and guided by mentor figure Scarlet (the venerable Dawn French) towards becoming a Knitted Knight which I guess is a thing now.
The game wears a lot of LBP trappings but in many ways feels like a clean break from what came before. The generic Sackfolk are odd in that you barely see them, and I think the other playable co-op characters are stated to be Sackboys from other timelines. Despite taking place on Craftworld again no previously established character ever appears; even LBP3 in its new setting managed to fit them in for tutorials and DLC! Actually no wait, the shopkeeper from 3, Zom Zom, reprises his role selling you outfit parts… I just forgot to connect those dots because I hate him. And his incessant babble when you’re browsing or playing minigames for his bell currency.
Anyway, S:ABA plays out not unlike Media Molecule’s Tearaway. Sackboy even has a roll move now! OK, it’s not that similar, as there’s a fixed quasi-isometric viewpoint and more of a focus on obstacle course-style challenging platform action and much less on creative and interactive elements. I’m actually impressed at the movement tech; it has a decent skill ceiling although the actual impact of mastering the jump-roll momentum is low outside of the specific challenge trials. There’s also a flutter jump hidden away as a toggle in the “game assists” menu, which is slightly helpful but equally can make you mess up intended jump timings. I struggled at times with depth/height perception due to the fixed camera, which is necessary due to the possibility of up to 4-player simultaneous co-op.
Sackboy’s other new abilities include picking up and throwing objects, and a simple attack with deceptively short range. It’s possible to pick up some objects to give you a more powerful whack (the cocktail umbrella also acts as a platforming aid), but they’re exceedingly rare and can easily be lost if you die. Gimmicky gadgets (like hover boots, a grapple hook, and a boomerang thing) return and usually make for some fun levels built around their new possibilities.
The levels explore lots of platforming ideas and I enjoyed their design enough to return to each one until I’d found all the collectibles and got the rewards for maxing out the score targets (nabbing every bubble you can is satisfying, but the usual LBP cumulative multiplier is swapped out for designated multiplier pickups). “Full sized” levels mix in with shorter ones that focus in on a specific concept, or revisit a section in a race format; there’s also plenty of them, a nice change from LBP3’s dearth of content. Each world ends in a boss fight, although the vast majority of them are the exact same fight with Vex just kicked up a notch each time, which was most disappointing.
There’s also a handful of levels that can only be attempted in co-op. You can do this online but I don’t have the subscription, so I tried a technique that a friend used for LBP3 co-op: having two controllers on my lap and trying to move two characters simultaneously! This was a very tricky but engaging task and I was pleased by how successful I was with it… for a while. The later levels were a bridge too far, at which point my kind and gracious spouse Cathy agreed to help me complete them.
My completionist attitude did not last the whole game though; the final postgame world went a bit too far beyond fun when trying to complete gruelling platforming gauntlets without dying (which reduces your score by 10%, but then for some reason there’s also a life counter with a maximum of five; you can turn on infinite lives in the assists menu but the game pouts at you about it). I also managed to master the timed challenge trials with much repetition, but likewise the final one, which asks you to reprise all 15 prior trials in a row without checkpoints within a ten-minute span had me quickly tapping out.
While SABA minimises the creative aspect, I still had fun dressing up my Sack…boy… I guess… with a good variety of costumes, whether found in levels or score rewards, bought from Zom Zom, or from the free DLC. I designed a whole new Sackperson at the start of each new world; naturally, they show up in cutscenes too. The worlds also maintain the fun DIY stylings the series is known for, with environments made from natural and crafted materials, seeming constructed by unseen giants, albeit without an explicit narrative layer about creativity.
While I can look back on SABA’s shortcomings I still had a great time playing through it. As much as the reframing of the setting and lore rankles me, and Sackboy is still a little underpowered and underdeveloped as a protagonist, breaking from the format of the rest of the series let Sumo craft a quite polished platforming experience. And now with the ignoble death of LBP as an ecosystem, and Astro Bot effectively usurping Sackboy’s mascot status, it serves as a decent swansong for the franchise as a whole, for now.
2/23/2010, we got Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing on the whole 7th gen of consoles!
Mario wasn't THE ONLY mascot racer out there, and while I haven't played THIS one, I'm led to believe that this still would give Mario Kart a challenge.
