Still Wakes the Deep (2024)

Concept Creation and Development (from initial pitch, through greenlighting, prototyping and pre-production), Creative Direction (until Alpha/Spring 2023 including high level direction on art, audio and design), Story Creation & Script, Narrative Direction (including working with Kate Saxon/Liquid Violet on casting, voice direction and editing).

The game’s only just come out and quite a bit got changed, cut and re-jigged after I left so I don’t want to say too much about it, but for me it was about a return to TCR’s roots in making atmospheric, story-driven horror. I’d been playing with the idea of something set on a sinking ship for a few years - my ideas tend to gestate for a while, going through different evolutions until they really land - and I wanted to get back to Rapture’s blend of high-concept horror/sci-fi with a recognisably domestic, realistic anchor into a very specific place and time. Specifically, on one hand there was Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and on the other were Boys from the Black Stuff, GBH and This is England. The short pitch for Deep started with “The Thing, on an oil rig” but the story and script I wrote had aspirations to dive more deeply into the personal drama of the main characters.

Fundamentally, the best horror works because you care about the characters - it’s why Jordan Peele is so exceptional as a writer/director - and the 1970s were the golden age for psychological horror that really drove this agenda. For me, it’s also why the previous games I’d written worked, whether they derived from soap-opera like Rapture, or slapstick comedy like Little Orpheus. The characters are the centre of the experience, and the ones I’ve written for Deep are, I think and hope, both genuine and empathic, and were a delight to write. Working with Kate again to put together a cast of some of the best Scottish actors working today and then seeing them bring Caz and his family, friends and co-workers to life was a real career highlight.

I directed Deep through prototyping, pre-production and production before handing it over just after it hit alpha, with a script that was complete short of a few rewrites. I’m looking forward to seeing what the team do with it as the moment I came up with Deep I knew it had the potential to be something special.

Oh, OK, yeah, some trivia for you - why’s the game set in Scotland? That goes back to 2014. When we were casting Rapture, there was this amazing actor called Alec Newman we shortlisted for the part of Stephen. It didn’t quite fit back then, but I knew I wanted to work with Alec and once I started working on Deep, I knew who would be playing Caz. Happily he said yes, because I basically wrote the part for him. And he is absolutely outstanding in it, probably the best vocal performance in a TCR game to date.