This week on Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee reviews Still Wakes the Deep. Support us on Patreon: / secondwindgroup Second Wind Merch Store: sharkrobot.com/collections/se...
This game was actually a big deal in Scotland because it has a Gaelic language option, so you can play the entire game with Gaelic subtitles and interface. Considering it’s a struggling language (although things are getting better) regardless of your thoughts on the game or TCR this was a fantastic thing for language preservation and deserve immense credit for going the extra mile to include a language many dismiss as “dead” or “useless”
As someone born and living in Scotland, it is not a big deal here, and gaelic is a shite language that I resent getting forced on those of us with zero connection to it. Imagine trying to force people from Barcelona to speak French because that is what people 100 miles north speak and you are close to how little relation I have to that Ullapool wank.
@SgtDax how's it remotely "forced" on us thats exactly WHY it's dying is its not mandatory teaching on the curriculum so more and more people grow up not learning the language of our land
I work in a mill and we have a painted yellow pathway that you must follow if you are not wearing PPE. I will complain to our Mill Manger about our poor game design.
The Chinese Room is named after a thought experiment intended to criticise the idea of the Turing Test. Suppose you have a man trapped in a room where his only communication is a slot in the door that papers can be pushed through. This man doesn't speak chinese, but he does have a giant mandarine phrasebook with questions and appropriate answers. People outside the room can post notes written in mandarine through the door, and he can check the book for the matching symbols, copy out the answering symbols, and thus appear to be fluently carrying out a conversation in a language he neither speaks nor reads. Thus, goes the argument, just because a computer can appear to perfectly replicate human communication, doesn't mean it actually understands anything. I only say this because it's literally the most interesting thing about this studio. Edit: this thought experiment was first posed by philosopher John Searle, to give due credit.
Also this thought experiment was mentioned, in full, in a Visual Novel - 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Hours(or 999 in short). Even the VN has gameplay elements such as puzzles, different choices and branching paths which lead to different endings. A VN has more gameplay than this game.
Interesting to learn, thanks for explaining. For some reason it makes me think of the parody philosophical question my gaming crew came up with: if a supposedly self-aware construct has to copy another AI's answers to prove their sentience, does the knowledge that their own answers sucked in fact prove them to be self-aware?
The one game where YELLOW is the color that should be everywhere (it's a ship, it's dangerous, you gotta know where to grab on and what's movable etc) and everyone mindlessly shits on it.
The irony of games overusing yellow paint to mark gameplay-free climbable things causing a walking sim (where just moving around is the gameplay) set on an oil rig (where things painted yellow actually make sense) to get unnecessary complaints.
the problem is that it still has yellow paint where it makes no sense to help guide the player. like a random plank with yellow paint over it around other planks with no paint in it, clearly telling you that you can walk specifically on that plank but not others.
So basically, the biggest thing of note is it did the slow-burn intro better than Half-Life or Doom 3, by actually letting us slow-burn for a bit? Neat.
Writing and acting's real good, and there's also earnest Gaelic representation. That's about it. It's an interactive narrative that would be easy to recommend if it wasn't also trying to be a game with barely-there parkour and stealth.
This game hs a few strong points that makes you overlook things like the lack of gameplay. The story is good, the VAs are amazing, and solid execution. The monsters' design is a bit boring and repetitive but you encounter them in very different environment so it's not a problem.
@@Sir_Bucket I actually kinda like the monster designs in this. Or at the very least how they're animated, they move around a bit like the monster from CARRION.
@@RougeMephilesClone So, basically every Chinese Room walking sim (except Machine for Pigs, which also tried to spice things up with killing epileptics with the interactive narrative). I will give them credit: you always know what to expect from their "games." Shame that "what" is never a good game.
@@goldenfiberwheat238 far from every game has such an option, for context i find less than 5% of my steam games even have translatations in my language and 0% dubbed in my language
@@goldenfiberwheat238 The same reason why people watch French films in French and anime in Japanese. And sometimes you want to relax with a language you understand. I think a German knowing English would prefer it to Polish while playing the Wither III. Plus sometimes most games are not available in your local language. For example, my native language has only 11 million speakers, so not everything gets translated.
@@johnmarstall Yep, agreed. I don't know how many times I've played a game and thought "Okay where the hell am I going?" And then seen the paint or ribbons and was instantly pissed like "Well shit, that spoiled it for me." because I want that element of discovery. Games pretty much play themselves nowadays :(
finally an option people can turn on upon booting the game and then feel justified whining about getting lost "well you can turn on the paint option again" "WHY SHOULD I NEED TO HOW DARE YOU" like yes the level design should direct you well enough in an ideal would, but...
@@MUCKLEECH Modern game graphics are complex and detailed enough that some obvious symbolism like yellow paint, or some "highlight interactables" button like the Arkham games' Detective Mode, is genuinely needed. I always get frustrated when people complain about yellow paint because...you'd be lost without it. You're not above getting blank walls and climbable cliffs confused. I'm not. No one is. That's not a criticism, it's literally just a blatant acknowledgement of reality. There's *so much* going on in any random square yard of a modern AAA game that, unless the game is like Portal and takes place in a sterile environment, players *will* get lost without some help. It's not "challenging" or "Fun" to squint at a wall of thousands of polygons for a full minute just to see which random detail is actually climbable and which is just there for aesthetics.
The gameplay was iffy and objectively it's nothing exceptional in the grand scheme of things, but I can't help but love Still Wakes the Deep. I love that a game entirely in the Scots language/English language hybrid that most folks speak day to day has gotten such attention and was more than just a niche thing for us Scots to get excited about. And it goes beyond the dialogue; Caz, from Glasgow, has a Partick Thistle scarf on his wall; Addair has National Front posters and white supremacist materials littering his room (in case anyone felt sorry for him); Trots has a letter about trade union business on his desk, and an "It's Scotland's Oil" sign on his cork board along with newspaper clippings. Even the decor like the pattern of the carpets and the way the communal areas of the rig were done up for Christmas reminded me of pictures I've seen from houses and pubs from the 1970s (some places still look like that, in fact). The point being that the setting and characters aren't token, which I appreciate. Real care and attention to detail was put into this game and I adore it for that reason.
I agree- the setting is absolutely on point for 70s Scotland- the characters are full of real world references, and the whole plot of a company being willing to unleash unimaginable horrors on its staff because the alternative is to spend money and perhaps stop the oil flowing for a while- that gave me a sudden "Ooh, this is a massive Piper Alpha metaphor" realisation.
@@shawndavis7249 More orientalist/colonialist. it refers to an erotic service in 18th c China where a man pays money to sit in a dimly-lit room while a naked (as far as you know) woman on the other side of a silk screen dances and poses. It's British colonial cultture and ridiculing things that were different. "Orientalism" refers to convincing the home culture that the alien/strange new culture is infantile, ignorant, unsophisticated, etc. I work with a lot of Chinese people who didn't think the term was offensive -- nevertheless we got wrod about 2 years ago to stop using the term.
Having flashbacks to Wolfenstein The New Order where all the English speakers are unsubtitled except the one Glaswegian bloke. Scottish is a foreign language apparently.
As a Scotsman, I can confirm some of us are that hard to understand we need either subtitles or an Oor Wullie Language dictionary. Heavy accented Glaswegians, Aberdonians & Fife are prime examples, my late grandpa being a Fife man from whom I know 70% of my scots gibberish from, the other half predicably being The Broons & Oor Wullie comics.
In Chinese Room's defense, having the climbable ladders and such being yellow makes sense from a safety perspective. On an oil rig, you want to be able to see where you're going, and bright colors would help that.
I just love how it's like Alien or John Carpenter's The Thing, but with Scottish personality. An explosion or alien noise isn't met with a whimper from the PC but "Aww, whit the nae?" classic!
As much as I appreciate the Lovercraftian horror element and the genuinely disturbing turns the game sometimes take, I can't help but wonder if the game might have been more effective as a sort of 'disaster movie' game rather than a sci-fi horror game. It had everything set up for it: the games establishes that the oil rig is basically falling apart before it's even started drilling. The management is sloppy and deaf to the concerns of the workers who are still holding things together in spite of it all with Caz desperately trying (and failing) to save his fellow workers from a disaster that was just waiting to happen. Take away the monsters and it's a realistic disaster movie. That said, I'm totally on board for The Thing with Scots in it so I'll take the game for what it is. On a related note, solid props to the dev team for making the environment and characters so goddamn realistic and engaging, especially going out of their way to have the game be playable with Gaelic language options. They didn't have to do it, but they did and I respect that.
Tbh this is one of the best games I've played in the last 5 years. This game had some of the most convincing voice acting I've ever experienced in a game. The atmosphere, the graphics, and story were just chef's kiss. Can't recommend it enough.
@ZachGatesHere personally I enjoyed the gameplay quite a bit. I mean hiding from monsters seems like standard horror game fare and there were some pretty unnerving sections in it. To each their own though.
The next DLC for Dredge is also a Lovecraftian mystery on an oil rig- I wonder why the combination of oil rigs and eldritch horror is so popular at the moment...
I did not have a single emotional reaction until you brought up Margaret Thatcher. It’s already a monster survival horror her inclusion is just a redundancy.
I feel like even fiscal and social conservatives should agree that everything that woman is and represents is evil. Mitt Romney, Malcom Turnbull, and whoever the British one was are one thing (with austerity, is there even a British equivalent), Thatcher is just a literal monster.
Weirdly I'm watching this straight after watching a documentary about her and now I feel like the ghost of Margaret Thatcher is following me across RU-vid.
On the one hand, Still Wakes the Deep is what you'd expect from The Chinese Room. On the other hand, I can say that it's an improvement on the last time they did a horror game in Machine for Pigs.
@@galaxy-wg1lf Oh yeah, there are things to relish in Machine for Pigs, even if some of its execution is a little, dare I say, ham-fisted. Pork puns aside, one thing that I only just realized is that Oswald Mandus was apparently a big game hunter. Though with that in mind, not once does he so much as pick up a gun in this game, because despite The Chinese Room having writing chops, they didn't go for Chekov's gun. Granted, the game would probably be pretty short if Mandus discharged a firearm in the middle of London on New Year's Eve, since the bobbies would've been all over the area. Though with that in mind, it probably would've introduced policemen to stealth around and possibly draw into conflict with the man-pigs. Now I think about it, being able to play the bobbies off of the man-pigs would make up for the scarcity of ammunition in 1890's London, so that while Mandus could only carry so many bullets/shells, he could potentially sneak through without firing a shot, or at least be able to make the most of his munitions in-between the many armouries that exist within the Machine, which would probably be stocked with ammunition for the man-pigs to load up on when the time comes to take over London.
@@GmodPlusWoW There are these things rhat I wish were different in Machine for pigs. It is definitely deeply flawed in its gameplay design/ lack there of. There just hasn't been a game pther than it so beautiful in its writing, concept, artstyle, dialogue music and voice acting. I love the setting, visuals and strangeness of the whole experience. And there has never been another moment in a game I relish as much as the final monologue of the machine. I wish people gave it a chance...
3:54 the fact Yahtzee mention Cryostasis: Sleep Of Reason makes me a bit happy that very obscure game appears to becoming less and less obscure. Hopefully some company like NightDive Studio's does a remake or remastered of that Gem of a game. I mean they are remastering The Thing video game, so why not Cryostasis: Sleep Of Reason?
@@piggosalternateaccount4917 yeah, it suffers a similar issue that Grim Fandango has, with being extremely troublesome to run on modern PCs so be good if someone fix up the coding in the game so it actually can be playable and be available on multiple devices.
I am so fascinated that these guys have taken over work on Vampire: The Masquerade 2. From interviews they clearly know what people want from the game (and what they don't), but I have no reason to think they can pull it off.
The Chinese Room is not the same studio they were previously. They're now just a brand owned by Sumo Digital, one of the larger entities in the UK game developer space.
I love Nick's delivery when he says "on TwiHERBGLERGH!" it's like either halfway through he remembered "Ah numpties!, it's called X now, feck it." or twidox literally sickens him nowadays.
I quite enjoyed the game, but I have two criticisms: First, there were one or two places I died while trying to escape a monster just because the game wanted me to do it in a very specific way, and it wasn't clear what that was. Second, there were one or two too many "ok, now run clear across the drilling rig *again* to pull a lever to keep us all from dying" objectives. It started to feel a bit like padding rather than something contributing to the gameplay and/or narrative.
@@squishybrick Thanks for your feedback! We here at Dave and Busters are always looking for new and innovative ways to improve our customer experience!
I really appreciate and enjoy Second Winds transparency with everything, from needing our help financially to showing us where and how our help is being spent, but also that we don't NEED to give them patreon, we can just like, comment, subscribe, and watch and that in and of itself being helpful, like they're not trying to guilt us. Personally, I only really watch Yahtzees stuff since the previous game review show was the only thing I watched on the previous channel, but I'm sure the other stuff is good too. Anyway, just wanted to say that I like the direction Second Wind is going with things and I'm glad that six months in, I still get my dose of video game rambles.
Cold Takes is always worth a watch, imho. If nothing else, the mixture of noir speculation and an asmr voice delivery make it very easy to watch 15 minutes blitz by. It's like an auditory walkthrough of an art museum set to investigating game development and state of the industry.
I think British folk are just more exposed to variety of accents moreso than Americans. I've found yanks struggle much more with accented English in my experience. Perhaps because we have a lot of strongly distinct regional accents and have a lot of interaction with continental Europeans speaking English, we get more familiar with picking up and understanding unfamiliar English than the fairly homogeneous states would.
@@pluemas Yeah, that's been the case from my (American) perspective. Some Northern English accents are pretty impenetrable (doesn't help that we're not exposed to them much). Then again, I'm sure there are some Deep South or Appalachian accents that would trip up most people too.
I loved this game a lot and the subtitles threw me into laughing fits. Thank you for translating slang. I want this in all games now. It’ll be hilarious.
If you can't understand a Scotsman just assume they're saying the most violently aggressive thing within the context is probably good advice, lol, thanks Yahtzee
"If in doubt, assume they're saying whatever would be the most violently aggressive thing to say in that moment." As an American, I can't claim to know whether or not this generalizes all people of Scottish heritage but I will say it definitely applies to my relatives in the old country & they are proud of it.
I actually just played and finished this last week! I highly enjoyed it and I'm glad I wasn't the only one to do a "The Rock eyebrow raise" when there were subtitles over the English speaking characters. That said, I'm very familiar with traveling in the UK and the slang while it's second nature to me, some might not like "figuring it out." Highly recommended if you're a walking sim person! :)
Grant Morrison is a good case of hard-to-decipher Scottish accents. When promoting one of DC's big comics in Italy, they had to get a scottish accent to english translator, than an english to italian translator to understand Morrison
I knew that there were things about DDLC that Yahtzee praised, but him straight up, and without qualification, saying "I like this game" is kind of wild to me. Not that I don't like it, I'm just shocked that Yahtzee remembers well enough to mention it.
I have been baffled by your use of the phrase "Ghost Train Ride" for years, since I had no idea what you were referring to. Once I saw your character sitting in a "Ghost Train" car in this episode it all clicked. I don't know if it's a regional thing but I'd never heard that phrase anywhere else. Now that I actually understand what you mean, I think that it's a pretty good metaphor. One mystery solved, now onto the next.
it's a term he's made up himself that refers to super linear story-based single-player games (usually AAA ones) with a big focus on set-pieces and with only one optimal way of playing them
@@mutantfreak48 Right, but it clearly also refers to those haunted house attractions that you'll find at amusement parks where you're put in a little cart and slowly taken through a series of spooky scenes on rails. That's where the Ghost Train Ride term comes from, and it works really well as a metaphor for linear sections in games.
@@mutantfreak48 That's the connection that I didn't get. Up until this video, I never connected the phrase "Ghost Train Ride" with those haunted house attractions. I'd never heard it used to describe those, so I understood what Yatzee was using it to mean in his videos (really linear games), but I didn't understand why he was using that phrase until I just made the connection to the haunted house things.
@@glacialbae I loved those. But once in a while they put real people in the shadows that swing axes at you. The sheer surprise simply because you've memorized the scenes and anything unexpected is a jump scare.
Oh Yahtzee mentioned Before Your Eyes. Admittedly I haven't played the game myself, but I watched someone else play it, and that final sequence had me holding back tears. It's the game thay finally made me go "Damn maybe borderline walking sims with minimal gameplay mechanics DO have a place."
I kind of wish that The Chinese Room had been the ones to make games like Until Dawn, because I feel like they at least understand how to tell a good story; despite all the pretentious lampshading they do with how they implement that story. But! They at least understand themes, there's an understanding about how to tell stories beyond "woah, let's make a film but worse". And that alone could have made Until Dawn almost worth playing. Because Until Dawn felt like "gamers don't watch that many movies, we can get away with being a terrible movie and frame it as 'oh it's just schlock', that'll get us some defenders". Until Dawn is vacant, and it's not even fun if you've seen the kinds of films the game is referencing.
Speaking as an American that reads philosophy texts for fun, did well with French classes in high school and college, and read novels like House of Leaves and Infinite Jest for fun... I have to say I was grateful for the subtitles translating the vernacular in this game. I think this is because in a game, there's a lot more to focus on at any given moment, including where the creeping horror might be coming from and the details of the setting (and there's a good amount here, especially early on)... so yeah... glad the subtitles were helping there.
Interesting thing about your comment about needing subtitles for Scottish accent. Something I've observed in the workplace. I agree that for most of us, it's actually not that challenging to understand. But, it's actually a very hard thing to ken to people who speak english as a second language. Great call from Chinese Room for accessibility.
One of my personal favourite horror games is Observer, and there are very very few moments in that game where you're under threat - the suspense and horror both come from unravelling the mystery and making you want to press on regardless of the threats. I think more horror games need to lean into the same sense of dread that inspires people to keep picking up a horror novel - we know we're not in any danger but we're tense and nervous to move on anyway.
I'd say the monster remaining a mystery is a big pro in a horror game, or horror anything for that matter. It remains nameless outside of the people it mutates, which is believable since the few people still alive, have better things to do than play scientist or give the infestation a silly codename.
Hadn't heard of the game until I saw this video. Staring at the thumbnail, I didn't think it might have been edited until I looked at it for a second and said "Wait a minute, that's the FR font".
The yellow isnt out of place there. Its a oil rig. Everything that moves or you use is going to have to painted bright yellow. Literally everything. You need to be able to see every single step, ladder, handle, piece of machinery, etc. It doesnt even look like climb here. More like its natural. Oil Rigs, etc, are painted bright yellow. Maybe theres some things that might not be yellow. Broken boards. But you would have to look really hard. And walkways are painted bright yellow too.
To be fair, the climbable things in this game are ladders on an oil rig, this is actually a scenario where painting them yellow is actually perfectly reasonable.
Think is that yellow paint is used on oil rigs because in case of an emergency, such as the electrics failing, you can still see and navigate by following the paint.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was a great experience from them. Mashing up an idylic English countryside town with an alien apocalypse was a great idea.
"but surely the Scottish aren't so hard to understand you need subtitles?" I *highly* recommend watching an SNL skit from when James McAvoy was host about "Scottish Air Traffic Controller".
Subtitles are useful for a whole lot of people and for a lot of reasons. My somewhat generous interpretation is that forcing subtitles because there are Scottish accents in a British game comes across as a bit cringe. Like the time they had to subtitle Jamie Oliver for Americans. Subtitles should always be there for those that want/need them.
@@davidcreighton-offord3275 Wait, they had to subtitle.. Jamie Oliver? Subtitling an 87 year old coal miner from up North I would understand, but I would imagine Oliver's pretty understandable. When did this happen?
@@davidcreighton-offord3275 To be fair, accents can be hard, especially when we're talking about a language as widely spoken as English, and America's various accents are some of the most divorced from Received Pronunciation and other supposedly "easy to understand" accents. It may come across as ridiculous, but it's better to be ridiculous than inaccessible.
