When I wrote our Still Wakes The Deep review I mentioned the true-to-life Scottish slang used by the oil rig workers of this North Sea horror. It was wonderful, but all these slang terms were being translated in the subtitles for some reason. “Gobshite” became “bastard”. The “polis” were localised as the “police”. And every “yersel” sneering out of the machismo-ridden workers became “yourself”. Well, turns out that’s the result of the game defaulting to “International English” for its captions. But if you want to immerse yourself in Scottish vernacular as deeply as protagonist Caz McCleary immerses himself in hazardous chemical spills, good news. There’s another option, says one of the game’s developers.
“For my American friends – [Still Wakes The Deep] detects your system locale and will default to our ‘International English’ subtitles,” says lead designer Rob McLachlan of The Chinese Room in a post on Xitter. “If you’re not feart of a little Scots slang in your life, please switch to English (UK) for a more authentic experience!”
He’s right. In the options menu, the default choice for subtitles simply says “English”, with a secondary “English (United Kingdom)” option just under that in the drop-down menu. One of this first-person horror’s great strengths is the devotion to its setting and the authenticity of its many voices. I recommend leaning fully into that with the subtitles too, for a full dose of weans, ayes, and fuds.
I enjoy that a studio can choose to pursue both strict realism and some messed-up John Carpenter gore-terror at the same time. You can see how the developers married themselves to authenticity by watching some of their “mini docs” (essentially a collection of behind-the-scenes marketing videos). I enjoyed the narrative and art videos among these the most, in which we learn that the team had to go through the game removing every instance of a particular liquid-containing crate, because it hadn’t been invented until 1992.
In related news, our review was also called out by Sam Barlow for attributing the game’s “look behind you” button as historically originating in the Outlast horror series. This feature, which lets the player peep over their shoulder as they walk around or run away from monsters, appeared before that in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, according to Barlow, who was the designer of that game. Oops. Never mind, Shattered Memories is a blind spot of mine, and has never been ported to PC. It’s principally a Nintendo Wii game, released in 2009, a year of my life which appropriately exists only as blank void.