I’m tens of thousands of feet underwater, here on a mission to uncover the remains of a tragic and colossal accident that saw an oil rig collapse and sink to the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Scotland. I’m here for answers. I’m here for closure. Hopefully I’ll find some mementos to bring back to the families that lost people in the accident. But it’s not just sunken, rusted metal that lines the ocean floor. No, something else is here. Or is it? Am I losing my mind? Strange visions cloud my sight. A sudden metallic thud announces the presence of…something out there in the deep. Am I hearing voices? Is someone there?
Uncontrollable fear races through my spine and all of a sudden, I’m not underwater anymore. No, I’m in my apartment here in Brooklyn in reality. I’ve just hit the escape key to pause this game; I need to take a moment and sober up my brain from the immersion that, for a split second, made me think I was actually underwater and something was coming to get me. Real phobias were triggered, but I am safe. I take a few breaths. I have to continue. I have to know what happened. And I have to face this fear. Why go through all this trouble to come back empty handed? I hear another sound. Oh god…I shouldn’t be here.
Set about a decade after the events of the base game, Siren’s Rest is an expansion to 2024’s horror walking simulator Still Wakes the Deep. Siren’s Rest tells the story of Mhairi, a diver who sets out to find what remains of the tragic and mysterious incident that caused the Beira D oil rig to sink in the base game. Given instructions to collect any memorabilia from the deceased and photograph any bodies you find, you’ll drift through the impossible depths of the ocean and explore the rig as you seek to learn what happened. It seems, however, that you’re not alone down here. And I’m not talking about your crew. There’s something else here, too.
Read More: Still Wakes The Deep: The Kotaku Review
It took me about three hours to reach the conclusion of Siren’s Rest—and, given my very real thalassophobic responses to its setting and scares, it was a rough three hours at that. Provided they don’t share my fear of watery depths, the DLC might feel too short for some, and could risk being a touch boring in that you mostly just swim around collecting stuff. But, if you stick around for the character-driven story woven through the murky depths, you’ll come to find that this DLC, much like the base game, is here to hold up a mirror to your own life, to ask you when your instincts might be the most dangerous threat to your existence. And just when you’re in the middle of some deep thought about the human desire for knowledge and our impulsive curiosity, Siren’s Rest’s horror is here to remind you that some forces of nature may ever elude that knowledge and perhaps punish that very curiosity we so often value.
As a pseudo sequel to Still Wakes the Deep, Siren’s Rest benefits from you having played the base game before jumping into the literal and proverbial deep end it provides. But if you played Still Wakes the Deep around the time of its release and have forgotten various details, don’t worry. I did too, and there was something resonant about coming across the wreckage of the original game as my mind slowly caught up to what happened. The DLC is a character-focused story at heart, so an encyclopedic knowledge of details about what happened in the original game beyond “crazy monster shows up and destroys everything” isn’t terribly necessary. So come on in. The water’s fi—no, this shit’s horrifying, what am I talking about?
The walking simulator learns to swim
Though the entirety of Siren’s Rest takes place at the bottom of the ocean floor, it is still very much like previous games from developer The Chinese Room: It’s a short trip of wandering and collecting, with the occasional test of your reflexes during chase sequences. You’re also given an arc welder early on that lets you cut open grates and doors to gain access to new areas.
You can’t cut just anything open, though. Instead, you’ll come to spot signature clusters of rusted metal nodules on the areas you’re allowed to cut, which typically come up at points when Mhairi finds herself at a dead end. This usually leads to the person chatting in her headpiece, Rob, telling her “well, look around!” and then you eventually find the door or grate or whatever that needs to be cut open. This pattern repeats a bit too often.
It’s unfortunate there’s not more freedom to play and explore in an unscripted way. The game wants you to poke around a bit and to feel free to explore, but there’s not a whole lot to be found if you venture off the straight and narrow path as you make your way toward the increasingly creepy experiences that await, buried under thousands of feet of water and rusted metal.
I have no issues with the simplicity of the “walking simulator” genre. I dig it—especially as a palette cleanser from larger, more demanding games. And there is something precious and refreshing about a game that you can just bang out in three hours. That said, there were more than a few times I wished the Chinese Room would’ve considered ways to push this genre a little more. Giving me a bit of freedom with the arc welder to cut into random, unmarked surfaces would’ve been a neat way to encourage me to poke around a bit more and get into the headspace of a deep sea diver uncovering mysteries.
Swimming underwater for the vast majority of the game does grant a sense of freedom you don’t usually find in this genre, however. The simple ability to move in all three dimensions makes the spaces feel less linear, and of course contributes to the sense of dread that comes with being at the bottom of the ocean. I’d love to see more devs run with the concept of a focused, narrative-driven game set underwater; it made me think in three dimensions more than I would’ve expected, which in turn allowed me to more easily immerse myself in the dread that Siren’s Rest’s environment holds.
On that subject, fellow thalassophobes, let’s have a chat about how this game will make your stomach turn.
If you suffer from thalassophobia or submechanophobia, please be careful
I fully consented to subjecting myself to a game that runs on the very things that terrify me the most: being stranded in a vast ocean, being deep underwater, and being in a large body of water with…things.
This has been a lifelong terror of mine. All the other shit that spooks me—arachnophobia, being abducted by aliens, trying and failing to use my rice cooker—all that takes a distant back seat to the behemoth of the ocean. So yeah, this game was hard for me to play. And the fact that I fell in love with the narrative only complicated that experience. At the sight of the impossible depths of Siren’s Rest’s ocean, my stomach physically felt like it turned several times; I had to smack the escape key to pause the game and take a breath more on numerous occasions. And yes, one moment did get me to yelp like a little girl and cover my eyes with my hands. Thankfully my roommate wasn’t home when this happened. I was loud.
I like to play around with fear and danger; it can be a rewarding and positive experience when done safely and with consent. But if you’re like me and genuinely do suffer from a sense of dread from large bodies of water, submechanophobia, kenophobia, or agoraphobia (and claustrophobia given the tight spaces you must squeeze yourself through sometimes), please be careful with this game. The flipside of its effective thalassophobic simulation is that Siren’s Rest can actually be a neat way to safely face some of these fears. And that very concept of facing something that scares you or confuses you is core to the DLC’s strongest asset: its gorgeous, resonant, and memorable narrative themes.
Fight, Flight, or Freeze
Running away, and the notion that we exacerbate problems by fleeing from them, was the most compelling aspect of 2025’s Still Wakes the Deep for me. The protagonist in the base game finds himself in a horrific situation because he’s running away from some problems at home. The game then uses inexplicable cosmic horror to give the character, and you, a persistent experience of flight, of running in terror, refusing to face what pursues you. And I simply love a game that bakes its themes into the gameplay itself.
You’ll have to escape from a few things in Siren’s Rest, but the previous game’s theme of running away is flipped. Instead of being someone who always runs from things, Mhairi continues to push further underwater, exploring the remains of the oil rig. She’s someone who consistently pursues things as a part of her character and temperament. She’s curious and persistent. You’ll come to learn that Mhairi has her own connection to the incident of the first game, and it seems clear that her curiosity and persistence, admirable qualities in the right circumstances, are the very things that are endangering her and her crew as the story unravels.
The political themes are louder this time around
The first game wasn’t shy about its politics, driving home that private, for-profit control and a lack of unionized labor was every bit as responsible for the destruction of the rig as was the creepy thing lurking in the waters. And if anything, playing Siren’s Rest only makes it even more clear just how much that first game had to say. Characters in Siren’s Rest chat about how the imposing and abusive managerial structure of the fictional Cadal oil company is what pushed the crew to its breaking point, while the Lovecraftian beasties serve as an unknowable representation of said breaking point. There’s a powerful story about labor and environmental justice woven into this DLC.
If Still Wakes the Deep tries to instill in you the lesson that perpetually running away from your problems won’t solve anything and in fact will only ruin things further, then Siren’s Rest is here to caution you about the extreme opposite reaction. The danger of persisting and the need to continue to dig to find closure on something mysterious and unknowable is at the core of this DLC. During one fascinating sequence, the crew in Siren’s Rest is given an opportunity to turn away and return to the surface after something unfortunate happens, but it’s Mhairi, not an overbearing manager who expects results, who wants to stay and keep digging, out of curiosity, out of a need to know. It’s a moment rooted in character that speaks to larger themes as well. Yes, the social and economic structures we build are often what swallow us whole when we’re not united against power and capital. But at the same time, we should be cautious about certain impulses of our own that might threaten our ability to unite against those forces.
But it’s not just its deft, rich commentary on capitalism and our impulse to seek answers that makes Siren’s Rest worth playing, nor is it just the fear of what lurks beneath the ocean’s surface that provides its nightmare fuel. Siren’s Rest is here to give you some cosmic, Lovecraftian horror—to scare the hell out of you, sure, but, to provide a powerful masterclass in how and why unknowable horror can be such a powerful narrative tool as well.
Siren’s Rest isn’t here to give you a lore dump on the ecology of whatever the hell came out of the ocean floor in the first game. Those hellish threats remain unnamed, mysterious, able to make you doubt reality itself. Siren’s Rest, instead, wants you to consider our connections to other people and how they are strained by the very relatable, human need to find closure. The “umbilical” cable that provides Mhairi with her oxygen serves as a reminder of her connection with safety, with other human beings. But despite how essential this connection is to sustaining her own life, Siren’s Rest sees Mhairi repeatedly test just how much stress she can put on that fragile connection. And at the same time, the game also wants to caution you that, just maybe, some shit is best left alone. If only it were so easy to just let sleeping dogs lie, even those sunken far below the ocean’s surface.
A short runtime and lack of freedom, on top of some unfortunate bugs, might hold Siren’s Rest down from reaching its potential for some. But the beautifully written character stories at the heart of this horror game are what make it worth experiencing. Siren’s Rest is a powerful and terrifying B-side to a fantastic horror game from last year, one I’ll think about for a long time to come.