DLC REVIEW: ‘Still Wakes The Deep: Siren’s Rest’ Is Too Brief And Lacks Closure

2024’s Still Wakes the Deep by The Chinese Room and Secret Mode brought the horror genre to a rarely used setting: An oil rig in the 70s. Its ever-winding, rough metal corridors and isolated setting were perfect to bring a fresh take to a genre that has more bad entries than good. Having the chance to revisit something like that again is always a great opportunity. In 2025, The Chinese Room is revisiting the Beira D’s remnants with the Siren’s Rest DLC to showcase the lasting impact of the nightmarish incident that led to the rig’s collapse.

Siren’s Rest takes place about 10 years after the end of the base game, and the Beira D has made its home at the bottom of the ocean. You play as Mhairi (pronounced like Mary), a diver tasked with finding evidence and photographing corpses for documentation purposes. Mhairi has her own questions about the Beira D’s mysterious disappearance. But as she dives into the wreckage, she quickly discovers that the wreck was caused by more than just a simple accident.

Siren’s Rest does an excellent job of finding new ways to tap into the isolationist fears from the base game. Instead of navigating a collapsing oil rig, you need to explore it all in the blackness of the deep sea. That tension can be felt so well through great voice acting that raises the stakes as things go wrong during this dive. Yet the overall story is fairly predictable.

Even then, the DLC does a great job of portraying the need for closure and the lengths some may go through to achieve it. The Beira D was such a freak accident that the sudden loss of communication and life hit the community hard. But what if you were directly affected by what happened? What if you lost a loved one during the event? Would you put your own life at risk to find answers for others? These are the questions that are regularly asked in this fairly brief experience.

Siren’s Rest is just as shocking as the main game.

Yet, the delivery does occasionally take a hit with poorly timed line cues. Sometimes, if you are quick enough, lines are played over each other. You could easily miss crucial details about where to go next or the significance of what you’ve found. However, these are issues that could be addressed in a patch to refine the experience.

The discovery of the horrors that happened on the Beira D being unearthed again through this underwater wreckage feels just as shocking as when they originally appeared in the main game. There is no gradual evolution like in the base game from a rickety oil rig to a Lovecraftian/Cronenbergian nightmare. Many of those horrors are still around, and Mhairi stumbling on them for her ultimate goal of closure is just as intense as the first time we faced them.

The same goes for the psychological aspect. Playing into the mental effects the otherworldly infection had on Beira D’s inhabitants is a great way to force Mhairi to face her past and discover what she was truly looking for, particularly if what you find may not actually be real. Siren’s Rest gets props for balancing that form of acceptance, even though it may not be the truth. However, it does get a little overshadowed by the fact that the ending is not completely satisfying.

For gameplay, playing underwater could be a negative. The DLC’s shift in this direction plays fairly well. There are some issues, like not being quite transparent about how specific mechanics operate, but the swimming is fun and intense. Plus, you’re not limited by oxygen for the most part… thank god.

Siren’s Rest’s gameplay feels unrefined.

As the game progresses, the tension is amplified by the supplies you use to see in this setting. From a simple flashlight to eventually using underwater flares, the ways you perceive the horrifically beautiful environments change. The eerie red glow from the flares makes the last portion of the DLC more tense than any other part before it, as the darkness on the edge of the flare is so oppressive.

However, beyond that, specifically in terms of general exploration, the gameplay feels unrefined. Having to move boxes around to open pathways and break open rusted doors with an underwater welding torch leads to wonky interactions between Mhairi and the environment. Several times, even with scripted grabbing of collectibles, the objects weren’t grabbed properly.

The different interactible objects float outside of her hand, or even in her character model’s hand instead of in her grip as you’d expect. Which is just odd since there aren’t many interactions, and when they are, they feel mostly played out. But the actual traversal moments do feel better than the base game which is nice for how infrequent they occur.

But what about the terror? Sadly, the DLC continues to lack actual scares. There’s great tension. But when it snaps, it’s kind of a letdown. Plus, similar to the base game, Siren’s Rest has a way of telegraphing when you’re safe or not. Which is a shame, with how limited the visibility is, and the base threat of the vast darkness of the ocean mixed with the metal hellscape of an oil rig could have set up more chances to never make you feel safe in any surroundings.

Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest isn’t scary enough.

The actual threat is never really a threat to begin with. The terror that finds you in the depths of the oil rig follows very similar AI to the base game, which can easily be abused with thrown objects to let you be completely in control of the situation. An evolution of this to match the new setting would again be a major benefit to give an overall better horror experience in a setting we barely get to explore in this genre.

Plus, the DLC just kind of ends. It’s not entirely satisfying once you reach the final moments and can lead to more questions than answers about possibly the last adventure to the Beira D. With giving its swan song in this form, something more definitive would have been a nice conclusion for those who wanted, well, closure.

Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest DLC is tense yet unsatisfying in its encore. While revisiting the Beria D in a dark underwater setting was great at first, the DLC just doesn’t stick the landing. Additionally, it suffers from some poor audio cues and suboptimal object interactions that undermine tension when it shouldn’t. While it does deliver in some aspects, the overall package will leave those who want a satisfying conclusion to the nightmare of the Beira D wanting more than this.

Still Wakes the Deep: Siren’s Rest is available June 18th on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.