Like the crew of Still Wakes The Deep’s mysterious oil rig, the creators of next year’s promising British horror game feel like they’ve been a little off the radar. When The Chinese Room fully re-emerges in 2024 with a pair of new releases, it will have been four years since the company’s last game launch, 2020’s Little Orpheus, and nearly a decade since the acclaimed Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
The Chinese Room has changed considerably in that time, not least when it shrank back down to just its two co-founders in mid 2017. Now, the studio numbers over 100 people spread across multiple game projects and a spacious multi-floor office in the heart of Brighton. The journey to get here has seen it become part of UK development powerhouse Sumo Digital, and sign up to launch Still Wakes The Deep into Xbox Game Pass with the support of Microsoft.
But throughout this, the feeling of the studio’s independent heritage and focus on strong narrative storytelling remains, staff tell me when I visit the studio – even after this summer’s departure of creative director Dan Pinchbeck. After spending so long submerged on building its oil rig horror, I was keen to hear more about the game and what The Chinese Room in general has been up to, as it prepares to launch both Still Wakes The Deep and the long-awaited Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 next year – and as it begins early work on what comes after.
“The studio grew quite a lot in the last four or five years, really since Sumo Digital acquired it,” The Chinese Room studio director Ed Daly acknowledges. “It’s now more than 100 people and then we have the rest of Sumo helping us make our games with additional expertise at help. We’ve not been able to talk about what we’ve been doing for the last three years, so all of a sudden we’ve got an embarrassment of riches.