Mini Review: Still Wakes the Deep: Siren's Rest (Xbox) - Buggy Scottish Horror is Still Worth the Plunge

Spoiler Warning: Siren's Rest contains story spoilers alluding the outcome of the base game. We'd recommend finishing the main story before reading/playing.

The sea is full of strange and beautiful things, and in Siren’s Rest, the surprise DLC for Still Wakes the Deep, it’s a fifty-thousand-tonne steel graveyard holding the crew of the Beira D. Did you catch that spoiler warning? Good.

Released exactly a year after Still Wakes the Deep launched, Siren’s Rest is a fitting way to mark the occasion - celebrating the three-time BAFTA award-winning walking sim by ditching its boots for floppy flippers. It dives straight into the wreckage - though not without a few leaks in the suit.

It’s been a decade since the Beira D incident of 1975. Now, the story follows Mhairi, a bonnie tea drinker and specialist diver, sent to retrieve the rig’s data logger. She's fought tooth and nail to make this dive happen: self-funding, organising, and training for the opportunity to provide closure to the families in mourning. The pressure is gnawing at her - not solely because she's 187 metres below sea level. Mhairi’s a far more empathetic protagonist than Caz McCleary, the base game’s lead and self-styled Muhammad Ali of potty mouths. As we navigate the treacherous wreckage in Mhairi’s flippers, we come to understand who she is, why this matters to her, and why she’s the one risking everything to do it.

Siren’s Rest is set almost entirely underwater, layering thalassophobia onto the game’s already deeply unsettling themes. The dark depths make for a brilliant setting - endless, oppressive, and haunting. The wrecked Beira D is scattered like bones across the seabed, its vast chasms opening into endless darkness. Even with oxygen on tap and regular comms with dive buddy Rob via an extremely long umbilical cord, it’s an incredibly isolating experience - a perfect recipe for the heebie-jeebies.

Revisiting familiar locales from the main game, since rotted and rusted by a decade in the salty North Sea, it’s claustrophobic, unstable, and perilous. Understandably, the Beira D isn’t what it once was, sadly dulling one of key pillars that made Still Wakes the Deep so special in the first place. Yet somehow deep down in the depths, the yellow paint survives - who knew the hand-holding paint was so durable? It is everywhere.

You’ll spend a lot of time swimming through the wreckage in the crushing dark, that awkward cord dragging behind you. In my experience, navigating underwater - or in space - is always risky in game design. It can turn atmospheric exploration into frustration fast. But for the most part, the DLC does okay.

Unfortunately, the deeper I went, the more Siren’s Rest buckled under pressure. For a relatively short story (1-3 hours depending on how you play) I experienced a few too many technical flaws. That umbilical cord attached to Mhairi’s diving helmet, for example, consistently clipped through walls, snapped in half, and at one point wrapped itself around my neck, completely obstructing my view - inadvertently amplifying my fear factor, a feat developer The Chinese Room nailed more effectively in the DLC’s second half. I reached out to Secret Mode about the performance issues, and they assured me that a recent Xbox update addressed most of them - and on second inspection, it seems to have sorted out a fair few of my complaints. But for transparency’s sake, my initial playthrough was littered with visual and audio bugs, capped off by a crash during a pivotal moment in the dive. A real shame, considering I was genuinely enjoying the story.

To wrap things up, the diving adds a terrifying new texture to Still Wakes the Deep, and Mhairi makes for a compelling anchor, adding yet another stellar voice to the talented cast. It’s in returning to the Beira D, photographing the lost souls trapped inside, collecting mementos, and learning more about Mhairi that the DLC shines brightest. With another patch or two, Siren’s Rest could become an essential epilogue to one of the most atmospheric games in recent years. As it stands, it’s flawed, fascinating, and absolutely worth the plunge.

Will you be returning to Still Wakes the Deep: Siren's Rest? Let us know in the comments.