Developer The Chinese Room’s Still Wakes the Deep is a short, six-hour game that puts you up against the horrors of Lovecraftian nightmares and decaying fossil-fuel infrastructure. Now you can add a third to that list: achievement hunting.
Read More: Still Wakes the Deep: The Kotaku Review
I’m exaggerating slightly. Most of the trophies in SWtD aren’t that big of a deal. If you know exactly what to do and when, you could unlock all 37 trophies/achievements in SWtD in about three and-a-half hours. It’s theoretically possible to do in a single run, but you’d need a guide, and you’d end up spoiling most of the game’s twists for yourself. And, given one of the game’s more quirky achievements that asks you to switch up the language settings, you’d also be playing on your first run in a language that you (probably) don’t know how to read.
The best way to unlock all of Still Wakes the Deep’s unlockables is to plan on two playthroughs. Go in blind for your first one, enjoy the horrors, then clean up everything you missed the second time around.
Naturally, this guide necessarily contains heavy spoilers for the entirety of Still Wakes the Deep.
For completing the game, you’ll earn the following story-related trophies/achievements:
There are also a couple of points in the game where you’ll have to find and use a fire extinguisher to progress forward. The first chance you get is right after you leave the kitchen in Accommodation. This unlocks:
There are several optional interactions in Still Wakes the Deep that unlock a trophy/achievement, which is about as close to “collectibles” as the game gets. These include finding dead crew members, answering all the emergency phone calls that come in over the course of the game, and, uh, dying a lot. If you want that platinum trophy and/or 1,000 gamerscore, then you’re going to need to deliberately murder Caz around 2 dozen times.
It’s worth noting here that SWtD handles its “collectibles” a little differently from most other games. Progress on each trophy/achievement is saved directly to your profile, much as in the Resident Evil remakes. So you don’t have to get everything on a single run through the game for it to count. This can come in handy, as several trophies/achievements are linked to unlabeled tasks that you can do in the first 10 minutes.
For this achievement, you’ll have to die by falling into the sea in five different areas on the rig’s exterior.
This is harder than it sounds as you’ll spend roughly two-thirds of SWtD deep in the rig’s guts. When you are outside, you aren’t always at imminent risk of falling overboard. You have to actively look for opportunities to jump over a railing to Caz’s watery demise.
On a typical blind run through the game, you’re most at risk of falling into the sea on the Under Rig right after the initial outbreak and on Starboard, when you’re using the helicopter as a makeshift ladder. Those both have a couple of sudden surprises that can take you off-guard.
You can also deliberately find places to leap into the sea right when you reach Lifeboats Access; on your second visit to the Deck, as you’re using the fallen shipping containers to evade Muir; and on the stack on the Processing Quad. For extra black comedy points, follow up your victory over Addair by quietly dropping through one of the holes in the stack’s walkway.
There’s a final opportunity for Full Fathom Five if you need it right at the end of the game when you revisit the Crew Lounge in Accommodation. At this point, a big hole’s been torn in the wall and it overlooks the sea. It’s morbid, but it offers one last chance to throw Caz overboard.
For this achievement, you’ll need to answer all the emergency phone calls over the course of the game. Five of these cannot be missed due to being mission objectives, while eight are technically optional.
It can be difficult to hear a phone’s ring over all the other industrial mayhem that’s usually happening in SWtD. When in doubt, look for a flashing button.
1 (mandatory): When you return to Accommodation for the first time, answer the phone to talk to O’Connor.
2 (mandatory): On Lifeboat Access, after you attempt to release the first boat, go up the nearby stairs. Rennick calls the nearby phone shortly afterward.
3: After #2, progress through the level. As you reach a small room with a ladder leading up, wait a second for Innes to call on the phone behind the ladder.
4 (mandatory): On the Deck, after the helicopter crash, talk to Brodie on the phone in Rennick’s office.
5: After you hang up on the previous call with Brodie, leave Rennick’s office. When you get a few steps away, the phone rings again. Return to the office and pick it up to hear from Davros.
6: Look for the flashing light on the phone in the arrivals/departures office in Administration. Pick it up to get a call from Scooby.
7: Answer the phone in the little office on Starboard to hear from Bruce. You’ll find it after you get off the helicopter, inside the blue shipping container.
8 (mandatory): After you reactivate the generators in Leg A, wait a few seconds and Brodie will call on the office phone.
9 (mandatory): Right before you enter the Processing Quad, you end up in a locker room in Accommodation. Use the heater on the floor, and you’ll get a new objective: use the nearby phone to check up on Roy.
10: The same phone as #9 will ring again once you leave the room, although it’s hard to hear. Double back and answer it for a creepy conversation.
11: When you return to Accommodation for the third time, there’s a phone in the hallway opposite your entry point. Use the heater, then walk down the hall towards Laundry until you hear the phone ring. Double back to answer it.
12 (mandatory): After you find Roy in the office above Accommodation, you’ll get a call from Finlay on the phone nearby.
13: The last call in the game comes in on a phone (above, circled) in an office in the flooded version of Accommodation. The phone’s button is flashing when you first walk in, so this isn’t that easy to miss, but it’s technically optional.
This one requires you to visit every residential cabin that you can reach, which means you’ll have to do a little extra exploring at the start of the game.
From your starting point in McClary’s cabin, leave, cross the hall, and check out cabin #108 (Campbell). From there, go down the stairs and visit #110 (O’Connor’s water-damaged suite) and #111 (Henderson).
For the next two, talk with Finlay in the hall, then cut through the shower room and check cabins #106 (Addair) and #104 (Gibson/Dobbie).
Much later on, when you visit Accommodation for the third time, many of the formerly locked rooms are now open and you can access the second floor. The critical path through this section is fairly linear and takes you through just about all of the intact cabins. You should unlock Snoop right before you leave.
This trophy unlocks by dying in all 9 possible ways:
After clearing a blind run through SWtD, even the most fumble-fingered player might only have credit towards 4 or 5 of these. Caz can take a few hits from environmental hazards before he dies, so it’s difficult to get killed by fire, live wiring, or steam. You’ll probably have to go back and deliberately kill Caz a few times to get this to unlock.
There’s also only one place in the game where you can die by gas: the access corridor that connects Starboard and Engineering. Monsters that can grab you with tentacles are only a little more common, but you can get killed by O’Connor at the base of Leg B (above) and Roper in the Marine Control Room.
This achievement requires you to sprint in all available movement modes and traversal types:
In theory, this is as easy to do as simply keeping the sprint button held down while you’re moving. The problem is that, at time of writing, sprint seems a little buggy. It also doesn’t play well with the Walking Simulator trophy/achievement, below. You probably want to try for one on one playthrough, then the other on a subsequent run.
For this achievement, you’ll need to interact with all the available electrical appliances found throughout the rig.
In practice, you’ll grab most of these as mandatory parts of the story, such as heaters, generators, fuse boxes, and breakers. The big exceptions are TVs, light switches, and transistor radios.
You can find radios throughout the rig, some of which are still playing music or news broadcasts, but the TV and light switch are harder to find.
At the start of the game, go into the Crew Lounge and turn on the TV (above). Before you visit the Canteen, flip the light switch in either Caz’s cabin or the shower room. When you reach the laundry room in Accommodation, be sure to turn the radio off. From here, just play the game normally and the trophy/achievement will eventually unlock.
In another self-destruction-based trophy/achievement, you’ll need to electrocute Caz in all 7 places on the rig where it is possible to do so. As noted above, this is difficult to do accidentally. Here are all the areas where you can electrocute yourself:
1: You can zap yourself on the fallen overhead lights in the hallway outside the canteen on Accommodation (above), either right after your first conversation with Roy or after you evade Trots in the laundry room.
2: When you revisit the Deck on your way to catch the chopper, walk into the live current that blocks your path forward.
3: Once you’ve escaped Muir on the Deck, the most direct path to Rennick’s office is blocked by some live current. Take yourself out with it.
4: After you push the cart in Administration, there’s an office in the hallway that’s blocked by a sparking conduit. Try to enter it.
5: After the first chase sequence with Rennick in Administration, before you pop the padlock on the last door, turn 180 degrees. There’s some fallen wiring in the hallway directly ahead of you that you can use to zap Caz.
6: In the generator-access area between Starboard and Engineering, you’ll need to flip a switch to turn off the power before you can progress. Before you do that, drop Caz into the electrified water.
7: On your final visit to Engineering, when it’s flooded, there’s a blink-and-you’d-miss-it chance to electrocute Caz on another fallen lighting rig.
After you speak with Finlay, run through the stage as usual. Eventually, you’ll use two improvised ladders to reach a maintenance catwalk. Upon arrival, Caz will say something out loud about how this area “reeks of oil.” This is your signal that the sparking wires ahead of you aren’t just set dressing. Crawl into them until Caz dies to earn your (worth 1 point on Xbox) trophy/achievement.
In order to unlock “Body Count,” you must find and interact with 19 corpses scattered throughout the rig. 11 of them are tracked automatically when you spot them, which leaves eight for you to track down.
You have to interact with all eight of these bodies. Simply walking by them doesn’t count.
1: After you kill the electricity on the Deck, go through the formerly blocked passage. Sunil’s corpse is slumped over at the bottom of the next drop.
2: While you’re working your way around the Deck to the elevator controls, check the dead guy in the blue coverall who’s next to one of the hiding places by the fence.
3: As you’re heading up to the helipad, you’ll exit a storage room through a vent cover and end up face-to-face with Dobbie’s corpse on the ground.
4: Enter Leg A and progress as normal. Before you jump onto the big fuel tank in the center of the room, turn left and go up the ladder. There’s a hidden corpse up here at the broken edge of the catwalk.
5: When you reach the controls for the debris screen, check the door that’s venting steam above the control room. There’s a dead man who’s barely visible through its window.
6: Upon your return to Accommodation near the end of the game, drop into the second-floor hall from the ceiling ductwork and walk forward into the open room. Check the dead, eviscerated man who’s propped up on the stack of books. He’s next to the open duct in the ceiling that you need to use to continue.
7: After you leave the room with corpse #7, go through the duct and drop down into another cabin. Inspect the corpse at the desk.
8: From corpse #8, go into the hallway, through the broken door, and use the open vent in the bathroom to get back into the ceiling. Drop down into yet another cabin and check the corpse in the bunk.
If you’ve hit all the necessary criteria for “Body Count,” it should unlock immediately after you get the lighter at the end of the game.
Before you reach Rennick’s office at the start of the game, make sure to have every optional conversation that you can find along the way.
Speak with Trots, Brodie, and Addair at the tables before you leave the Canteen, then talk with Muir and Roper as you make your way across the Deck. The prompts are easy to spot as long as you’re not sprinting through this section as quickly as possible. The trophy/achievement should unlock right before everything goes to hell.
This section discusses various hidden trophies/achievements that are scattered throughout the game.
For this trophy, you’ll have to spot a monster while Caz is leaning. You can do this as early as your second trip through the laundry room in Accommodation, but it works at any point in the game where you’re hiding from a mutated worker.
Here, you’ll have to find a way to drown indoors.
McLeary can hold his breath for a really long time, but there are enough complicated underwater sequences in the back half of SWtD that you’re likely to get this without trying. In theory, you could unlock this as early as your first trip to Engineering if you kept Caz submerged in the flooded crawlspace.
There are two different places in the rig where you can listen to a news broadcast on a transistor radio.
One is in Accommodation on your first visit to the laundry room, where you can hear it playing near the door to Lifeboats Access. The other is in the office in Administration that’s just past the blocked door in the stairwell.
In either case, stand around for 5 minutes until the broadcast ends and this unlocks.
At the start of the game, head into the shower room next to the naked guy and hang out for a while. The trophy/achievement should fire after roughly 45 seconds.
This Gaelic achievement title translates to: “The ocean will bring out its own.”
To earn this, turn on the Scottish Gaelic dialogue track in Options at the start of the game and play the rest of the game through to the end.
While all spoken dialogue is still in English, the subtitles and UI will all be in Gaelic. It can be a challenge to navigate, but the onscreen prompts make it reasonably intuitive. Even so, you’re better off leaving this for a second run when you’ve already got a solid grasp on the game’s mechanics.
For this to unlock, clear the game with less than 10 minutes’ sprinting time on the clock.
Caz actually moves at a light jog under ordinary conditions (you can see it from his shadow in places like the Mud Testing room in Engineering), so there’s no real reason to sprint around constantly unless you’re trying to speedrun the game. To unlock this, try to only sprint when you’re in a chase sequence or you’re about to make a big flying jump. 10 minutes is a lot.
Over the course of your third visit to Accommodation, late in the game, you’ll finally reach Roy’s cabin and be able to grab his insulin. While you’re there, check out the green tartan-pattern chair near Roy’s bed. If you point the camera at the spoon next to the open magazine for a second, this trophy/achievement unlocks.
Starting in Engineering, you can routinely find small objects that you can pick up and throw around, such as wrenches, hammers, coffee mugs, hard hats, and thermoses. These are primarily meant to be used as distractions for monsters so you can slip by.
To unlock this trophy/achievement, pick up and throw 50 different objects. This doesn’t mean you have to hunt down 50 different things you can throw, but instead, that you should pick up and throw everything you find until this trophy/achievement fires.
To snag this achievement, just throw any object into the sea.
Your first chance to do this is on your second visit to the Deck. Upon entering, go down the first ladder and check the bench by the fire for a thermos. Pick it up and throw it overboard. It might take a second, but the trophy/achievement will fire as soon as the thermos hits the water.
For this trophy, you’ll have to bounce a thrown object off of any monster in the game. I got this by chucking a thermos at Addair in the generator room, because he is a jerk, but you could do this as early as the laundry room escape on Accommodation.
And with that, you’ll have unlocked all of the trophies/achievements in Still Wakes The Deep!
