Within the opening hour of Nonetheless Wakes the Deep, the acclaimed horror recreation set aboard a deadly oil rig within the North Sea, we hear the C-bomb a minimum of six instances. Most come from the mouth of gruff protagonist Caz McLeary, an electrician, or “leccy,” from Glasgow. Caz possesses a advantageous grasp of his native colloquialisms: “scunnered” means “fed up”; “clarty” means “lined in dust.” When Nonetheless Wakes the Deep isn’t delivering accursed, heart-pounding horror, it’s providing an expletive-filled primer within the Scottish language.
Verisimilitude, of place, interval, and slang, immerses gamers within the recreation. However the exactingly rendered rig and largely working-class forged isn’t simply window dressing. “The sport is grounded thematically in Scotland,” says John McCormack, artistic director of Nonetheless Wakes the Deep. The nation skilled an oil increase within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, which is why Caz and his colleagues are on the rig, and the sport attracts closely on Scottish politics and tradition. Living proof: The sport, developed by studio The Chinese language Room, shipped with an uncommon language possibility: Scottish Gaelic. The colourful script is subtitled utilizing the nation’s indigenous language spoken by 1.3% of its 5.5 million inhabitants.
This week on kritikanews, we’re taking a look at how cultural variations have an effect on media in a particular situation we’re calling Tradition Shock.
“We didn’t maintain again on the swearing or the accents,” says McCormack, who’s from Glasgow himself. “We embraced all of it after which doubled down. Then we doubled down once more with the Scottish Gaelic translation.”
For McCormack, the indigenous language is a crucial image and provider of grassroots id. It was the first language in most rural areas till the early seventeenth century when it was suppressed by the Scottish crown. The language was additional suppressed after the Jacobite insurrection of 1745. As lately because the early twentieth century, kids had been overwhelmed into talking English in school. McCormack remembers his faculty historical past lessons from the Nineteen Eighties. “It was simply English and British historical past,” he says. “There was no Scottish historical past in any respect.”
The thought for the Scottish Gaelic translation got here as McCormack was brainstorming concepts for the sport’s announcement trailer that debuted on the 2023 Xbox Video games Showcase, simply as the sport entered its last yr of improvement. He needed to keep away from conventional horror tropes: bounce scares; screeching violins; livid, dramatic modifying. He envisioned one thing slower and extra melancholic: a shot of the swirling North Sea; the oil rig slowly rising by way of the misty air; an elegiac Scottish Gaelic folks music soundtracking the participant’s introduction to this doomed setting.
The artistic director went down a YouTube rabbit gap, finally coming throughout a video titled “Scottish lady sings emotional folks music.” The girl in query was the legendary conventional Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil, who lived on the tiny Hebridean island of Barra. “She’s bought a wonderful voice. It’s so stuffed with disappointment,” says McCormack.
He despatched the music to the sport’s audio director, Daan Hendriks, who recommended they use it, or one thing comparable, for each the sport’s announcement trailer and its finish credit. Hendriks discovered one other music whose lyrics had been a greater match for the sport’s themes: “Fath Mo Mhulaid A Bhith Ann,” which interprets to “being right here has precipitated my sorrow.” MacNeil died in 2015, however the recreation’s writer, Secret Mode, was capable of fee her daughter, the skilled folks singer Maggie MacInnes, to file a vocal-only model of the music. McCormack was enamored with the consequence. “It actually nailed the heartbreak that gamers ought to be feeling,” he says.
The mournful music rings out over the top credit. McCormack felt a form of “magic” in pairing a conventional folks music, one which summons each the historical past and stark great thing about Scotland, with a recreation whose tragedy stems from drilling down into the nation’s historic bedrock. However he additionally felt a duty: It wasn’t sufficient for the sport to make use of Scottish Gaelic to evoke the previous; it ought to talk with the language’s audio system within the current. The thought was bought to the sport’s writer on the benefit that it could make a pleasant advertising and marketing beat. If value was a difficulty, McCormack was prepared to “ditch” different parts of the sport to make it occur.
Scottish Gaelic has confronted a sluggish and regular decline. In 1755, the language was spoken by 289,798 folks, or 22.9% of its 1.2 million inhabitants on the time. The newest census figures from 2022 say it’s spoken by 69,701 folks, or 1.3% of the nation. The quantity (and proportion of the inhabitants) talking it has risen marginally over the previous decade. However Robbie MacLeòid, a Glasgow-based author and tutorial in Scottish Gaelic, says the census reveals that the language is definitely falling out of neighborhood use within the Scottish Highlands and western islands, the areas historically considered its heartland. One other examine suggests the language could even die out altogether within the subsequent decade or so.
The language’s place inside the arts is uneven. Scottish Gaelic literature is in “good well being,” says MacLeòid. However in theater, there’s only a single theater firm, Theatre Gu Leòr, which excursions performs and different stage productions across the nation. Scottish Gaelic audio system can watch tv broadcast by BBC Alba and hearken to the radio by way of BBC Radio nan Gàidheal.
Picture: The Chinese language Room/Secret Mode
Video video games, even these made by Scottish builders, lag far behind. There are a handful of DIY translation efforts by the likes of GunChleoc (a pseudonym) for video games reminiscent of 0 A.D and Pingus. However the mainstream trade, whose builders embody Rockstar North and No Code (the Glasgow-based studio engaged on a brand new Silent Hill title), has proven little curiosity within the language. “Making an allowance for how wholesome the online game trade is in Scotland, it’s stunning that it’s taken till Nonetheless Wakes the Deep for this sort of illustration,” says MacLeòid.
It was a momentous second for MacLeòid when he booted up the sport with the Scottish Gaelic translation turned on. “I truthfully bought fairly emotional on the title display as quickly as I modified it to Gaelic,” he says. “I sat there for a minute being like, Wow, I’ve by no means seen this earlier than.” MacLeòid has lengthy interacted with video video games by way of English; to play utilizing genuine Scottish Gaelic was each “surreal” and “shifting.”
Too usually, says MacLeòid, the language is utilized in a approach that may really feel culturally appropriative. Scottish Gaelic is commonly included because the “historic tongue,” he continues, so as to add “colour” and counsel both the “romantic” or the “unknown,” implying that the language is an artifact or a signifier of the previous, and, subsequently, one thing that’s not “related now.”
Arts and tradition, together with video video games like Nonetheless Wakes the Deep, are in a singular place to normalize minority languages and help these studying to talk it. MacLeòid remembers the way in which the Scottish Gaelic translation of X-Males: The Animated Sequence, broadcast on BBC Alba within the Nineteen Nineties, helped him study the language. He considers the affect a Scottish Gaelic translation of Grand Theft Auto 6, at present in improvement at Rockstar North in Edinburgh (in addition to different studios around the globe), may need on the language. “It might be radical and revolutionary — a recreation changer,” he says. “It wouldn’t simply present jobs for folks working within the language however confer respect to the language itself — its proper to exist.” That is the “naked minimal,” stresses MacLeòid, that he feels main Scottish recreation firms ought to be doing in regard to Scottish Gaelic.
For McCormack, Nonetheless Wakes the Deep is an expression of Scottish id. The sport, with its acute sense of place and eye for regional element, resonates with efforts throughout pockets of the U.Ok. and Eire. Northern Irish band Kneecap rap in Irish Gaelic; the fiction author Harry Josephine Giles received the celebrated Arthur C. Clarke award for Deep Wheel Orcadia, a sci-fi novel written within the Orkney dialect of Scots. Blindboy Boatclub is an nameless podcaster and writer reimagining Irish historical past in response to centuries of English colonialism. “Persons are reclaiming their id,” says McCormack. “It’s a wonderful factor.”
McCormack sees the Scottish Gaelic translation of Nonetheless Wakes the Deep as a small however essential a part of this motion. “Folks say, ‘There’s solely so many hundreds [of people] who really communicate Scottish Gaelic,’” he says. “‘I don’t care.’ Then they’ll say, ‘However hardly anybody will use it.’”
McCormack is pleased with his crew’s response to this latter level. Those that want to declare each achievement in Nonetheless Wakes the Deep should full the sport with the interpretation turned on. As of December 2024, greater than 16,500 gamers have finished so throughout PlayStation 5, Steam, and Xbox Sequence X. Name it an incentive, mild encouragement, or a gamified strategy to language. Regardless, The Chinese language Room has engineered a breakout second for what many take into account a wonderful, elegant language, and a reminder that Scottish Gaelic isn’t any relic.
