The first forty minutes of Grimwater Deep contain no threat at all. You descend, you check pressure gauges, you recover three of the four data cores you were sent for, and the loudest thing in the game is the sound of your own regulator. It is a long time to spend teaching a player what normal sounds like, and it is the reason everything afterwards works.
The creature audio was field recorded rather than assembled from a library, and you can hear the difference immediately if you have played enough horror games to recognise the usual samples. Nothing here is familiar. There is a sound about four hours in that I could not identify as animal, mechanical or structural, and not knowing which was substantially worse than any of the three would have been.
What the game refuses to do is more interesting than what it does. There is no combat. There is no stamina bar. Your lamp is your only tool and also the only reason anything finds you, which turns every navigation decision into a risk assessment without a single line of tutorial text explaining that it has. The one weapon-shaped object you find is a cutting torch and it is for doors.
It is not perfect. The mid-game asks you to backtrack through three chambers you have already emptied, and the procedural layout means that stretch can generate as a genuinely tedious walk. But the ending sequence is the best twenty minutes of horror I have played since I started doing this, and it earns it by being quiet for nine hours first.
