Soma

What makes Soma a profound DIA experience isn't solely its gameplay; it's how cleverly the makers worked with the very idea of "gameplay" -- working with the concept of "play" as a means of finding one's identity.
When I heard that Soma really shovels in ass-heaps of "deep" dialogue, I was ready to cringe at how clearly the game could have been a book or a film rather than something marketed as interactive.
I was a dumbass.
Soma is skillful in its design as a first-person survival-horror/adventure game like its sister Amnesia The Dark Descent. Scenes are nicely articulated as these visual treats of the "sci-fi horror" aesthetic, and without any clusterfucks of detail that distract you from the key items; which lets the pacing of the game move slowly, but smoothly.
Sure, there are monster-chase sequences that speed things up, but for the most part Soma is a lot of quietly walking around, yet it's rarely boring because it feels like you know what you're doing: you walk down a hall, you'll find the level's exit or an item to help you find said exit.
On paper, I know it sounds like a redundant simulator of seek-and-find; but Soma stimulates further in a way that's cerebral, as room by room of the underwater facility seems to hide some little clue or detail that elaborates the hidden story of what happened down there that lead to the facility's downfall.
Plus, the variety of short puzzles (again like Amnesia) helps fend off any monotony.
Though the writing could be criticized how implausibly the main protagonist acts after some otherwise scary moments. More than several times you run away from a monster and then you talk to your partner like that was more of a chore than a life-or-death situation; or even less plausible, how quickly after these moments he dives straight into philosophical questions to make the player "think" -- an intention of the developers which makes some of these scenes feel a tad pretentious. At least the ending (before and after the credits) serves as an engaging demonstration and counterpoint for all the speculations on doom and paradise.
Less of a criticism and more of a gripe: when compared the monster sequences to Amnesia, Soma ventures into a less subtle taste of "horror" which is how your screen's interface glitches and screams at you with static at the suspenseful parts; and considering that your interface is inescapable, this is borderline jump-scare territory -- and surely I needn't explain why jump-scares are tasteless.
But to get back to my dick-sucking tone: speaking of blasting static, was I the only person really impressed with Soma's sound design? Personally I was entranced by the vivid textures and infinite variations of sounds made by wet machinery and speaker-system feedback.
Any, Soma surprised me with its casual means of intense atmosphere and Cartesian philosophy. Its ending was definitely better than fucking Amnesia's, but the gameplay and palette for what's "scary" didn't impress me as much.

Great horror story, unfortunately its held back but some clunky gameplay. Honestly better on the difficulty where the monsters cant hurt you.

The “walking simulator” is a relatively new phenomenon in the gaming realm. They are an amalgamation of the adventure, puzzle, platforming, and simulator game genres without leaning too heavily into one of them. They are minimal by design compared to other game genres, showcasing narrative, characters, dialogue, and tone over action and gameplay. One would think that the widespread popularity of these types of games signals that the game industry has finally committed to just starting making films by stripping away at most of the gameplay. However, most of these “walking simulator” games are made by indie developers. Perhaps these games have been churned out frequently over the past decade because developers with a small-scale budget can still offer something with substance and spectacle. Frictional Games, the Swedish indie developer seem to have a grasp on making an effective “walking simulator” as seen with the smash hit Amnesia: The Dark Descent from 2010. The minimization of the gameplay proved to be incredibly effective in terms of evoking horror to the player. It reminded us that great horror is intended to make the player claustrophobic and defenseless against what lurks in the dark, something was forgotten in the waves of action-horror games that littered the 2000’s. Soma, their 2015 follow-up to Amnesia, translated all of the best elements from Amnesia into the domain of science-fiction. In doing this, Frictional Games upholds their horror idiosyncrasies with Soma, delivering something as frightening as Amnesia in a different setting while offering something more substantial.

One of the more substantial factors of Soma compared to Amnesia is its riveting narrative. The narrative in Amnesia was intentionally vague, seemingly for the title’s namesake, but was supported by mystique, atmosphere, and spectacle. All of those elements support Soma’s narrative as well, but I feel they are more effective due to the humdrum opening of the game. Simon Jarrett, a young man living in modern-day 2015, wakes up on a sunny, picturesque day in his apartment in Toronto, Canada. He gets up to attend an experimental cranial scan to soothe his traumatic brain injury. He drinks his revolting medicine and steps into the doctor’s chair like any mundane checkup. When he sits in the chair, however, the scene of a simple checkup plummets faster than a bird being shot out of the sky. Simon is transported to a dark, industrial landscape foreign from the sunny skies of 2015 Toronto. In Amnesia, the player hadn’t a clue where they were, but at least the player had a suspended sense of belief due to also having zero context about the mysterious foreground. Soma on the other handsets up a domestic setting for the player just to eject them out of a sense of familiarity. The player is as startled and confused as Simon is as a result, adding a certain level of intrigue to the game’s story and characters.

As the game progresses, the circumstances surrounding Simon’s bizarre occurrence become much more interesting. It’s easy to assume that Simon is simply dreaming and what the player is experiencing is Simon’s frazzled mind in a comatose state. Thankfully, the writers for this game didn’t appease the player’s easy first conclusion. Instead, Soma’s story is a whirlwind of science-fiction existentialism that directly relates to the subject of reality about the Phillip K. Dick quote that opens the game. Once Simon finds his way around the dark facility, he discovers that the year is 2104 and he’s been transported to a futuristic, underwater society called PATHOS-II. He is relieved when he contacts someone named Catherine who is located in another facility on PATHOS-II. Once he finds Catherine on the Lambda site, he is disappointed to learn that she is merely a robot. Specifically, she is a robotic scan of someone who worked in PATHOS-II and she lives on artificially. She explains that decades ago, Earth failed in stopping a comet from colliding into Earth, resulting in an apocalyptic decline for human society and the species itself. The only survivors are the workers of PATHOS-II who are slowly attempting to reconstruct humanity with the WAU system as an overseer, but all of the workers are dead as well. Simon transplants Catherine into his Omnitool as they venture onward to uncover the ARK, a project conducted by the WAU as the last hope for humanity. During his journey, Simon learns that he too is an artificial being. He died way back in 2015 during the brain scan and his file was saved to be transported to a deceased co-worker of Catherine’s. Yet, Simon is oblivious to this until he discovers it. Simon then transports his being again into a machine capable of descending further into the abyss of the ocean floor, leaving his previous body behind. He finds the ARK and destroys the WAU in the process. Simon’s destination is the Phi site where he downloads Catherine and himself into the ARK as it blasts off into space. Unfortunately, his present consciousness did not transmit into the ARK and neither did Catherine’s. Simon and Catherine have a heated altercation and Catherine’s AI fractures as a result, leaving Simon alone in the abyss. Meanwhile, the transmitted versions of Simon and Catherine have successfully entered the ARK. They now exist in a land of serenity that is orbiting the forsaken Earth.

Initially, I never expected to be floored by Soma’s narrative. I had just figured
the most obvious of set-ups and thought Simon was going to have a Wizard of Oz moment where he has a bad dream during the brain scan and he recognizes a few faces as he wakes up. The likely scenario of traveling to the future and going back with a hundred years of insight didn’t tickle me either. When Simon peruses the recordings and finds the graduate doctors frustrated at themselves for killing him during the procedure. Simon wasn’t in a hundred-year slumber; he was in a state of oblivion due to being dead, resurrected due to futuristic technology that even we in the 21st century cannot fathom as a possibility. Once this revelation occurred, I suddenly began to become invested in this game’s narrative. The concept of suddenly having one’s brain and consciousness turned off like a light switch for almost a century strikes at the core of existential terror. We as people do this for an average of 6-8 hours a night, putting our consciousness in a state of oblivious purgatory as Simon did. The huge difference is that it’s unlikely that we could be awoken almost a century into the future, but the concept of waking up somewhere unrecognizable with no concept about how much time has passed in the context of Soma is horrifying.

The game plays with the concept of consciousness about existence constantly. With technology, the researchers in the PATHOS-II system are essentially jolted back to life at any given notice. The conscious mind of a deceased worker is mechanically revived for a couple of minutes just to manipulate a passcode out from him. After that, he’s gone again with the simple click of a button. Catherine doesn’t exist unless Simon attaches his Omnitool to a monitor. These monitors are found in most places, but the fact that Catherine’s existence relies on technology and Simon has all the control is a bit unnerving, to say the least. It brings the player a sense of existential dread to think that one’s personhood and their existence are just a matter of a file uploaded to a computer. When Simon transports his body, the one he’s been piloting since he woke up is sitting dormant in an operating chair. It’s up to the player whether the current Simon euthanizes old Simon or not, and this sequence makes the player consider the reality of consciousness the game wishes to explore. Soma uses the idea of consciousness and existence so flippantly with science-fiction tropes. The ability to perceive one’s humanity with senses and consciousness is depicted so trivially here that it’s quite discomforting. Given that this is a post-apocalyptic scenario, perhaps the narrative is suggesting that this artificial existence is the only means of preserving humanity as technology progresses. Even the immaculate landscape on the ARK is an artificial simulation. I think this idea of consciousness could only have been executed properly in the video game medium because of the first-person perspective. We as the player are only familiar with Simon’s voice and relative background. We only get a glimpse of his futuristic, robotic body once in a shadowy reflection, discounting seeing it in a lifeless state after transporting his consciousness to another unit. The first-person perspective often utilized in video games is the easiest way to convey this sense of consciousness compared to every other visual medium.

I also wasn’t expecting to get invested in Soma’s characters as I did. High-concept science-fiction stories tend to be light on characterization so as not to distract from the science-fiction narrative, but I was pleasantly surprised that Soma managed to create substantial characters. Simon is the epitome of an everyman character, catapulted into a scenario beyond his reach. His situation garnered a sense of sympathy from me, especially when it was revealed that he died a century ago and he was now an artificial lifeform. His dialogue is relatively mundane, but his voice actor does a great job at personalizing it so Simon’s personality isn’t as robotic as his body. His unorthodox relationship with Catherine also adds a great amount of characterization to Simon, and I suppose that extends to Catherine as well. Both of them are practically the only substantial characters in the entire game, so it’s nice that these characters develop a certain rapport with each other. They banter with one another, argue, joke around, etc. like normal people, and their conversations act as a source of levity. During the final sequence of the arc when Simon’s data was buffering in the five-second time window, I had my fists clenched in suspense along with Simon hoping for the best, something I never expected to do with his character near the beginning. This makes the ending of the game all the more gut-wrenching as I dreaded thinking about the lonely, cataclysmic existence Simon is about to face. Their relationship is also cleverly disguised as a love plot which is not explicitly detailed in the game. They are two lonely souls in the same hostile environment who build a relationship with one another because of it, an easy set-up for a romantic angle with two characters if I’ve ever heard one. I’m glad that the game did not make this the prime trajectory in the game as it would’ve been distracting, but the game’s conclusion with both of them on the ARK leads me to believe Simon and Catherine’s relationship shifted into an Adam and Eve scenario.

While the narrative is the backbone of Soma, there is still a video game to be played here. Frictional Games most likely didn’t strain themselves in this department as Soma plays almost exactly like Amnesia. It’s a first-person “walking simulator” that combines adventure game progression with a Half-Life-Esque physics engine sans the physics puzzles. The player is also rendered utterly defenseless against any enemies they might come across, a minimal choice for the intended fear factor. The Omnitool is the main device at Simon’s disposal, but it cannot be used to ward off futuristic sea creatures. The progression in Soma is not based on puzzle solving, but rather tinkering around with everything and checking every nook and cranny for anything of importance. The player gets a sense of this as early as when Simon wakes up and has to rip up everything in his apartment to find his disgusting brain fluid. As engaging as puzzles usually are in games, I suppose a puzzle-intensive game would distract from the artistic goals of the developers. I’m trying to be open-minded with attempting to wrap my head around what a “walking simulator” is supposed to accomplish, considering the effective qualities. I don’t mind that the gameplay was relatively sparse because it served its purpose to progress Soma’s strong narrative. The only criticism I have regarding this is the underwater sections. Oftentimes, Simon will wade through the trenches of the Atlantic to get to another section of PATHOS-II. The first time the player has to do this, it has a certain spectacle to it. However, this does not retain upon the fourth or fifth time the game drops the player in one of these sections. Frictional Games should’ve adopted the Bioshock rule of keeping the underwater setting as a consistent backdrop.

Soma also borrows the same kind of monsters from Amnesia and the same methods of dealing with them. As I mentioned before, Simon is defenseless against these strange creatures, so the practical solution is to hide from them and shimmy around when he gets the chance to. The creatures will make throaty, squelching noises and bellow high-pitched yelps to notify their presence. Simon’s visor also becomes erratic and hazy the closer he gets to the monsters, signifying that they are close by. The monsters are also attracted to light, so the flashlight should be strategically used along with when to bust a move. The obvious drawback to this is that the abandoned facilities of PATHOS-II are incredibly dark, so navigating through them while trying to avoid monsters is more aggravating than hair-raising. These claustrophobic corners also prevent the player from running away from these monsters as well, something at least feasible in Amnesia. While the monsters in Soma are legitimately scary with many tense moments revolving around them, I’m not sure they are necessary. The core horror of Soma is in its existential narrative, so it doesn’t need any of the leftover monsters from Amnesia for it to be an impressionable horror game. I guess the developers got scared and figured people would be put off by a horror game that doesn’t offer any tangible monsters, so they added them for safe measures. Soma also comes with a “safe mode” without any monsters which are intended as an easy mode. However, most people see it as the optimal way to experience the game without any distractions. I played the normal mode for an authentic experience, but I could see myself siding with this opinion.

I was gleefully surprised by what Soma had to offer. The premise of a game being a “walking simulator” was a strong detractor at first, and the first few hours of the game were fulfilling my already low expectations. As the game progressed and the story started to unfold, I became heavily invested in the world, characters, lore, and narrative of Soma. It’s a heavy game where subtle horror creeps into the player’s mind and makes them consider their surroundings like any effective piece of psychological horror should do. Unfortunately, this sense of subtlety is marred by the developers getting cold feet and trying to offer the same thrills as their hit previous title Amnesia. Soma proved that it didn’t need monsters to be effectively scary (although the sections with monsters did raise my blood pressure). The moments from this game that sticks in my mind aren’t hiding from walking scrotums with barnacles on them, but the state of human consciousness and how it makes me who I am, something that might keep me up at night. Maybe I’ll replay this game on “safe mode” to fully relish Soma without any unnecessary distractions one day, and I’ll fully appreciate the game in full.

I want to like this game. And in a way, I do. The story and themes presented in the game, the ability to make your own opinion on what's going on, I really liked. The writing is strong here. But the gameplay? So, so, so, so, so bland. Unlike Amnesia TDD, there's barely any elements of puzzle solving, just "Take thing here, put thing there", with only the occasional creative input. The enemy design is lazy, all the enemies are literally the exact same AI mapped to a different skeleton I'm 100% sure. There is no tension, despite my criticism of the Grunts from Amnesia, at least they built strong tension for the first part of the game. The enemies here are unbearably annoying.

Please, only buy this game if it's one sale. I luckily got it for $3 and managed to get some enjoyment out of it, but it is in no way worth $30 USD. You'll get more out of it by just watching a video explaining it.

I think this game has excellent presentation and atmosphere. By atmosphere, I mean barometric pressure. The ideas specifically the scientific and philosophical dilemmas it brings up are great on their own. I mean as thought experiments and hypotheticals I have heard a thousand times they're a little rote, but it was nice to see some of this visualized into a game so we can give the kids a little education with mountains of gore and cusswords. The problem I have with this is that when we get to each obviously staged one of these philosophical promptings the characters try way too hard to act out the emotional feelings I as the player should be having. The only problem is I'm not. Again, the presentation and atmosphere are great, the ideas it tries to bring forward are great. The problem is when they try to bring these two things together that is when I start to see the cracks in this game's false reality. I just don't really feel the moral weight that I should, when I hear that robot screaming because of the electrical shocks at the start of the game or when "the tapes puzzle" commences and the fact that the main character is always screaming and saying "this is wrong over and over" only highlights the disconnect for me. Maybe this game proves I'm actually psychotic because after a while I just intentionally tried to do what I assumed the game thought was evil just to hear the main character jibber like an idiot over it. The sophist in me wants to pretend that I was deebly goncerned about the ideas presented here, but as a video game enthusiast, I was more interested in seeing if my choices actually made a difference in the game and how far I could play the "wrong" choices out. I turned that shock machine on and walked the fuck away. Not because I enjoyed torturing that robot, but because I wanted to see if it made a damn bit of difference. Spoiler alert: The choices don't matter.

It doesn't matter that the choices don't matter. I'm a metaphysical nihilist so nothing matters. That aside though, I do find it sad, that my own inclination and I'm assuming that of most people who play games like this, is more about testing the limits of a games space rather than seeing them as a simulated world where we need to make real serious choices in them.
Richard Garriot always mentions when talking about the history of "Ultima" that he was saddened that people were more interested in min/maxing than they were the moral side of being a hero and adventuring which is why he tried and succeeded to a small extent in imbuing the Ultima games from four onward with more of an emphasis on moral questions and learning about virtues than what we typically see as RPG staples. We have seen some innovation in the way moral problems and ideas have been presented, but I don't think they have advanced a whole lot from Ultima 4 in terms of actually making you care about the moral choices yourself. Despite some creators and companies trying harder than others. Simply presenting them to us decontextualized seems like an especially bad way of doing this. The makers of Soma try really hard to contextualize these choices the problem is that I just don't give a shit and I still think of it as more of a game than a situation I'm in. You might say "WELL ITS A GAME DUMBASS" and I agree obviously, but games manage to convey a lot of other feelings and ideas perfectly well. I personally have felt a lot of emotions throughout various games and I mean ones the makers were intending me to have given the game's mechanics, stories... And "aesthetics." Movies and books convey moral conundrums fine, I mean most of these dilemmas are sub "Phil 101" fare and I would know because I only made it to Phil 98. So the high school textbook that I was reading in community college told me about trolley rides with me a fat guy on one rail and five manlets on the other. I'm sorry about calling them manlets. All men are kings but if all men are kings who runs the kingdom? I heard about brains in vats, how some AI enthusiasts believe sentience can come from any form as long as it works, and those damned experiments that we all hear about a hundred million fucking times about simulated prisons and fake shock punishments. I know how these have proven that we are all great and "it" can't happen here, folks. What I'm saying is, these ideas aren't that deep. When the electricity fires in my vat and I'm feeling especially creative I can imagine a game that manages to make me feel these moral dilemmas more seamlessly than this game tries to. I think it can be done. If someone just had the patience, virtue, and the courage to try.

Imagine somehow making a game where the moral facet of the game's reality was tied directly to its gameplay and not in a way that was simply dialogue or had nothing to do with direct kill mechanics. I... Don't have the brains to really imagine what this would be like, but I want other people to try and imagine it with me because I think video games need to make that effort.

One thing this game tries to do with its narrative that also doesn't work that well for me here is it tries to make the main character doubt his own sense of self. The biggest problem is that we as the player don't really have a strong sense of who this guy was before he woke up in an underwater facility in someone else's body. So a lot of him doubting himself doesn't really work that well, because there wasn't much to work off of in the first place. I actually think the bigger problem is that they tried to make a character feel like they weren't real when I think they should have aimed for a bigger goal. Try to make me doubt my own identity. You might think this is an impossible goal for a game to set but in ways, you fall and get immersed in their simulated worlds all the time. Any time you feel like you are going to die in a split second when your character is about to. They fooled you. Have you ever watched yourself or heard someone say they watched an entire shows run and then you or they feel an emptiness inside when it ends? That is because despite the show not being real the emotions you felt while watching it were and you lived a simulated life projecting onto this fictional reality to the point you started to feel almost parasocially involved in the lives of these fictional characters. You consciously know the shit you saw was fake and yet you lived it out in real-time emotionally. You played yourself.
But more than that you get fooled by simulations into doubting yourself easily in dreams every night. In some ways, dreams have it easier than fiction because they have the ultimate means to fool you direct access to the chemicals in your brain in which to fire images at you, but they also have a disadvantage in that they aren't consciously trying to form a narrative for you. So one minute you're realistically in a situation that feels more real than real in a dream and the next minute you're accompanied by a dog that died years ago and walking through a wall into a new place that has no relation to the previous room or where the dream's narrative was headed at all. Yet despite these immersion-breaking elements they can temporarily fool us and make us feel real emotions in simulated scenarios. So a game company that is consciously constructing a context on which to project emotions should actually have it easier in some ways to make us feel these things and to try to make us care about juicy moral choices.
I also think this is a more noteworthy goal to have, making people doubt themselves I mean. Imagine a game that gave you a truly out of body experience or was at least aiming for that level of immersion, even if it failed I would find it to be a more noteworthy failure than just trying to make a fictional character doubt their own existence and failing at that.
To show my generosity in that regard. In the first and probably the only time I will talk about Bethesda Fallout positively when it comes to intellectual ideas. I think they aimed for this in the Far Harbor DLC of getting the main character and by extension the player to doubt that they could prove they aren't a Synth themselves. I have some problems with the overall execution of this when it comes to its relation to the game's main narrative, but even Bethesdawww had the sacknuts to kind of rim on the edge of this idea. So I'm sure another developer with at least two brain cells instead of one should try this at some point.

I don't dislike this game. I actually think it's pretty good. Among walking simulators, it's the best I've ever played and it does a lot right. I just think that its central appeal is a little weak and it highlights a broader weakness games have in making us feel the moral weight of problems. I wanted to care, free-floating as I am a cellular configuration swimming through my reality limited by perception, rocking as this satellite orbits ever-larger celestial bodies in an even grander potential simulation while we ponder over digital hallucinations and how they don't make up for the missing excitement in my life, but I just couldn't.
*Heart starts to pound heavily as he thinks to himself. Do I really want to put up this negative snippet against a good game? Needlessly besmirching good developers that tried their best for no reason other than my own aggrandizement?* "Oh man this is wrong... This is so wrong. Fuck. I can't do this. Catherine! Cathy... Look. Just find me a way out of this room. Just don't make me post this!" *Sees a hypothetical philosophical zombie clone of me post this.* "GODDAMNIT CATH-" *Static*

Its a somewhat compromise between Dear Esther and Amnesia, and does that in a much better fashion than A machine for pigs.

I really like the art direction and sound, which contribute to creating a sense of isolation, loneliness and fear. Really cool atmosphere.

The puzzles are quite cool for the most part, and the enemy encounters are a bit weak but they are few and short.

You play this game for two things, the atmosphere and the story. The story in particular is excellent and left me thinking about it for days after finishing the game. I think its better to know the less about it the possible, but i loved the questions that the game asked. Its a game with a few flaws, most notably when it cames to the actual gameplay and the protagonist isnt the sharpest tool in the shed, but overal its a great game. Takes about 5 hours to beat.