This review contains spoilers
Spoilers only discussed at the bottom of the review.
SOMA may be the most intriguing jumble I have ever seen in gaming. Like the machines occupying its eerie world, it boasts some commendable features offset by a number of defects: there’re many fascinating themes, but they’re never delved deep into; there’s a finesse signifying a veteran company’s apt for game development, yet that skill has been focused on lame design schemes. It doesn’t quite reach frustrating levels, however I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t ultimately disappointed by the endeavor, especially when considered against its esteemed reputation in the indie community.
I’m going to start this review with a disclaimer by stating that I am not a fan of horror games that give you no method of fighting back against the antagonists before you. I refer to them derogatorily as “running simulators” because that is literally your only option- either scurry off or hide like a pansy until the enemy vanishes. I genuinely wonder where the love for these titles comes from as it is, 9 times out of 10, more annoying than invigorating. We’ve all played games with stealth or stealth-esque sections that required us to avoid an unstoppable threat- off the top of my head, popular releases like Mass Effect 2, Spider-Man, and Skyward Sword had them in doses, and the reason they worked was due to their sporadic nature: that is, the gameplay got spiced up, giving players a temporary new perspective.
When you have an entire game revolving around this schematic, however, it can’t help but render you helpless. Now you may be thinking “well Red, isn’t the point of the horror genre to do that?” to which I answer no. The best horror games make you feel powerless, not helpless, and there’s an important distinction: when you’re helpless, you can’t do anything; when you’re powerless, you can stave off the inevitable to a degree. Lovecraft was pretty famous for indulging in the latter- read most of his publications and you’ll see how, in spite of the inexorable calamity affronting them, there was an initiative undertaken by his characters to fight their fate. However, if you want good video game examples, Silent Hill and Alien: Isolation (as it pertains to the xenomorph) work wonders.
When you remove that illusion of defense from players, you remove a piece of their agency, and when you remove a piece of their agency…well, I can’t quite make a grand claim as this is clearly a popular genre. As much as I want to blame Outlast and PT for pioneering the running sim, it has its roots all the way back to Clock Tower in the 90s, and even Frictional Games (the developer/publisher of SOMA) has been reveling in these traits since their Penumbra series in the mid-2000s. It’s evidently borne fruit for the industry and will continue to do so.
What I’ll say instead is, for me, I don’t like being made pathetic for prolonged periods of time, due to the aforementioned reasons as well as the fact that it just gets repetitive. Having to constantly go into hiding every dang time someone pokes their head around a wall is an inherently limited loop, no matter the amount of spins you put on it. And that’s my disclaimer: I probably would’ve avoided SOMA altogether if I hadn’t heard great praise for its narrative, and so keep that bias in mind when reading this review.
Graphically, I guess I have another prejudice that clouds my judgment, and that’s the derelict space station debauchery of science fiction- it is so overdone. I know SOMA is set on Earth, but within the first hours you’ll realize it’s a futurescape of abandoned laboratories containing highly-advanced technology…aka, your standard derelict space station motif. That’s not to say it’s bad here- au contraire, Frictional Games has done a phenomenal job filling each of the hubs you’ll travel to with life: whether it's the crew quarters, laboratories, or medical offices, every space is the video game equivalent of a stamp book in terms of the sheer amount of detail squeezed together. Mathematical formulas on white boards, desk gadgets on tables, racks with knick-knacks, it honestly feels like the artisans sat down with the writers to determine what each scientist was like before they went about stacking all the enclaves. While I wouldn’t put it quite on the level of The Last of Us, it did its job as far as fleshing out this dystopia. But sadly, all this effort can’t distinguish SOMA from its arthouse kin: glowering red panels amidst darkened corridors, shattered glass on the floor, sparking machinery in the distance, and your atypical bloodstains and corpses- it’s been done to death, and there’s nothing unique here. I probably didn’t do myself any favors playing this game relatively soon after Observation, though even if I had, I doubt my opinion would have changed.
In addition, there were some minor hindrances I need to discuss. First is that I occasionally experienced a blurriness that I thought was a fault in my graphics rendering, but eventually realized was actually a poor attempt by the developers to depict haze, either by interior pollutant smog or exterior oceanic dust. It’s one of those instances where realism has no place in a video game, and I wish someone at Frictional had realized this as it got eye-straining whenever it popped up.
On the topic of oceanic dust are the undersea levels. Not only are they abysmal from a gameplay perspective (more on that below), but they’re so blatantly striving to channel an inferior BioShock, which is saying something considering you never even went into the water in that game.
Thirdly, with regards to the monsters, Frictional implemented this bizarre choice wherein you cannot look at most of them. Contrary to other players, I didn’t have any issue with their visage; while not particularly original, they served their purpose of being demented. However, it seems that someone in the dev team despised them as you are literally unable to view them without your screen cracking-up disproportionately. Though this is partly done to indicate your proximity to one (the closer you are the worse the tremors get), its alleviation upon gazing away indicates that that wasn’t the primary reason for its incorporation. In fact, researching Frictional’s past library indicates that they have implemented this schema into the lion’s share of their videography, and I do not understand why. By preventing players from ocularly-feasting on these behemoths, it’s completely insulting to the artists who spent so much time and energy coming-up with the designs.
And finally, there’s the fact that Frictional opted not to compose a character model for protagonist Simon Jarrett. Besides cutscenes, you’re playing as a first-person camera, which I thought was kind of lazy. It won’t hinder your gaming, though the lack of weight and form does make you feel like a slug every time you have to crawl around in vents.
But look, I’m being a negative nancy. This is a well-made game with phenomenal texturing, and for all my whining about visual cliches, the reality is this always has a chance of being someone’s first or second viewing of a post-Alien dystopia.
Sound is where SOMA excels as, going back to my introductory paragraph, it’s the one area where Frictional has truly honed their craft. I kid you not when I say that some of the scariest moments in the game didn’t come from skirting around monsters but from walking along the empty corridors of research stations. There’s something utterly unsettling about distant, echoey bumps that reverberate through a hollow dome, and SOMA is chockful of those. While jump scares are throw-in, the ability to create and maintain the anticipation of one is where real nightmare tension comes from, and SOMA manages to evoke that through its aurality. The creaking of a locker hinge, the jostling of items about your feet, the steam-release motion of a door…all were enough to put me on edge, even in areas I strongly suspected of being free of enemies. And when you are faced with creatures, well, let me say it is the apogean praise of a horror developer when you genuinely want to scream “sh*t” after knocking over an item during a sneak attempt.
The most impressive feat, however, is the sheer amount of foleying in the game. Every single grabbable object, let me repeat, every single grabbable object has its own collision noise conditional upon velocity and the surface its impacting, and it sounds exactly like you would expect its real-life counterpart to. Whether we’re talking about a heavy paperweight, metal chairs, stress balls, glassware, freakin books, all had fantastic SFX that altered depending on whether I threw them at a wall, dropped them from a height, or tossed them on a hard/soft surface.
The only downside I found in this category were Simon’s footsteps. Because you are playing as a camera, there aren’t actual feet to patter away at the ground, meaning you’re getting a program that’s just estimating how such appendages would land, and the results are middling- they don’t have any particular oomph to them and are inconsistently synchronized, and running lacks the frantic vigor it’s meant to carry during chase sequences.
Music is good, but perhaps a bit too distant. I can’t recall any tones off the top of my head minus the credits, but that I wasn’t distracted is a testament to its blending with the standard audio of the game.
Voice acting has its ups and downs, those downs unfortunately largely deriving from Simon. He’s played by a guy named Jared Zeus, who’s good at pulling off the “average joe”. The problem is, he’s ONLY good at pulling off the “average joe”. There are numerous points in the game where he’s required to express anger, bewilderment, or sadness and he just never came off as believable when expressing so. That being said, I do think external facets had a hand in the diminishing of his performance, for a couple of reasons: one, the script rarely treats Simon like a regular person, meaning he’s not given natural reactions to things that would cause your neighbor across the street to go “WTF”. And two, all my complaints about Zeus are upended by his acting in the very end, where he goes through the full spectrum of emotions to a perfect degree, indicating potentially sloppy ADR direction was the real culprit. Regardless of the reasons, though, you’ll have to deal with mediocrity for the majority of your playthrough.
Catherine, a programmer, is your deuteragonist played by Nell Mooney. She fairs a lot better than Zeus in terms of sounding well-rounded, though it’s hampered by her occasionally dipping into Sarah Silverman-level nasalness. Nonetheless, one thing I have to commend her and Zeus for are their chemistry: they play-off each other very well. When you connect to her at the various relays, you truly feel a sense of relief as you know you’re going to have a temporary respite from the dangers and have a chance to speak to her, which goes a long way towards making the journey enjoyable considering the faults in the impetus.
Well, what exactly is that journey? SOMA tells of Simon Jarrett, a dying man who, in an attempt to prolong his life, tries a treatment program involving an experimental brain scanner. After a quick laser capture, he finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of years later, society having gone to ruin and all of humanity gone. What has happened and why has Simon awakened? It’s up to you to figure that out.
Listen, there’s no way to practically criticize SOMA without delving into spoilers, so to sum things up, what I’ll say is the problem is two-fold: first, its thematic angles are scattered amidst a plethora of different takes without proper depth accompanying any, and two your quest ends up being divvied amongst a plethora of plotlines that don’t add-up in a meaningful way; it feels less like you’re on a single odyssey and more like you’re being thrown between different chapters of different books. There’s also the unlucky fact that everything SOMA wants to say has just been done better in other works, whether it’s the Philip K. Dick stories it takes influence from, episodes of Black Mirror, or other video games like The Talos Principle. I feel most of the praise for the game must come from people who haven’t experienced any of the above, as it’s quite rudimentary (and often self-sabotaging) when it wants to tackle something deep.
And that’s all I’ll say without spoilers. Those wanting a more fleshed out critique need only skip to the bottom of this page.
Gameplay-wise, there isn’t much to speak about. Many reviewers have called SOMA a walking sim, a label that I find poorly-applied because the game literally isn’t centered on, you know, walking. Yeah you do a lot of jogging and ambling, but those parts of monster ducking are reserved for the game’s “action beats”- instead, you get a lot of puzzle and exploration sections to satiate your time. Granted, both of these have flaws: the puzzles usually come down to just finding X and inserting it into Y, and exploration doesn’t yield anything except an overabundance of info dumps from recordings or corpses Simon can siphon pre-mortem memories from. But what I’m trying to say is there was an attempt here at building a horror game that wasn’t just about avoiding the Boogeyman, and Frictional deserves to be commended for attempting to start a trend that never caught on.
I know I complained earlier about the absence of combat, however, to SOMA’s credit, you are up against superhuman monstrosities, so it nominally makes sense that Simon is unable to do squat against them. It doesn’t turn things any funner, especially when you get a hang of the game’s layout, but, at least it’s fine from a lore perspective. You’re also often granted two shots at an area as being detected results in you simply getting knocked out (albeit waking up much slower) rather than an insta-death (though the save system is very forgivable, and those wanting to avoid dying can play the game on safe mode [which was apparently inspired by the humorously titled “wussmod”]). Despite what fans claim, there isn’t much diversity to the monsters as you end up using the same tactic of crouching and peering. I do wish there had been some kind of crafting system, like what was in Alien: Isolation, as there were many sections where I could not find a tossable object to redirect an enemy elsewhere for the life of me, and was forced to stick to the shadows.
Lastly, to address my prior lamentation of the water levels, what it comes down to is the areas are often too big with little to do in-between. If anyone were to just look at those parts in a microcosm, I wouldn’t blame them for branding SOMA a walking sim because that is what you are doing in them. The transition between going from an aquatic area to a dryspace also involves you having to wait for a depressurization chamber to successfully fill or empty, and while it’s not prolonged, it’s still a bit tiresome to endure each time.
Overall, I don’t know if I can recommend SOMA. It does succeed in being frightening, however those scares come from a system I find inherently inferior. It’s technically and artistically superb, but has directed those facets towards outdated schemas without meaningful content. Look up some video footage and decide for yourself is all I can say.
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SOMA wants to do an introspective look at consciousness and the impact it has on one’s humanity. The problem is, it doesn’t pose this as a question for long as the developers flat-out provide their take while simultaneously acting like it’s up-for-debate. It’s as though they wanted players to ponder about a deep topic but were afraid said gamers would come to a different conclusion than what they had in mind.
Frictional is dead-set on treating consciousness as the core aspect of humanity. Simon awakens inside a robotic suit, yet still thinks, speaks, and acts the exact same as he did when he was of corporeal meat and bones. There is literally no difference from a personhood perspective, yet you get a number of conversations between him and Catherine about whether or not he’s still human that come-off as tacked-on: it’s the equivalent of a chef baking an edible out of dough, calling it bread, having someone eat and claim it tastes like bread, only for the chef to then debate another cook about if it’s actually bread. It’s like, you literally spent the last X minutes blatantly establishing it to be a loaf, only to now renege on the prospect?
Perhaps realizing this, the writers haphazardly switch-up the thematic scope of these discussions every time they occur, and each variant is mixed as far as their overall quality is concerned. The ones about whether an individual’s place in a community dictate their personage, for example, stumble, whereas the ones focused on the concept of a replicant being a distinct sentient entity are better. But even with the superior entries, I ultimately wasn’t left hanging the way I was with the discourses in The Talos Principle. They’re too sparse and, as I said, undercut whenever the game decides to physically depict them (i.e., put forward Frictional’s definitive viewpoint). For example, Simon chastises Catherine for constantly booting-up the scan of a remnant scientist, likening it to resuscitating and killing someone like a god. However, the way the game depicts it, it’s no more heart-wrenching than booting-up a Sims profile -- if it were truly meant to be comparable to technological necromancy, then the demeanor or reactions of the subject should’ve been altered, not played on the exact same loop so as to remove any sense of awareness on his part.
Those hoping the audio logs to be a saving grace would be mistaken as, unlike the door-to-door chats in Observer, they don’t deal with philosophy, instead being entirely preoccupied with divulging the backstory of your surroundings. While the radio drama acting is actually quite good, there are too many of these diaries, and a good portion are fundamentally either not that interesting or drag on a bit.
There’s also the fact that, no matter how much the writers want to parley a human consciousness in a robot being indifferent from a regular machine, they’re just not able to do so without anthropomorphizing those drones to such a degree that they’re human in everything but name. Hearing a “bot’ scream out in pain or beg you not to end its life, while saddening, isn’t in the realm of machine ethics because pure mechanized somas just aren’t capable of eliciting sympathy. I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to craft an anguishing experience from deliberately hurting/destroying an inanimate being- the closest SOMA comes to depicting this is a part where you have to destroy a harmless floating rig, though even then he’s still programmed with enough of a biological consciousness to produce frantic cries.
You may be thinking, well Red, wasn’t the actual point of the game to show that the human mind is beyond the parameters of the flesh, to which I say yes, which just goes back to my earlier remark about there being no stimulating discourse to any of the concepts. It’s all laid out before you plainly without room for deviation.
The ending is the culmination of this problem. Time and time again, we’re shown that doing a brain scan creates a sapient duplicate: the original and the inhabitant of a new body. It’s a bit contrived, rips off The Prestige, and is never explored to its full potential (i.e., having Simon converse with one of his “clones”), but even if I put all that aside, SOMA’s writers trying to act like the grand revelation of Simon not realizing one of him would not end up on the ARK is just silly. You’re literally the product of this tentative procedure, have witnessed it occur beforehand, but are still bewildered that one of you would stay back? The writers must’ve been aware of this as they have Catherine literally chastise him for being ignorant of something he should’ve known. Oh,and on the topic of Catherine, the developers decide to throw in some Twilight Zone-level torture porn by having her conveniently fry herself, leaving Simon forever alone as the last man on Earth.
And yet, for all my complaining, I can’t deny that it affected me. In my review of Observation (https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/518868/), I noted how sci-fi writers tend to get strung up on constructing an epic climax to the detriment of any logic. While its reputation would suggest something majestic, the reality is SOMA’s writers opted to be small-scale, and the results speak for themselves. Though not related to any of the overarching cogitations, the idea of Simon being permanently isolated after all he’s been through is thoroughly depressing, and showcases just how much of a mark simple prose can make.
But if the big philosophical quandaries falter, does the physical adventure leading up to this climax warrant accolades? It doesn’t, and it’s because of what I stated beforehand about there being no incitement to the start, or any connection between the major threads of the story.
With the first, Simon’s whole reason for going after the ARK literally comes down to him wanting to engage because there’s nothing better to do. I mean, he’s technically not wrong, but considering SOMA’s writers gave him NO REACTION to, you know, humanity’s extinction, it makes this feel even more arbitrary and stupid a motivation than it normally would be. That Catherine has to be prodded to come along (and later, irrelevantly, switches sides at the click of a button) doesn’t give the form any credence.
With the second, you’ll find that a number of the story developments are unrelated to each other. Simon’s awakening is irrelevant to the falling apart of the research stations, the ARK independent of the main antagonist (an AI called the WAU), and the individual tales of the deceased specialists detached from the robots with human cognizance. In the third act, you also encounter this German humanoid chimera who has apparently been trying to orchestrate Simon’s arrival at the last facility, but he’s essentially just thrown-in out of the blue, and it’s never explained how he was able to hack into Simon’s interface or resist the WAU’s corrupting jelly (side note - wasn’t a big fan of the structure gel as its fantasy-esque properties of reviving the dead felt at odds with the techno atmosphere [unless the writers were attempting to make a comparison of a zombie being indistinguishable from a robot, which would, again, be massively underdeveloped]).
Both of these are a long way of saying that I rarely ever felt driven to the singular goal as a result of distractions and diversions along the path. There are games that take a multilinear approach to storytelling, and SOMA may very well have been one of those efforts given that the developers evidently want you to learn and process their multitudinous stabs at the human condition. Unfortunately, considering they failed at fleshing out those abstract concepts, the result is an undermining of the main expedition (not to mention Simon has no character arc due to his idiocy).
It’s funny because I actually feel Frictional missed a potential goldmine in the AGI anima debate: prior to her cybernetic unveiling, Catherine serves as a type of Turing Test: if they had toned down her emotional output and kept her hidden longer, we could’ve had something thought-provoking here.
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SOMA may be the most intriguing jumble I have ever seen in gaming. Like the machines occupying its eerie world, it boasts some commendable features offset by a number of defects: there’re many fascinating themes, but they’re never delved deep into; there’s a finesse signifying a veteran company’s apt for game development, yet that skill has been focused on lame design schemes. It doesn’t quite reach frustrating levels, however I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t ultimately disappointed by the endeavor, especially when considered against its esteemed reputation in the indie community.
I’m going to start this review with a disclaimer by stating that I am not a fan of horror games that give you no method of fighting back against the antagonists before you. I refer to them derogatorily as “running simulators” because that is literally your only option- either scurry off or hide like a pansy until the enemy vanishes. I genuinely wonder where the love for these titles comes from as it is, 9 times out of 10, more annoying than invigorating. We’ve all played games with stealth or stealth-esque sections that required us to avoid an unstoppable threat- off the top of my head, popular releases like Mass Effect 2, Spider-Man, and Skyward Sword had them in doses, and the reason they worked was due to their sporadic nature: that is, the gameplay got spiced up, giving players a temporary new perspective.
When you have an entire game revolving around this schematic, however, it can’t help but render you helpless. Now you may be thinking “well Red, isn’t the point of the horror genre to do that?” to which I answer no. The best horror games make you feel powerless, not helpless, and there’s an important distinction: when you’re helpless, you can’t do anything; when you’re powerless, you can stave off the inevitable to a degree. Lovecraft was pretty famous for indulging in the latter- read most of his publications and you’ll see how, in spite of the inexorable calamity affronting them, there was an initiative undertaken by his characters to fight their fate. However, if you want good video game examples, Silent Hill and Alien: Isolation (as it pertains to the xenomorph) work wonders.
When you remove that illusion of defense from players, you remove a piece of their agency, and when you remove a piece of their agency…well, I can’t quite make a grand claim as this is clearly a popular genre. As much as I want to blame Outlast and PT for pioneering the running sim, it has its roots all the way back to Clock Tower in the 90s, and even Frictional Games (the developer/publisher of SOMA) has been reveling in these traits since their Penumbra series in the mid-2000s. It’s evidently borne fruit for the industry and will continue to do so.
What I’ll say instead is, for me, I don’t like being made pathetic for prolonged periods of time, due to the aforementioned reasons as well as the fact that it just gets repetitive. Having to constantly go into hiding every dang time someone pokes their head around a wall is an inherently limited loop, no matter the amount of spins you put on it. And that’s my disclaimer: I probably would’ve avoided SOMA altogether if I hadn’t heard great praise for its narrative, and so keep that bias in mind when reading this review.
Graphically, I guess I have another prejudice that clouds my judgment, and that’s the derelict space station debauchery of science fiction- it is so overdone. I know SOMA is set on Earth, but within the first hours you’ll realize it’s a futurescape of abandoned laboratories containing highly-advanced technology…aka, your standard derelict space station motif. That’s not to say it’s bad here- au contraire, Frictional Games has done a phenomenal job filling each of the hubs you’ll travel to with life: whether it's the crew quarters, laboratories, or medical offices, every space is the video game equivalent of a stamp book in terms of the sheer amount of detail squeezed together. Mathematical formulas on white boards, desk gadgets on tables, racks with knick-knacks, it honestly feels like the artisans sat down with the writers to determine what each scientist was like before they went about stacking all the enclaves. While I wouldn’t put it quite on the level of The Last of Us, it did its job as far as fleshing out this dystopia. But sadly, all this effort can’t distinguish SOMA from its arthouse kin: glowering red panels amidst darkened corridors, shattered glass on the floor, sparking machinery in the distance, and your atypical bloodstains and corpses- it’s been done to death, and there’s nothing unique here. I probably didn’t do myself any favors playing this game relatively soon after Observation, though even if I had, I doubt my opinion would have changed.
In addition, there were some minor hindrances I need to discuss. First is that I occasionally experienced a blurriness that I thought was a fault in my graphics rendering, but eventually realized was actually a poor attempt by the developers to depict haze, either by interior pollutant smog or exterior oceanic dust. It’s one of those instances where realism has no place in a video game, and I wish someone at Frictional had realized this as it got eye-straining whenever it popped up.
On the topic of oceanic dust are the undersea levels. Not only are they abysmal from a gameplay perspective (more on that below), but they’re so blatantly striving to channel an inferior BioShock, which is saying something considering you never even went into the water in that game.
Thirdly, with regards to the monsters, Frictional implemented this bizarre choice wherein you cannot look at most of them. Contrary to other players, I didn’t have any issue with their visage; while not particularly original, they served their purpose of being demented. However, it seems that someone in the dev team despised them as you are literally unable to view them without your screen cracking-up disproportionately. Though this is partly done to indicate your proximity to one (the closer you are the worse the tremors get), its alleviation upon gazing away indicates that that wasn’t the primary reason for its incorporation. In fact, researching Frictional’s past library indicates that they have implemented this schema into the lion’s share of their videography, and I do not understand why. By preventing players from ocularly-feasting on these behemoths, it’s completely insulting to the artists who spent so much time and energy coming-up with the designs.
And finally, there’s the fact that Frictional opted not to compose a character model for protagonist Simon Jarrett. Besides cutscenes, you’re playing as a first-person camera, which I thought was kind of lazy. It won’t hinder your gaming, though the lack of weight and form does make you feel like a slug every time you have to crawl around in vents.
But look, I’m being a negative nancy. This is a well-made game with phenomenal texturing, and for all my whining about visual cliches, the reality is this always has a chance of being someone’s first or second viewing of a post-Alien dystopia.
Sound is where SOMA excels as, going back to my introductory paragraph, it’s the one area where Frictional has truly honed their craft. I kid you not when I say that some of the scariest moments in the game didn’t come from skirting around monsters but from walking along the empty corridors of research stations. There’s something utterly unsettling about distant, echoey bumps that reverberate through a hollow dome, and SOMA is chockful of those. While jump scares are throw-in, the ability to create and maintain the anticipation of one is where real nightmare tension comes from, and SOMA manages to evoke that through its aurality. The creaking of a locker hinge, the jostling of items about your feet, the steam-release motion of a door…all were enough to put me on edge, even in areas I strongly suspected of being free of enemies. And when you are faced with creatures, well, let me say it is the apogean praise of a horror developer when you genuinely want to scream “sh*t” after knocking over an item during a sneak attempt.
The most impressive feat, however, is the sheer amount of foleying in the game. Every single grabbable object, let me repeat, every single grabbable object has its own collision noise conditional upon velocity and the surface its impacting, and it sounds exactly like you would expect its real-life counterpart to. Whether we’re talking about a heavy paperweight, metal chairs, stress balls, glassware, freakin books, all had fantastic SFX that altered depending on whether I threw them at a wall, dropped them from a height, or tossed them on a hard/soft surface.
The only downside I found in this category were Simon’s footsteps. Because you are playing as a camera, there aren’t actual feet to patter away at the ground, meaning you’re getting a program that’s just estimating how such appendages would land, and the results are middling- they don’t have any particular oomph to them and are inconsistently synchronized, and running lacks the frantic vigor it’s meant to carry during chase sequences.
Music is good, but perhaps a bit too distant. I can’t recall any tones off the top of my head minus the credits, but that I wasn’t distracted is a testament to its blending with the standard audio of the game.
Voice acting has its ups and downs, those downs unfortunately largely deriving from Simon. He’s played by a guy named Jared Zeus, who’s good at pulling off the “average joe”. The problem is, he’s ONLY good at pulling off the “average joe”. There are numerous points in the game where he’s required to express anger, bewilderment, or sadness and he just never came off as believable when expressing so. That being said, I do think external facets had a hand in the diminishing of his performance, for a couple of reasons: one, the script rarely treats Simon like a regular person, meaning he’s not given natural reactions to things that would cause your neighbor across the street to go “WTF”. And two, all my complaints about Zeus are upended by his acting in the very end, where he goes through the full spectrum of emotions to a perfect degree, indicating potentially sloppy ADR direction was the real culprit. Regardless of the reasons, though, you’ll have to deal with mediocrity for the majority of your playthrough.
Catherine, a programmer, is your deuteragonist played by Nell Mooney. She fairs a lot better than Zeus in terms of sounding well-rounded, though it’s hampered by her occasionally dipping into Sarah Silverman-level nasalness. Nonetheless, one thing I have to commend her and Zeus for are their chemistry: they play-off each other very well. When you connect to her at the various relays, you truly feel a sense of relief as you know you’re going to have a temporary respite from the dangers and have a chance to speak to her, which goes a long way towards making the journey enjoyable considering the faults in the impetus.
Well, what exactly is that journey? SOMA tells of Simon Jarrett, a dying man who, in an attempt to prolong his life, tries a treatment program involving an experimental brain scanner. After a quick laser capture, he finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of years later, society having gone to ruin and all of humanity gone. What has happened and why has Simon awakened? It’s up to you to figure that out.
Listen, there’s no way to practically criticize SOMA without delving into spoilers, so to sum things up, what I’ll say is the problem is two-fold: first, its thematic angles are scattered amidst a plethora of different takes without proper depth accompanying any, and two your quest ends up being divvied amongst a plethora of plotlines that don’t add-up in a meaningful way; it feels less like you’re on a single odyssey and more like you’re being thrown between different chapters of different books. There’s also the unlucky fact that everything SOMA wants to say has just been done better in other works, whether it’s the Philip K. Dick stories it takes influence from, episodes of Black Mirror, or other video games like The Talos Principle. I feel most of the praise for the game must come from people who haven’t experienced any of the above, as it’s quite rudimentary (and often self-sabotaging) when it wants to tackle something deep.
And that’s all I’ll say without spoilers. Those wanting a more fleshed out critique need only skip to the bottom of this page.
Gameplay-wise, there isn’t much to speak about. Many reviewers have called SOMA a walking sim, a label that I find poorly-applied because the game literally isn’t centered on, you know, walking. Yeah you do a lot of jogging and ambling, but those parts of monster ducking are reserved for the game’s “action beats”- instead, you get a lot of puzzle and exploration sections to satiate your time. Granted, both of these have flaws: the puzzles usually come down to just finding X and inserting it into Y, and exploration doesn’t yield anything except an overabundance of info dumps from recordings or corpses Simon can siphon pre-mortem memories from. But what I’m trying to say is there was an attempt here at building a horror game that wasn’t just about avoiding the Boogeyman, and Frictional deserves to be commended for attempting to start a trend that never caught on.
I know I complained earlier about the absence of combat, however, to SOMA’s credit, you are up against superhuman monstrosities, so it nominally makes sense that Simon is unable to do squat against them. It doesn’t turn things any funner, especially when you get a hang of the game’s layout, but, at least it’s fine from a lore perspective. You’re also often granted two shots at an area as being detected results in you simply getting knocked out (albeit waking up much slower) rather than an insta-death (though the save system is very forgivable, and those wanting to avoid dying can play the game on safe mode [which was apparently inspired by the humorously titled “wussmod”]). Despite what fans claim, there isn’t much diversity to the monsters as you end up using the same tactic of crouching and peering. I do wish there had been some kind of crafting system, like what was in Alien: Isolation, as there were many sections where I could not find a tossable object to redirect an enemy elsewhere for the life of me, and was forced to stick to the shadows.
Lastly, to address my prior lamentation of the water levels, what it comes down to is the areas are often too big with little to do in-between. If anyone were to just look at those parts in a microcosm, I wouldn’t blame them for branding SOMA a walking sim because that is what you are doing in them. The transition between going from an aquatic area to a dryspace also involves you having to wait for a depressurization chamber to successfully fill or empty, and while it’s not prolonged, it’s still a bit tiresome to endure each time.
Overall, I don’t know if I can recommend SOMA. It does succeed in being frightening, however those scares come from a system I find inherently inferior. It’s technically and artistically superb, but has directed those facets towards outdated schemas without meaningful content. Look up some video footage and decide for yourself is all I can say.
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SOMA wants to do an introspective look at consciousness and the impact it has on one’s humanity. The problem is, it doesn’t pose this as a question for long as the developers flat-out provide their take while simultaneously acting like it’s up-for-debate. It’s as though they wanted players to ponder about a deep topic but were afraid said gamers would come to a different conclusion than what they had in mind.
Frictional is dead-set on treating consciousness as the core aspect of humanity. Simon awakens inside a robotic suit, yet still thinks, speaks, and acts the exact same as he did when he was of corporeal meat and bones. There is literally no difference from a personhood perspective, yet you get a number of conversations between him and Catherine about whether or not he’s still human that come-off as tacked-on: it’s the equivalent of a chef baking an edible out of dough, calling it bread, having someone eat and claim it tastes like bread, only for the chef to then debate another cook about if it’s actually bread. It’s like, you literally spent the last X minutes blatantly establishing it to be a loaf, only to now renege on the prospect?
Perhaps realizing this, the writers haphazardly switch-up the thematic scope of these discussions every time they occur, and each variant is mixed as far as their overall quality is concerned. The ones about whether an individual’s place in a community dictate their personage, for example, stumble, whereas the ones focused on the concept of a replicant being a distinct sentient entity are better. But even with the superior entries, I ultimately wasn’t left hanging the way I was with the discourses in The Talos Principle. They’re too sparse and, as I said, undercut whenever the game decides to physically depict them (i.e., put forward Frictional’s definitive viewpoint). For example, Simon chastises Catherine for constantly booting-up the scan of a remnant scientist, likening it to resuscitating and killing someone like a god. However, the way the game depicts it, it’s no more heart-wrenching than booting-up a Sims profile -- if it were truly meant to be comparable to technological necromancy, then the demeanor or reactions of the subject should’ve been altered, not played on the exact same loop so as to remove any sense of awareness on his part.
Those hoping the audio logs to be a saving grace would be mistaken as, unlike the door-to-door chats in Observer, they don’t deal with philosophy, instead being entirely preoccupied with divulging the backstory of your surroundings. While the radio drama acting is actually quite good, there are too many of these diaries, and a good portion are fundamentally either not that interesting or drag on a bit.
There’s also the fact that, no matter how much the writers want to parley a human consciousness in a robot being indifferent from a regular machine, they’re just not able to do so without anthropomorphizing those drones to such a degree that they’re human in everything but name. Hearing a “bot’ scream out in pain or beg you not to end its life, while saddening, isn’t in the realm of machine ethics because pure mechanized somas just aren’t capable of eliciting sympathy. I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to craft an anguishing experience from deliberately hurting/destroying an inanimate being- the closest SOMA comes to depicting this is a part where you have to destroy a harmless floating rig, though even then he’s still programmed with enough of a biological consciousness to produce frantic cries.
You may be thinking, well Red, wasn’t the actual point of the game to show that the human mind is beyond the parameters of the flesh, to which I say yes, which just goes back to my earlier remark about there being no stimulating discourse to any of the concepts. It’s all laid out before you plainly without room for deviation.
The ending is the culmination of this problem. Time and time again, we’re shown that doing a brain scan creates a sapient duplicate: the original and the inhabitant of a new body. It’s a bit contrived, rips off The Prestige, and is never explored to its full potential (i.e., having Simon converse with one of his “clones”), but even if I put all that aside, SOMA’s writers trying to act like the grand revelation of Simon not realizing one of him would not end up on the ARK is just silly. You’re literally the product of this tentative procedure, have witnessed it occur beforehand, but are still bewildered that one of you would stay back? The writers must’ve been aware of this as they have Catherine literally chastise him for being ignorant of something he should’ve known. Oh,and on the topic of Catherine, the developers decide to throw in some Twilight Zone-level torture porn by having her conveniently fry herself, leaving Simon forever alone as the last man on Earth.
And yet, for all my complaining, I can’t deny that it affected me. In my review of Observation (https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/518868/), I noted how sci-fi writers tend to get strung up on constructing an epic climax to the detriment of any logic. While its reputation would suggest something majestic, the reality is SOMA’s writers opted to be small-scale, and the results speak for themselves. Though not related to any of the overarching cogitations, the idea of Simon being permanently isolated after all he’s been through is thoroughly depressing, and showcases just how much of a mark simple prose can make.
But if the big philosophical quandaries falter, does the physical adventure leading up to this climax warrant accolades? It doesn’t, and it’s because of what I stated beforehand about there being no incitement to the start, or any connection between the major threads of the story.
With the first, Simon’s whole reason for going after the ARK literally comes down to him wanting to engage because there’s nothing better to do. I mean, he’s technically not wrong, but considering SOMA’s writers gave him NO REACTION to, you know, humanity’s extinction, it makes this feel even more arbitrary and stupid a motivation than it normally would be. That Catherine has to be prodded to come along (and later, irrelevantly, switches sides at the click of a button) doesn’t give the form any credence.
With the second, you’ll find that a number of the story developments are unrelated to each other. Simon’s awakening is irrelevant to the falling apart of the research stations, the ARK independent of the main antagonist (an AI called the WAU), and the individual tales of the deceased specialists detached from the robots with human cognizance. In the third act, you also encounter this German humanoid chimera who has apparently been trying to orchestrate Simon’s arrival at the last facility, but he’s essentially just thrown-in out of the blue, and it’s never explained how he was able to hack into Simon’s interface or resist the WAU’s corrupting jelly (side note - wasn’t a big fan of the structure gel as its fantasy-esque properties of reviving the dead felt at odds with the techno atmosphere [unless the writers were attempting to make a comparison of a zombie being indistinguishable from a robot, which would, again, be massively underdeveloped]).
Both of these are a long way of saying that I rarely ever felt driven to the singular goal as a result of distractions and diversions along the path. There are games that take a multilinear approach to storytelling, and SOMA may very well have been one of those efforts given that the developers evidently want you to learn and process their multitudinous stabs at the human condition. Unfortunately, considering they failed at fleshing out those abstract concepts, the result is an undermining of the main expedition (not to mention Simon has no character arc due to his idiocy).
It’s funny because I actually feel Frictional missed a potential goldmine in the AGI anima debate: prior to her cybernetic unveiling, Catherine serves as a type of Turing Test: if they had toned down her emotional output and kept her hidden longer, we could’ve had something thought-provoking here.
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