There's a part pretty early on in this game that I think captures what makes it so great. You are told you have to use a chip from a robot in order to activate a lift you need to progress. You have two options as to where you can retrieve this chip: a small fully-automated robot that chirps and beeps and acts sort of like a pet, helping you with rusted doors as it follows you around after you save it. Or, a robot that has the consciousness of a person uploaded in it, mumbling to himself and delirious while he navigates the area and is completely unhelpful to you with what you need. You have to kill one of these things and use its chip. SOMA asks you which life you consider more valuable, regardless of if it's 'human' enough or not.

SOMA asks a lot of questions in this vein and I think out of the games I've played it's the most effective one.

I do have a complaint about the WAU sub-narrative though. A lot of the latter part of the game hinges on Simon seeing visions from the one crew member about going to the WAU and infecting it so it will die and stop doing whatever it's doing to everything around it. So you go, it eats your hand, and boom mission accomplished according to the WAU-ified hallucination (?) of Ross (name?) Simon is seeing. And then Ross dies and then that's the end of that plot? It goes completely unaddressed for the remainder of the narrative, and I was pretty disappointed by that. The story's emphasis definitely should have stayed on the ARK and its launching, but...huh? There was a lot of build-up for a whole lot of nothing.

The game feels pretty similar to Amnesia controls-wise, which is to say I was STRUGGLINGGGGGGG. The game's knobs and hinges were finicky with my mouse, indicators on key items could be hard to pick up on, etc. That said, the environments were really well-made. Especially the underwater section outside Tau. Also, I was playing on safe mode, so any frustration I might have had with the game was pretty much a non-issue since there wasn't any real threat posed by the monsters.

Simon is a very well-written character and incredibly realistic but I did sort of want to hit him over the head a few times. Which I think is good and justifiable for a character like him, and I wouldn't write him any other way, although the voice acting felt a little stiff for me at times and I think that maybe had something to do with my occasional disdain. Not that I dislike him, but oh my goddddddd dude.

I felt the ending after the credits showing the Simon and Catherine on the ARK sort of undermined the ending before the credits--I've typed out so many reasons to try and explain why I don't like it very much but I'm really struggling with articulating it in a way that feels authentic too. We play as one iteration of Simon through the whole game and then to be given another 'Simon' at the end just for the sake of a happy ending feels...? Inauthentic? But then again this sort of backs up SOMA's themes: is SOMA a tragedy? Or is it fine because a version of Simon who isn't us got on the ARK? Personally, I guess I just feel like the visual confirmation of that rather than keeping it in 'hope' limbo cheapens the effect.

Overall, I really liked the game, but I doubt I would want to play it on normal, and I really wish the WAU thing had been tied up more. Despite that, if you like philosophical science fiction (hell the game opens with a Philip K Dick quote!) this really is worth checking out and I really did thoroughly enjoy the narrative and the way it went about asking its particular questions.