SOMA is an ambitious work of science fiction which grapples with fundamental questions of consciousness, identity, and the relationship between the mind and the body. It feels weighty but never dry or ponderous thanks to an engaging and surprising story. But SOMA is also a work of survival horror, and in this regard slightly less successful. While the scares are unquestionably intense and terrifying – I’d expect nothing less from the developer behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent – the puzzle-solving and exploration elements are much less memorable and produce some unfortunate pacing problems.


Like the very best horror stories, SOMA maintains an unsettling level ambiguity which has you doubting everyone and everything around you. Why your character, Simon, wakes up aboard a dilapidated, abandoned research facility at the bottom of the ocean can be pieced together, but unreliable narrators are everywhere. It’s genuinely disconcerting, and few games play with ambiguity so well or confidently.


Simon’s awakening is prefaced by a famous quote from Philip K. ♥♥♥♥: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” It alludes to the particular type of uncertainty at play, as you soon meet a variety of malfunctioning robots who talk and behave just like people. You soon realise these robots don’t perceive themselves to be machines since they’re running digital and identical copy of a person’s mind. Immediately, this opens a rich vein of philosophical questions to be tackled. At first, Simon thinks these machines are being remote-controlled, functioning as avatars for people located elsewhere.
Quite brilliantly, these robots aren’t sleek, fleshy androids. Although slightly anthropomorphised – cameras are positioned where you’d expect eyes – they’re rusty, broken-down heaps of metal, spewing oil, yet this only intensifies the tragedy of the situation. They believe themselves to be human, and can’t understand why you can’t see them as such. It’s simultaneously intriguing and heartbreaking, and when you’re given the option to unplug these machines (people?), SOMA throws up some fascinating dilemmas which I’ve thought more and more about since finishing it. It also makes wonderfully smart use of video game conventions and devices, such as the use of perspective, to tell this story in a particularly effective way.


n terms of plot and ideas, SOMA is fascinating, but when it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay it has fewer original ideas. Ultimately it’s built upon the framework of a fairly standard ‘peak-em-up’, which involves cowering in corners or behind doors waiting for the big bad thing to lose interest and wander out of the room. The creatures – robots infected by a rogue, self-replicating AI – are intimidating and scary, but after a while they become frustrating since there’s no discernible way to avoid them, even when it seems you should logically be able to. For instance, one of the few mechanics at your disposal is the ability to pick up objects and throw them, but strangely this can’t be used to lure a creature away to investigate a noise. Most of my encounters resulted in me frantically running past creatures in the hope I’d survive an attack. Checkpoints are pretty frequent, making this a viable tactic. Also, if you have enough health, you’ll wake up in the exact spot where you were attacked and, therefore, slightly closer to your goal. A couple of frustrations aside, these sequences remain genuinely intense and effective, if somewhat cheap and inconsequential next to SOMA’s tackling in the rest of its story.

Exploration and puzzle-solving fill in the rest of SOMA’s gameplay. While some of its research stations are indistinguishable from other horror games – dimly-lit, streaked with blood – there’s a surprising amount of variety to be discovered. Certain areas are taken over by the evil force controlling the monsters, creating eerie and unnerving bio-mechanical spaces reminiscent of famed designer Giger – horrible, claustrophobic places where cables wrap around objects like sinew on bone. In fact, one of SOMA’s most consistently terrifying sequences takes place at the bottom of a deep oceanic trench and there’s not a twitchy monster in sight.
Puzzles are more infuriating, however, and add much less to the experience. There was one in particular which involved triggering switches and interacting with computers on the ocean floor to summon a vehicle, and I still have no idea how I did it; I walked around blindly for 30 or so minutes, and eventually it happened. There are a couple of decent ones, with the best being thematically linked to SOMA’s premise: it entails booting up a ‘person’s’ consciousness and manipulating their reality via an operating system, in order to extract valuable information. It’s one of the few times its gameplay feels like it rooted in the story which drives it forward.


Verdict
SOMA is a sustained exploration of an original and thought-provoking idea. The concept of artificial intelligence has been explored by lots of science fiction, so it isn’t unique in that regard, but it makes particularly intelligent use of video game conventions to present those familiar ideas in new and surprising ways. At 12 hours long, the story feels a little stretched, especially when so much of its gameplay feels less original than its ideas. That’s not to say it’s scares aren’t effective or intense but I found myself drawn to its quiet moments in which its philosophical yet unpretentious storytelling is allowed to breathe without interference from unintuitive puzzles and monsters that can’t be manipulated.

literally the best horror game ive ever played ggs 11/10