Soma is a “survival horror” game by Frictional Games. The story is made of some interesting sci-fi stuff, reminiscent of the darker Philip K. Dick or Greg Egan stories: You play as Simon, an unremarkable man who is suffering from a fatal brain condition. In a last ditch effort to save himself, he agrees to undergo a ‘brain scan’ procedure. The scan goes through as normal, but upon waking up he finds himself in a weird H.R. Giger inspired version of Bio Shock, running away from scary monsters wrapped in Christmas lights. Woven into all this is a story about how the world wound up the way it did, and what happened afterwards.
The gameplay itself is intuitive. You navigate in the first person through a world which is densely populated with physics objects, and interact with them to solve puzzles. For anything that isn’t physics based, problems are resolved by tinkering with the hundreds of computer terminals scattered around the environment.
The graphics and audio are both excellent. The dark environments cover up a lot of the asset reuse, and some clever placement means that while you’re essentially wandering around the same few corridors most of the game, it never feels recycled or stale. The creepy ambient sounds are brilliant. Gurgling sploshes of water, loud metallic clanks in the distance, computer whirring lifelessly to themselves. It all comes together to create a genuinely unsettling world.
However, while Soma is very good, it isn’t perfect.
The story is interesting, but it has a lot of plot holes, and quite honestly the main character often (particularly during end game) comes across as too stupid for his own good. Little things don’t start adding up pretty early on, but by the time you get to the last stages of the game, it feels like the story is starting to disintegrate. Also, while there’s a lot to do, none of it has any real impact on the story or how it pans out. Interaction is good, but if knobs and dials aren’t attached to anything, the allure of fiddling with them is quickly diminished.
Likewise, the horror elements start off strong, but they quickly start to fall apart. Soma, like a lot of horror games, suffers from a fairly fundamental problem: While horror is a genre that relies a lot on the concept of the unexpected, games are a medium that only succeed by allowing the player to anticipate outcomes.
That is, horror depends on the audience not being able to catch up with what’s happening in front of them. That sense of not knowing is core to what makes scary things so scary. Games on the other hand, especially games that are difficult and allow you to die, rely on the exact opposite condition. They require that the player be able to analyse their action, learn from mistakes, and get better through repetition.
Repetition is not good for horror. A scary monster is scary so long as you don’t understand it. But when it kills you enough times that you start to understand its behaviour, it stops being scary and becomes just another obstacle to overmount. And depending on how difficult the monster is, scary can very quickly become a tedious obstacle. And nothing ruins the feeling of being scared faster than the feeling of being bored.
While playing Soma, a lot of the times I genuinely came close to feeling something like fear were almost always undermined by a much stronger driving force: the requirement to understand the enemy in front of me enough that I could circumvent it and get to the next set piece. Soma felt like a good game, but it also felt like half the time the medium chosen to tell the story was doing its best to fight against it.
The end result is that while Soma is amazing in so many ways, it also feels like there are lot of points where the implementation just doesn’t fit together as nicely as it could have. There were more than a few times I felt like long sequences could have been cut out entirely, and other times where the included backstory felt far too barren. Although I generally liked the protagonist, there were more than a few times I was bowled over by his inability to grasp what was going on around him. Although that kind of character might have worked fine enough in a movie or novel, in a game, where the lines between the character’s thoughts and the audience’s are far less defined, Simon’s whining did a lot to break the sense of immersion.
And on a related note, even though the game does a great job of building up a sense of interaction with the environment, it was kind of annoying that my only viable response to the monsters was to hide or run. I’m not saying that the game should have had weapons, or turned into a shooter, but it would have been nice if I could at least trap the monsters behind doors, or fool them into killing themselves or something. I get that the feeling of being chased is pivotal to the mood Soma is trying to make, but by about the halfway point it started to get a little old.
Despite these gripes, Soma is worth playing. It has its shortcomings, but when it’s good, it’s very good. Some of the sequences are just brilliant. For example, bringing the simulation of a dead man back to life over and over in different environments, trying different permutations to see which one will loosen him up enough to reveal a security password. You just won’t find a lot of this kind of stuff outside of a game like Soma.
If you have a weekend free, you should put this on your list of things to do.
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