A Few Thoughts on SOMA

It's October, so I decided to take this opportunity to catch up on a few scary games I've been planning to play. These articles won't be full blown reviews - more like rants, really.

First up is SOMA by Frictional Games, the creators of the famous Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Amnesia played a major role in bringing horror games back into the scene but its sequel, developed by The Chinese Room, disappointed a lot of fans. Now that Frictional itself has taken the reigns again, can they measure up to their prior achievement? 

I won't leave you in suspense - the answer's no.

I don't always agree with the general consensus, but in SOMA's case, I think the critics' and audience's overall impressions are pretty spot-on: The game has great writing and visuals and deals with some powerful uncomfortable themes, but it's bogged down by problems with its gameplay. 

I won't get too deep into spoiler territory, but as its marketing material shows, SOMA is set in a more futuristic time era. In your journey, you'll be met with robots and AIs, some of which believe they are human, and others were human once. As the border between an AI and a human being becomes more and more blurred, you're presented with the notion of copying someone's "brain" leading to two "instances" of a person. Is the copy a real person? Is it the same person? For the questions and uncomfortable scenarios it presents, SOMA is well worth checking out. It also has varied and beautiful setpieces, with a lot of time spent on the ocean floor to my surprise. In those regards, I'd say it's ahead of Amnesia.

But that's about the only thing it has over Amnesia.

Amnesia and SOMA both include large areas to explore with the threat of monsters, but the exploration in SOMA is endlessly more frustrating and less rewarding. It all starts with the mechanics. Amnesia and SOMA both have a 'sanity' mechanic, but only Amnesia has real 'health.' You could check out your menu at any time to observe both in Amnesia. Additionally, you had much more influence on your sanity in Amnesia as well. How? The answer is light. To contextualize, standing in the dark slowly drained your sanity and the game offered tools to combat this:
Tinderboxes and lamp oil. A tinderbox would allow you to ignite a light source like a candle permanently, but it was fixed in place. Lamp oil gave you a mobile light, but the oil would run out eventually. This added a dynamic where light would protect you from the dark, but it would also allow monsters to see you more easily.

Not only did the sanity mechanic allow for many interesting risk/reward considerations, it also made the exploration more rewarding. Exploring the sprawling, huge areas before making progress could improve your chances of survival by finding precious medicine, tinderboxes or lamp oil. To bring it back to SOMA, there's none of that. You have a flashlight which never runs out, and although you can suffer some kind of sanity damage, you can only repair it by single use interactable objects placed in significant areas. This also takes away the elegant logic of Daniel (from Amnesia) recovering his sanity because he solved a puzzle or made significant progress, though I can't get into exactly how SOMA justifies it without spoilers. But the point here is that there's only one reward for thorough exploration: more story. It's not an insignificant reward if you're hooked on the world of SOMA, but the lack of immediate connection with the gameplay made it less impactful than finding a few tinderboxes and a note detailing Daniel's backstory.

But having just story as a reward for exploration isn't necessarily a flaw, if only the exploration itself wasn't so frustrating. Where SOMA really falls flat on its face is the monsters. Though their designs are cool and they'll certainly give you a fright the first few times you see them, the means to avoid them will soon turn them into nuisances. The rules for the monsters are generally:

1. Don't look at them.
2. Don't make any noise around them.

That's really scary at first, but the monsters are mobile enough - some of them teleport - that you'll encounter them very often. The charm of hiding in a corner for a minute until a monster passes wears off really fast. SOMA doesn't offer dedicated hiding spots or doors that need to be broken down like Amnesia, and most monsters will catch you if they're after you, so it feels like there's little to no room for strategy beyond just quietly waiting. This turns a thorough search of a complex area from a tense rewarding experience into a frustrating waiting game. Additionally, when you're caught, the monster usually leaves you for dead, giving you a second chance to escape. You only die if you're caught twice in a short time or at certain story moments. This might remove even more of the tension for some players, though it was ironically probably implemented to prevent frustration.

That about sums it up, I think! Ignoring the frustrating monsters, the game has plenty of interesting puzzles and cool areas to explore. The game actually has a version that excludes the monsters, which you may want to try. That doesn't really solve the problem, though; with no looming threat at all, the tension is completely gone. SOMA does need monsters, it just needs better ones.

To summarize this incoherent rant, SOMA is a horror game with interesting themes, beautiful setpieces and interesting puzzles, but the experience is ruined in part by obnoxious monsters who will initially scare you but eventually do nothing but slow you down and block your progress. The monsters and exploration are a huge step down from its predecessor Amnesia: The Dark Descent, even if it is the latter's superior in terms of story and themes.