After 14 hours, I finished the most recent game from Frictional Games. SOMA was released last year in September and was their highest selling game after Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I guess you could say that I'm a bit of a Frictional Games fanboy too as I have been excited about the two games they have released since I first played The Dark Descent, so you have been warned that for the most part, this is going to be a positive review.
I will start off on a bit of a frustrated note however. What issues I did have with the game, were not too often, although they were quite frustrating. In all, I believe the game crashed on me, at most, five times, which comes out to about once every three hours or so, which is kind of a lot, I will grant you that. It only became frustrating when the game would crash before I had reached an autosave checkpoint (like when I first started playing and the game crashed about 20 minutes in). Additionally, and probably because I was running the game off an external hard drive, every once in a while, maybe 15-20 minutes or so (more frequently at times that involved a lot of talking or transitions), the game would freeze for a couple of seconds. This stutter of sorts would also happen before talk-heavy scenes with the voice repeating the first word a number of times before it picked back up to where it was supposed to be. I never found that the game skipped dialogue in order to catch up with the events on screen though. Lastly, before starting the game, I went into the graphical settings and capped the game at 30 fps knowing that my computer would not be able to handle anything higher. Possibly as a result, my game frequently ran at 24 fps, although there were times when the game dropped down to 10 fps, and despite this drop, was still very playable and happened most frequently in the underwater stages, which only amplified the feeling of trying to move through water while completely submerged.
As for what I enjoyed/liked/loved about the game, I am going to be intentionally vague both with words and pictures.
Like their two previous games in the Amnesia series (The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs), SOMA is a first person exploration game focused on storytelling, with stealth elements where you have to escape a force that will kill you if you are found. This occurs more frequently than I recall in A Machine for Pigs, and is about on par with The Dark Descent, although I found the act of dying less annoying than I did with The Dark Descent. I did find myself though questioning why I was being attacked an killed by my pursuers here, but only in some instances whereas in other times in made sense story-wise. I did find the act of dying to be a little immersion breaking, which will make more sense when you play, but I found the "YOU DIED. Press any button to try again..." text to be very old school, which might be what Frictional Games was going for, but I cannot say for sure.
One thing that took a little bit to get used to, but definitely helped to get into the mind set of the character, was the frequent use of low light areas. Your character will come equipped with a flashlight, but anyone who has gone out in the forest at night with only a flashlight will tell you that the area illuminated by the flashlight is not very much compared to the everything else.
I never found this lack of sight to be an annoyance either. If you have seen The Blair Witch Project, the use of low light in large open space environments created a great conflicting sense of isolation and claustrophobia all while being out in the open. This aesthetic was carried through to the indoor environments as well, which only amplified the growing feeling of being alone.
Since I cannot show anything about the quality of the voice actors, I will say that the two primary voice actors, Nell Mooney and Jared Zeus did phenomenal work. My only critique, was that there was at least one of the male voice actors who sounded a lot like Jared Zeus' Simon Jarret, which made me wonder if it was in fact a different actor, or if I was somehow hearing Simon Jarret; this was over found audio recordings. But again, the voice acting was damn fine quality work from the two leads, especially in the last act.
Since we are talking about audio, Finnish composer Mikko Tarmia, who composed the music to The Dark Descent and the Penumbra series did a fantastic job with the score for SOMA. Similar to The Dark Descent, most of the music here worked as background and atmospheric, although the soundtrack seems to contain a lot more melody than I remember being in the game, but that could just be due to how it was played in-game. There were a couple of themes though, specifically "Catherine's Theme," "Going Down," and "ARK" that when played during their respective scenes forced me to clench my jaw and focus my tear ducts, willing them to not function.
Okay, now for some random bits that I quite liked. First, when you load up your game, the loading screen is used to give you a very brief description about what you were doing when you last saved, such as, "Simon is looking for a shuttle station to Lambda, where Catherine said she would wait for him." Nothing too obscure like "Simon is trying to escape" or too obvious "Simon is trying to locate a key card to open the door in the mess hall so he can acquire the note pad that contains the password to unlock the safety switch on the air lock leading to Lambda." I greatly appreciated this brief reminder, rather than jumping right back into the world after not having played for a day or two. Secondly, there was a fair amount of papers and pictures to pick up and look at, most of which did nothing. You might find a picture of a waterfall or a wooded area and since you can turn the picture around, you might think that there is some special bit of information scrawled on the back, but no, there was nothing. The same with notes, which usually provided background bits of information in order to make the world feel both lived in an real. You could probably have gone through the entire game without having looked at a single picture, scrap of paper or document, but that would leave the world feeling hollow.
Lastly, like The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs, you are given very little information about your situation or and what the world around you is, but it is not a rehash of either of the two games, which is probably why this was not Amnesia: SOMA. There is no amnesia affected character here (not really a spoiler), but knowing about the world and how the character relates within that world is similar. There was something that I came across pretty early one that I was unsure of what it was or what it did, and my curiosity got the better of me and a story point was spoiled for me when I went snooping online.
I really want to say more about SOMA, but I know that that would only spoil it for those out there who have yet to play this game. One final word of caution though: SOMA plays very closely to Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, both in gameplay and in story. You do not have any weapons. You can walk and sprint, crouch and jump. Sure you can pick up fire extinguisher and throw it at the thing pursuing you, but the game is designed for that to not have any effect. If you tried playing SOMA with speed running in mind, you are probably going to have a bad time as there are a number of sequences that "force" you to sit and listen to dialogue, one scene in particular that lasts upwards of five minutes. This is a game about exploring not only the environment, but the very idea behind identity. There are plenty of tense parts here too, and a number that had me saying "Oh, fuck! Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!" as I tried running away from something that I only glimpsed in a flash of electrical discharge in an otherwise darkened portion of a partially lit hallway. The game also led Conklederp and myself to a fair amount of philosophical discussion that, again, might lead to spoilers.
In the end, the 14 hours (probably less than that if you take the handful of crashes and reloads due to dying) I played SOMA was time well spent. I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good game with a great story that makes you ask yourself (and anyone else watching/paying attention) questions that do not include "Who the hell is shooting at me!?" or "Where is that last piece of the crystal so I can 100% this stage!?" SOMA is a great looking game (even on medium settings across the board), with a gripping story which does take some time to get used to, but that is what I love about the games from Frictional Games.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
P.S. I wanted to share a couple extra pictures I took which I could not work into the body of the article.
This was a keycard that had this amazing reflective back. I must have stood there rotating the card for at least a minute.
This cargo transport reminded me so much of the Silt Striders in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and I would not be surprised at all if their design was based off those creatures.
I will not say what this is, but I just liked the picture, so here you go.
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