SOMA Review

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]OMA , Frictional Games’ newest release, is a stellar horror game; while it may not be as scary as the team’s previous games, it delivers an electrifying atmosphere coupled with a thoroughly intelligent and thought provoking story which will get your heart thumping and your mind racing.
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First for a bit of history. Frictional Games first made a name for themselves with their series of Penumbra survival horror games, in which you play as a physicist unravelling a dark mystery regarding your father in the desolate north of Greenland. Utilising a blend of puzzles, physics and mystery they exhibited a unique style of gameplay and tone which has become a hallmark of Frictional Games. Their next venture, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, was an internet sensation. With no memory of how you got there you descend into the bowels of a 19^th century Prussian castle to discover its vile secrets, all the while clinging desperately to your last vestiges of sanity as you flee helplessly from nameless terrors. The depraved story and unique mechanics resulted in a game which is undoubtedly one of the scariest video games ever made, and helped to launch the careers of many of Youtube’s big names  like PewDiePie and Markiplier.

Frictional’s newest offering, SOMA sticks with tradition in the sense that it too is a horror game, albeit with a heavy sci-fi influence. The year is 2015 and your name is Simon. In the wake of a terrible car crash which left your girlfriend dead and you with significant brain damage, you agree to take part in an experimental medical procedure with the hope of discovering a way to stop the bleeding in your brain. The procedure in question appears to involve creating a kind of digital clone of your brain, which allows for the simulation of a potentially limitless number of treatments to be tested to see what they do. As you’re hooked up to a brain scanner, you’re suddenly switched to research lab PATHOS-2 on the ocean floor. The lab is covered in foul artificial/organic growths (sort of like machine anemones), and you soon experience the first of many disturbing, terrifying encounters with the sentient machines which riddle PATHOS-2.

Let’s just nip this in the bud; if you were hoping SOMA would be as scary as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. The faithful sanity meter is non-existent, and the setting and tone of SOMA just don’t lend themselves to inducing paralysing fear as much as the labyrinthine corridors of an ancient haunted castle. Which is not to say that SOMA is in any way a failure, indeed it’s still scary enough to induce palpitations in the most hardy of gamers, but more importantly the main goal of SOMA doesn’t appear to be to scare you, but to make you think. The clever guys at Frictional Games know better than to beat a dead horse, and this combined with their obvious maturation as game developers over the years seems to have lead them to move away from their old style and focus more on story.

Let’s nip this in the bud; if you were hoping SOMA would be as scary as Amnesia, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.

As previously mentioned, SOMA has a strong science fiction influence in both story and aesthetics, in fact it’s possible to draw parallels between SOMA and a game like Bioshock; both are sci-fi horrors set on the bottom of the ocean, both have intense and immersive atmospheres and both have intelligent stories which raise issues such as free will, consciousness and morality. In true sci-fi fashion SOMA takes an initial question and runs with it, the question in this case being “What would happen if we could digitally clone consciousness?”. SOMA forces you to think about and deal with the ramifications of such a situation; what meaning do death and pain have when you can just reload a consciousness as though nothing ever happened?, is there any difference between sentience living in silicone and metal as opposed to bone and flesh?.

SOMA is unique in the sense that some of the biggest shocks come not from the creatures or the jump scares, but from the choices you make. In this way, throughout the game you are not only stalked by the chilling monsters that roam PATHOS-2, but are also haunted by the ghost in the machine.
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