SOMA

This game is a masterpiece. The story is incredibly captivating, interesting, philosophically deep. The voice acting is superb, the main characters are great and the ending is just genius. I played ~13h. Cons: - Very little collectibles that are actually useful, so even though you can examine a lot of objects, the world feels rather static. If you played "Deliver Us The Moon", it's the same thing here. - When you are low on health, everything looks a bit defracted and I really didn't like this effect at all, but that might be a matter of taste. The pain points are practically neglectable Do yourself a favour and buy it.

Basically a walking simulator with physics-based object interaction just because it was included in Amnesia and Penumbra. There are less emphasis in physics-based puzzles unlike in predecasors which make the whole object interaction system quite pointless in this game. Otherwise it is impressive how the small game team like Frictional Games can make such a game with so much visual details. The gameplay experience is quite straightforward but not too linear fortunately. Because there is no journal or any mission log at all, it was not always clear what I was supposed to do. Of course it's good to figure out things by myself, but there was a few part I was hoping to have at least some hints to proceed. The game automatically chooses an appropriate item from your minimal inventory, so you don't have to figure out what item to use. On the other hand, the minimal inventory system eliminates frustrating pixel hunting since there are not much items to pick up. It would be a nightmare to looking for little items like tinderboxes and lantern oil and such from such dark and high-detailed game world. It's not clear how the stealth system works in this game, or how does the enemies spot the player. I got caught many times too easily because the enemies can detect my presence even behind the walls no matter how quiet I was. So I just ended up running past the enemies many times unless they were blocking my way in thight corridors. So I found the enemies more annoying than scary. Also the game seems to run quite slowly even with the minimal graphical settings. The game doesn't look so impressive graphically these days, but even still the game demands some PC performance. At lest it was not totally unplayable with my low-end system, and so I had an experience of an interesting scifi story.

I'll keep it short. This is my favorite story in any video game I have played. If you are willing to put in the time and effort to notice mechanics and story elements being presented to you, you will likely have a grand time.

SOMA is a game for the lightweight philosophers - of what life is all about and where we are or should/n't be going. Episodes ridden from identity crises to friendship, trust, dreams, utter devastation and most of all FEAR. Fear is what drives humanity forward or backward. Everyone is dealing with it fast paced or slowly or avoiding it altogether until it hits hard. Better to get used to this evil necessity very early on in life. There is this theme of no-way-back. One questions that will remain after you played is this: "Is my life worth enough to allow myself to be jerked around for better or worst?" because if you do, there's only utter misery at the end... remember that... "DON'T BE A JERK"

I found this game to be an enormous amount of fun!! I loved the ending so much, I found it very fitting and was a great story cap! The critters attacks reminded me of the Outlast games, which I loved.