SOMA

Ok I know it's unfair to compare this game to BioShock. They're different kinds of games that are doing very different kinds of things that happen to share an underwater setting. However, I don't think it's as strange to compare them as you might think. Besides the obvious aesthetic similarities, both games are 1st person with heavy horror elements about a wrecked underwater structure with all sorts of mad science going on. And although I won't get into spoiler territory, there are actually some similarities between the themese presented in both games stories. Here's the thing though, if I was going to compare these two games, BioShock delivers on pretty much all of it better than SOMA. Better aesthetics, better horror, better storytelling. This is a horror game from the makers of the Amnesia series, and I've never played the Amnesia games, but from what I've seen online, I feel like this game doesn't really deliver as well on the horror elements you might be expecting. I never really felt like the monsters that chase you were that scary, either in appearance or in what they could do. For the most part they're just an annoying hindrance rather than a terrifying foe, as the majority of the gameplay revolves around stumbling around the various areas trying to figure out what button to press or where to go to progress the story, with the monsters and having to stealth past them just being an obstacle to that. Storytelling wise I think the game is playing with some cool ideas, but they're executed poorly. (This is the intro to the game so I don't feel like it's a spoiler) you're given a medical brain scan and then wake up on a sunken underwater lab, so I felt pretty confident about how the story was going to go after that. Overall, if you're a fan of the genre you might enjoy it, but honestly I feel like I could've done with a miss on this one.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I'd say it's a bad game, but it would have to be a game for that label. Despite the fact that they made the penumbra and amnesia series, they apparently forgot how to make a game for this entry. Playing this is why I never, and at this point probably will never, touched rebirth. This should have been a short story or at most a 1 hour free interactive story, not a "video game" longer than a lot of actual games released. It's functionally a walking sim with every step taken to annoy you, hurt your eyes, and pad out the run time. If you actually like walking sims, just play it on safe and don't worry about playing it on normal. There is a reason they added it as an official mode. It's like outlast 2 but if outlast 2 had a positive worth noting. The only good things are the presentation and some of the story. It presents ideas in a way that sci-fi should, but that's it. Even the ending comes across as "whoops, we ran out of money" They draw everything else out but fade to credits so abruptly. At least the Bunker came out so now I don't have to write off the next game they release. Seriously, don't buy, just put a let's play on in the background or something.

I consider this the first major blunder from Frictional Games. I enjoyed the Penumbra series and both of the Amnesia games for what they were, despite their flaws, but I wasn't really able to get into this game. Major flaws include an annoying whiny protagonist, monsters that are more annoying than scary, and philosophical questions that everybody should have already answered to their satisfaction when they first encountered the idea of copyable consciousness in their pre-teens. Oh, and so much fog and chromatic aberration that I was too busy just trying to parse what's on the screen to really take in the atmosphere.

The game that all sci-fi fans HAVE to play!