[Overview]
SOMA is a sci-fi horror game by Frictional Games, creators of the Amnesia and Penumbra series. It’s set in an underwater research facility in the year 2104. You play as Simon Jarrett, who wakes up in the facility with no memory of how he got there. As he explores the abandoned, decaying station, he uncovers mysteries about the facility's purpose, its missing crew, and his own identity.
[Positives]
- Like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, this game has a very intractable world. Many objects can be picked up and interacted with.
- Solid gameplay. If you like Amnesia’s gameplay loop, this is very similar, although stripped down.
- Very immersive. Many of the computers and other objects can be interacted with making the world come off as more authentic.
- Decent music and sound design.
- Solid voice acting.
- Solid art style, but some of the textures are incredibly low resolution for a 2015 game.
[Mixed]
- After seeing all the hype, I found the story to be fairly disappointing. It feels like a less effective version of something like Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. SOMA has similar themes, but it doesn’t really break much new ground within the genre. Simon comes off as a fairly stupid and whiny protagonist. The truth is explained to him multiple times over, he can even look into mirrors and examine this for himself, and yet he still never really seems to get it despite the situation being pretty simple to comprehend, although understandably heavy. It feels like Simon is lagging behind the games own story and holds it back as a result. The game also has excessive lore dumps. They start out interesting and even immersive as many pieces of lore are told through computer logs, but they start to get long, repetitive, and uninteresting after some time.
- Weak-ish horror. The game just isn’t that scary for the most part. Compared to Frictional’s other games, this is definitely among their least scary. There’s some usage of cheap jumpscares which is lame considering that Frictional has proven themselves to be great at creating atmospheric horror. Some enemy encounters can be pretty tense, but even on normal difficulty you can tank hits from certain enemies with very minimal consequences.
- The bloom visual effect is excessive and ugly, but thankfully it can be toggled off.
[Negatives]
- Gameplay elements are locked to 60 FPS even when running uncapped. This essentially causes the game to run at a capped 60 FPS, even if you’re running at a higher framerate. There is no current way of fully unlocking this limit.
- Gameplay is heavily simplified compared to Amnesia. There’s no more sanity mechanics, healing items, or limited lantern (flashlight). Instead you get a mostly unlimited flashlight and healing stations. Resource management is effectively gone. The inventory system has been simplified to the point where it barely even exists. You aren’t able to save notes or anything like that, any notes that you find will always remain in it’s original location.
- The monsters are incredibly underwhelming. Stalker enemies mostly follow scripted paths, enemies in the underwater sections are so slow that they you can run right past them, enemies teleport and stop chasing after they hit you, etc. The game is very easy and enemies are barely a threat. Once you realize this, their scariness nosedives pretty heavily.
- Choices don’t matter. There’s a handful of tough decisions that you can make throughout the game, but they have absolutely no effect on anything. The choices simply exist with no consequences or impact.
- In-game V-Sync can cause pretty bad performance issues.
- The settings leave a lot to be desired. There’s very few options and no way to disable effects like depth of field or the ugly chromatic aberration. FXAA is the only anti-aliasing option which leads to blurry/jagged visuals.
- Safe mode (journalist difficulty) is a lame addition to include, especially in a game that’s already very easy.
- $30 is a bit steep for how old and short the game is (~9 hours) and there’s not much replay value either.
[Conclusion]
It’s a decent game. Not the most scary or difficult, but I’d say that makes it a solid pick for newcomers to the Horror genre. It feels like Amnesia Lite with a Blade Runner inspired story. Get it on sale.
7/10