SOMA

Que soy...

The scary part is not what you expect to be!

Wow! An incredible experience. Why did I wait so long to play it? I don't intend to spoil anything with the game and it is probably best to jump right in with as little knowledge as possible. Soma is a first person survival horror game. You don't really have weapons or any offensive abilities. I would not consider it a walking simulator as I think the player's relationship to the world felt very connected and the player performs a lot of actions. The story unfolds entirely from a first person perspective as you try to accomplish various goals that develop from your actions. It took me about 10 hours and felt very well paced. No doubt now you can buy the game for more than 50% off and is easily worth it. What did I like about it? The audio and music is probably among the best I have ever experienced (played with headphones). It absolutely nails the genre and created many absolute dread moments. One time I thought I was going to have a panic attack. There is SO much audio in this game, and it is so good. The story, writing, and voice acting were excellent. There are a lot of complex topics being worked with here and they were all handled well. There were a lot of brutal moments that felt appropriately heavy. The level design and art direction were generally very good. It is not the most detailed game but it made up for it with atmosphere and variety. The lighting is generally impressive, and the sense of scale was very good throughout. Environments were often just as big as they needed to be and let you get up close to appreciate things, and when the environments were big, the player still had plenty of stuff to relate to. At times the environment, the lighting, the story, the audio, and the VFX were just working perfectly together. The interactivity of the world was great. The player can grab and manipulate many small objects in the world like in HL2, but additionally the player can grab and drag open doors or drawers, pull levers and many other things that made an immersive experience. These were cleverly built into the gameplay at times where you are screaming "COME ON!!!" as you try to perform an action under pressure. The world had lots of agency and typically boring things like doors were interesting through cool animations. The physics engine was often impressive in how objects interacted with each other. The UI screens that the player interacts with throughout were great. They had a lot of variety and fit into the context of the story and environment. There were even a number of minigames on them. What didn't I like? I generally don't like stealth mechanics of hiding from something and having to wait a painfully long time for a safe moment to advance. In this game the player seems to lack agency to draw the enemy away, like throwing bottles to distract Jeff in Half-Life: Alyx (if that did in fact work, I never saw feedback of it working). There are already systems in place to grab and throw objects and they generally feel satisfying and intuitive, but seem to serve no gameplay purpose. I played the whole game on the middle difficulty where I could die, and I died many times. I absolutely despise the method of punishing the player from being caught by darkening the screen, by cranking up the chromatic aberration, overlaying screen FX, by slowing the player. This makes the game unenjoyable and nauseating until the player can heal from fixed points, sometimes these sections go on for 5-10 minutes which is far too long. Combine this with the sometimes unclear rules of the enemies and the game goes from world class horror to just a frustrating experience. Horror is always a razor's edge. The art didn't always work, particularly the human character models. I got stuck a couple of times not knowing what to do because I didn't see an interactable panel or find a path forward. Most of the time the game did a great job making your goal clear, but a few times it was not clear what the player needed to do. I'm wishing for the best with Frictional Games that they can brave this struggling industry and look forward to their next release.