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Thinking About Playing SOMA Again

February 17, 2023

In which I discuss my thoughts on the video game SOMA (2015).

Written on a MacBook Pro while listenting to nothing XD

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I should try finishingS SOMA (2015). I really adore the story and the general atmosphere of it; but it's the only game I stopped playing because it scared me too much. It's very well executed but the scariness isn't exclusively because of that, it's more the weird biomechanical creatures and the philosophical themes of the game.

I very rarely get scared of horror media, mostly because 99.9999999% of it is absolutely awful and horribly done. Like the “old people or children doing something really w e i r d and c r a z y” trope that scares ~stupid babies~ apparently literally everyone other than me. But even the well-done media, weird psychological stuff can make me introspective but rarely actually scared; I don't find machines particularly scary, they're at most intimidating because they're arbitrarily stronger than you; and biological monsters I typically have the opposite reaction the designers expected.

But SOMA uses the perfect biomechanical creatures, plus the philosophical themes throughout the entire story, capped of with the fantastic execution: great sound design and visual effects, excellent setting and atmosphere.

The whole game is fantastic on top of actually being scary, the writing and story in particular really shines (haven't finished the game so can't speak for the quality of the last act). I would like to point out that all of Frictional Games' games that weren't written by Mikael Hedberg are generally bad.

Also because not enough games do this anymore—or possibly because I haven't been paying attention—SOMA had a really fantastic set of teasers prior to the release of the game:

http://somagame.com/files.html

Especially “Mockingbird” which is a full live-action video that explores stuff in the game, ever so slightly spoiler-y but it's really enjoyable. Apparently there's also a miniseries called Transmissions that I haven't seen but that explains why they had sets and props for the teaser videos.

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