SOMA

[TheLastBaron]

So this is the next Frictional game. I'm a baby for scary games (though games that are stupid and just have a lot of jump scares don't bother me at all) so I haven't actually played Amnesia outside of the Justine dlc. This looks cool though.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/10/11/soma-debut-trailer-released-by-frictional-games/

[Sno]

I've been loving the playfully ambiguous live-action teasers they've been doing, the way they're teasing the themes of SOMA, and now that incredible in-game trailer.

So yeah, what do we have so far?

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We have a woman flipping her shit when a mysterious machine produces a panicked, screaming simulacrum of herself on its screen. We have an android apparently suffering some kind of dissociation and confused identity, exhibiting impossible, personal knowledge when confronted by the man whose identity it has seemingly stolen. Then, finally, we have a man in hot pursuit of his pilfered brain, left wondering at the end if he just watched himself die.

I'm a sucker for sci-fi horror, i'm a sucker for ideas like these, and i think Amnesia was the scariest game i've ever played. I am very on board with whatever Frictional's trying to do.

Klepek conducted a really excellent interview with Frictional over at Giant Bomb, i recommend checking it out.

Here are the two live-action teasers, plus the

 

 

[Twig]

I really like the live-action stuff. It sorta reminds me of some of the things from The SCP Foundation, which is definitely a positive for me.

 

The in-game trailer really brought me down, though. Mehhhhhhhhhhhhrhh. It's just so... the same as Amnesia or any other first-person atmospheric-horror game. Everything's dirty and dark. I don't know. I JUST DON'T KNOW. I wish someone would, at least once, pull off an atmospheric horror game that WASN'T dirty and dark.

[Roderick]

Same here. I'm waiting for the thing that made the live action shorts so memorable. Also not convinced on the first person narration, though that may be just for the sake of the trailer. I certainly didn't need to be told that the guy on the slab was alive when he moved, and then dead when stopped.

[Twig]

Oh, I see the interview mentions SCP. Wonderful!

[Sno]

I was kind of surprised to see them be so upfront about the apparent SCP influence.

[Erkki]

  On 10/14/2013 at 5:35 AM, Sno said:

Klepek conducted a really excellent interview with Frictional over at Giant Bomb, i recommend checking it out.

Seconded! Really awesome interview!

[TychoCelchuuu]

  On 10/14/2013 at 5:53 AM, Twig said:

I really like the live-action stuff. It sorta reminds me of some of the things from The SCP Foundation, which is definitely a positive for me.

 

The in-game trailer really brought me down, though. Mehhhhhhhhhhhhrhh. It's just so... the same as Amnesia or any other first-person atmospheric-horror game. Everything's dirty and dark. I don't know. I JUST DON'T KNOW. I wish someone would, at least once, pull off an atmospheric horror game that WASN'T dirty and dark.

The System Shock games weren't overly dirty or dark, all things considered. The upcoming Routine appears to have many non-dirty, non-dark areas. Miasmata is sort of dirty but not in the sense you mean, I think. Pathologic isn't really dirty or dark. The Void is dark but not in a "the lights are out" sense but rather in a "this is the void" sense which is maybe different.

[Twig]

System Shock is also a shooter, not atmospheric horror - by which I mean "a game like Amnesia". I'm very excited about Routine. Miasmata isn't very... horror at all. Pathologic is an unknown to me. The Void seems pretty dark and dirty.

 

Also I should say that by "dark" I literally just mean "dark". I really dislike playing dark games. It's like a constant strain on my eyes.

[Sno]

This is a good, frank interview that lets slide a lot of interesting details.

I like the idea that you may not necessarily even know if something is hostile, or under which conditions it may turn hostile.
 

Gone Home is also cited as an influence, so presumably Soma will have some manner of ghosts.

[namman siggins]

Just recently found out that SOMA is going to take place underwater and not in space...

My mind is all kinds of fucked up now. The vibe and atmosphere I was picking up from what Frictional was giving us about SOMA made it seem like it was in space. Now that it's underwater, it puts it in a different ballgame.

Let me expand on different. Different in that instead of being surrounded by endless darkness, you're now surrounded by endless darkness with living things surrounding you, living their life. I think that adds another level of existential dread of knowing that the things around will continue to live their while you die or try to survive.

Also the mythology and atmosphere of deep sea environment takes something so familiar to us to yet is still so damn alien. And if one has knowledge of the creatures that inhabit those depths, having those creatures surrounding (even creatures not yet discovered!) with, I'm going to assume, killer robots going after you is frightening.

[Atlantic]

Frictional released a short gameplay demo:

 

 

Also, their Youtube channel is a bizarre mix of ARGy type live action videos for Soma (sorry, SOMA), glitched out versions of gameplay segments and tests of their graphics engine from 2006.

 

EDIT: looks like it's coming for PC and PS4 this year. Maybe in the Autumn?

[Sno]

That gameplay demo looks terrific to me, I am very excited about this game.

[Ninety-Three]

Everything about that trailer is great, but did anyone else have trouble making out the voices? I found that the game's background noise kept making me miss what they were saying.

 

 

  On 5/29/2015 at 3:19 PM, Atlantic said:

EDIT: looks like it's coming for PC and PS4 this year. Maybe in the Autumn?

 

Watch the trailer, it says Sep 22.

[Erkki]

Looks awesome, like the best bits of Amnesia mixed with Thief and put into a cool sci-fi setting.

[Erkki]

It's out! And for some reason I'm typing on a DS3 and it kind of works! Ok, sorry for the distraction, switched back to keyboard - was trying Controller Companion's radial on screen keyboard -- kind of works but still 10 times slower than a real keyboard.

 

Anyway, what does work surprisingly well with a controller is SOMA. I played Amnesia and the Penumbras with mouse & keyboard, but lately am prefering DS3 for most games (playing from couch), so it was good to find that it works. Even pulling the drawers open, picking up stuff, is not too weird with it, although with a mouse still feels more natural.

 

The game itself is awesome! It's like they have distilled the essence of the kind of games they make and left out the cruft. At least that's what it seems like so far. From the first moments you are interacting with physical things a la Gone Home or Amnesia and it looks great (besides the human characters maybe) and things are introduced at a great pace. The voice acting is not super awesome, but there's not that much of it. Maybe I'll switch to Spanish, try that out (I'm learning it)...

[Sno]

I have played and finished this game and... You know, while i was playing it, and after i finished it - finding the game stuck on my mind for several days - i felt like i had a whole lot to say about it, but... A lot of it is about the story, and it doesn't look like anybody here has finished it yet, so i probably won't go too indepth.

 

I thought the voice acting was pretty good, by and large. It's incredibly difficult to do a first-person voiced protagonist and not have it be really, really weird, but i think they got most of the way there, though Simon could probably have stood to be a little more noticeably unnerved during the first couple areas of the game. (Some might take issue with him generally sounding like an awkward, regular ass dude, but that's kind of what makes him work in my opinion. He's kind of a dope.)

 

Really though, i completely loved this game. It's probably another goty contender for me, and maybe one of my favorite horror games ever. I think it's also one of the most committed and unnerving explorations of body horror i've seen in a video game practically since System Shock 2. It commits to the theme instead of just the visual and it's thoroughly upsetting in parts, I think it legitimately works as psychological horror. It does that in part owing to there being precious few jump scares in the game, and they almost never occur in circumstances wherein you are actually open to danger. If there is going to be something that can kill you, the game lets you exist with it, know it's there, and feel all the tension of it being right there in front of you. That said, the game is also relatively simplified in comparison to Amnesia, it lacks that prior game's complicated systems interactions and how those worked to create tension. If Soma has a fault that's where it lies, but Soma still gets pretty much all the way to being scary through its theme and its pacing, which is fairly admirable, i think. Soma is a game that faces you constantly with choices that are in no way systemically reinforced, but still thrive as relentlessly complicated moral quandaries that - as an exploration of the game's themes - pile up on eachother and lead you to question what you've done and what you've come from. It's fantastic, i love the story. (It actually seems to have accidentally had more resonance than the writer even intended, sparking debates and questions that he apparently didn't realize the narrative supported.)

 

In fact, the game is in large part almost an adventure game, with relatively clever puzzles and environmental exploration actually making up the largest chunk of the game, encounters happening relatively intermittently and usually quite briefly, there's much less of an ever present threat than there was in Amnesia. The mechanics of those encounters are also generally more simplistic, and while individual encounters present a lot of variety in how they approach Soma's mechanics, the narrower and more discernable walls on the simulation governing these survival encounters makes it probably a little less scary overall than Amnesia. (Which, hey, isn't necessarily a bad thing.) It's also balanced, definitely, towards the very easy end of the spectrum. I died exactly once in the entire game. (Which i spent 15 hours playing, by the way. That was a playthrough that put emphasis on checking every corner for bits of story, and dealing with encounters in a stealthy and measured fashion.)

 

I was quite surprised to see those two original live action teasers referenced in the story of the game and actually make complete sense in the context of the game. (Frictional is also presently releasing a web series on their youtube channel that also ties in, but a little more tenuously, and the web series proper is also maybe not quite as effective as those original live action teasers were.) On the other end of the spectrum, that first gameplay teaser is almost completely unrecognizable and has virtually nothing in common with the shipping game. There's a locked archive that gets thrown in with the game's install that, if opened, is revealed to contain just buckets and buckets of development materials which imply that the game shifted course wildly possibly several times over the course of its elongated development cycle.

 

As an aside, i think it gets some good mileage from its setting. There's a sequence towards the end that really makes its deep ocean setting seem oppressive and intimidating in a way that i don't think other games set in deep, dark, murky water have ever really achieved.

 

Again though, I think Soma's one of the best horror games i've ever played, kudos to Frictional.

 

I actually like it a whole lot more than i liked Amnesia, though as a piece of game design, i think i still respect Amnesia more, if that makes sense.

[Trip Hazard]

Thanks for that, I've been wondering if SOMA is the game for me, as a fan of Amnesia who generally didn't enjoy getting killed by monsters. Horror games are at their best for me when they're building, and then sustaining, tension. Amnesia did this very well, but it would be undone when I'd get killed by a monster: all that tension instantly dissolved. Now, I know it was possible to run and hide and that too was a very tense experience, but I wasn't good at that and would frequently get killed. If you're killed, all that happens is you're set back a very short ways, the beastie(s) are shuffled around (or removed entirely sometimes, I think) and you try that section again, this time feeling a little less tense and a little more irritated.

 

I suppose what it meant for me was being reminder that, yeah, this is a game, and just getting yanked out of the experience. Probably have more to say on this but my brain isn't working right now

[Dewar]

I saw the Giant Bomb video for this, and I really want to play it, but I don't really enjoy classic horror games (mostly the jump scares and the gore.) I guess what I want is Gone Home, but a lot more creepy, without the outright horror. Maybe Tacoma will deliver on that. Reading your description, maybe this delivers on that. I dunno.

[Mangela Lansbury]

I've played a bit of this, and while it does have its jump scares and exit, pursued by a bear bits, it feels a lot more like playing an unsettling scifi story than playing a horror game to me.

[iax]

Interesting, I don't remember any jump scares being in the game. Sure, there are sections when things happen and become dangerous fast, but I can't recall any "instant monster in your face" heart attack attempt moments.

 

About SOMA being a horror game, I actually felt that it is one only during monster hide & run parts (or when it's clear one of these parts is imminent). I see it more as a narrative-focused game with dark atmosphere and themes, which wasn't the case for Amnesia. I'm still unsure how I feel about the monstery horrory parts, it was always a mix of "oh my god that's terrifying" and "sigh, again? I hope I'll get to the exploration part soon". But I also can't confidently say that removing this aspect would improve the game for me, I recognize that not feeling safe probably does play a role in experiencing the game.

 

Otherwise the game is great, Sno already elaborated on the themes and narrative better than I could. I would also add that the audio is phenomenal in this game.

[Erkki]

I just finished it and yeah, I like it a lot more than Amnesia. I also think it's one of the best sci-fi stories told in video game format lately, perhaps ever. I liked that it had less of the monster-bits, but one of later ones did frustrate me enough because I didn't figure out the pattern or the monster just repeatedly spawned too close to me.

 

I felt kind of distanced from the psychological horror, though, but I put the error more on my side than the game's. Maybe should have gone for headphones, huddled close to a monitor, instead of big screen & slouching on the couch.

[Dewar]

Interesting. sounds like the kind of creepy I like. I might pick this up....

[Sno]

  On 10/7/2015 at 8:52 PM, Erkki said:

I just finished it and yeah, I like it a lot more than Amnesia. I also think it's one of the best sci-fi stories told in video game format lately, perhaps ever. I liked that it had less of the monster-bits, but one of later ones did frustrate me enough because I didn't figure out the pattern or the monster just repeatedly spawned too close to me.

 

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A couple of the later ones i'm not sure i had "figured out" either, mainly the angler fish and the other group of fish.

 

I think the angler fish might have just been a fairly normal encounter, but i didn't deal with it long enough to find out. I assume it's meant to force you to backpedal into the lengthy branching cavern you had just passed through to reach it, but it caught me while i was doing so. I had enough health to take the hit, and when i woke up, it had seemingly moved on deeper into the cavern, but i was still near the exit. So i pretty much just picked up and kept moving.

 

The school of fish i got through without major incident incident, though i took quite a few hits to be honest, and i'm not clear that i understood what the mechanic of that encounter was supposed to be. The game implies that they stay away from the lights, but they don't. I mean, but i was kind of able to sprint left and right to avoid the fish as they dove in at me, so... That's kind of what i did, but it feels like i was probably supposed to do something else? (I mean, you eventually reach a point where you have abandoned shipping containers to hide in, but some of that encounter is just wide out in the open.)

 

The other encounters in the game were all much more obvious.

 

The corrupted helper robot is pretty much your baseline. It's pretty fast, it sees and hears.

 

The gross cancerous zombies are completely blind, but have super sensitive hearing. (Unless the robot girl turns out to be faster, the zombie with arms - i think it's supposed to be akers? - is probably the fastest bipedal enemy in the game, extremely difficult to get away from, take sharp turns and crouch and stay silent whenever you build up any distance.)

 

The naked disco ball men apparently not only teleport towards you when you look at them, but actually detect you by you looking at them, and i struggled with the longer, later form of that encounter given the small series of spaces it occurs within. (This was the one enemy i died to.)  Speaking of teleporting, i gathered that the game was trying to imply that the teleporting was cleverly actually "lost time" for Simon due to the EMP effects of the disco ball, but that... Doesn't really explain some of what they do in their scripted pre-encounter appearances. (It also sure as hell doesn't explain whatever was going on with Ross, who seems to be straight up invisible for long stretches.)

 

The crying robot girl just seemed to have a very, very generous ramp up towards aggro, so stay quiet and leave her alone, is what i took from that encounter. She definitely "detected" me a number of times while i was trying to grab the power pack, but never actually chased. I was wondering if i had actually glitched the game, but i'm pretty sure she's just meant to seem kind of semi-lucid and in agony and not particularly interested in you.

 

The corrupted diving suit seemed to have more advanced AI than a lot of other enemies, actually going into investigating individual rooms, but once detected by it, you would find that it's actually very slow and easy to stay away from.

 

There was also the big leviathan creature made of corrupted structure gel, and that encounter was basically just running from alcove to alcove, any spot that looked like it wouldn't be a comfortable fit for the leviathan to chase through.

 

That's everything, right? I don't think i'm missing anything. There's a helper robot with a brain scan loaded onto it during an early underwater sequence that makes some aggressive statements and will chase, but i never got close enough for it to possibly attack.

 

Ross, i guess, does chase you for one sequence. I've seen people say he will kill you there, which makes sense. It's only after that, that you turn into the thing he can use against WAU.

 

Aside: I kind of like how the game sort of abstractly conveys your health with the gradually deepening color separation visual. (I have seen it stated that distressing imagery causes a tiny, persistent health decay? I didn't really find this noticeable while playing, if true, but i did always seem to have a tiny bit of color separation creep in even when healed up after an encounter. It's a weirdly ineffectual sanity system, if true.)

[bakelite]

I really didn't expect the story to hit me like it did, I haven't experienced an ending that devastating since Brothers.