SOMA

[Sno]

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That sequence where Simon 3 has to decide to either mercy kill Simon 2 or spare him and necessarily abandon him to face WAU's horrors on his own as "you" and Catherine climb into the abyss? Yeah, i had to pause the game, walk away, and think about that one for a bit.

 

Speaking of WAU, this kind of resonates with the experience of playing Soma, as WAU is not at all portrayed as a malevolent entity, but one undertaking extreme and novel measures to ensure it can meet the requirements of its programming. (Keeping the base personnel "alive".)

[Mangela Lansbury]

I beat SOMA last night, and then also had a SOMA based nightmare.

 

This is a good game. 

[Nappi]

Listening to the Giant Bomb Game of the Year casts made me really want to try out SOMA, but looking at the gameplay videos I just know that I'm not going to finish the game ever, because I'm a big baby when it comes to horror games that involve sneaking and hiding (and nothing is going to change that, I feel). I'm still really interested in the story, even if I spoiled some of it listening to the casts (not enough, though, in my opinion). Do you think that the game will still be enjoyable/meaningful, with this mod?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/01/06/soma-mod-horror/

[Erkki]

Yes, very likely

[Nappi]

Cool, perch'd.

[sclpls]

Yeah, thanks to that mod I'm probably gonna grab this game finally. I'm not a baby when it comes to horror stuff, but I find having to run away from the monster constantly mechanic tedious in the games I've played where that's a thing.

[Nappi]

Just finished it.

 

Scattered observations about the game, the mod, and me:

-The game, as I experienced it, was great. The story explored interesting concepts, and the developers had the sense to avoid relying on twists (which the players would have been able to see a million miles away). The setting was wisely scoped, and they absolutely nailed the base and sea floor areas. And holy shit, the atmosphere was amazing.

- The Wuss mode absolutely does not ruin the experience. Exploring the base is fucking terrifying even if you know that the monsters won't attack you. These alien creatures wandering aimlessly in the corridors, ignoring you, adds its own special kind of horror to the atmosphere. When you are going through the log entries on a computer and your vision starts to distort more and more, you want to get away, even if you are not in a physical danger.

- There is zero chance I would have been able to complete this game without the Wuss mode. There are a couple of scripted scenes where you are still vulnerable, and one of them left my heart racing so fast that I had to take a break from the game. Moreover, avoiding the monsters seems like a tedious mechanic, and I'm quite sure that I would have become frustrated with the game even if I hadn't been scared to death.

- My TV really struggles with scenes with lots of grey.

 

So: Great game. Would recommend. If the gameplay puts you off, try the mod.

 

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I liked that there was an opportunity to fill the Ark survey twice, once in the base and again in the, well, Ark.

[Calvarok]

I watched a Lets Play of this game so i guess you could say i didn't get the full experience, but based on that... I think i really dislike this game.

 

A lot of it is down to the tone and writing being all over the place.  I never had any clear idea of what the story was trying to say, and it felt like it kept repeating itself and re-establishing things that were obvious, and there seemed to be no logic to how aware the main character was of his situation at any given time.

 

I won't deny it's ambitious, but I think it's a case where the ambition sheds light on the fact that the game they're making is designed to handle very simple concepts.  the entire time i was watching it I was thinking "hey, there are some interesting ideas for a good game inside this OK game"

[Sno]

There are quite a lot of incidental character beats and fairly important pieces of story-telling in far-off corners that can be pretty easily missed, leading to a much more disjointed narrative and thematic experience, so i can understand how you would arrive at that impression.

 

I played through the game twice and was pretty thorough about it, and in having that experience i was left feeling like the story generally is able to hit all the notes it needs to hit. The pieces are there, the player just isn't necessarily being forced to look at them.

 

This obviously isn't a problem unique to Soma, and if you're watching somebody else play through the game, it's just going to be exacerbated.

[Calvarok]

  On 1/25/2016 at 6:51 AM, Sno said:

There are quite a lot of incidental character beats and fairly important pieces of story-telling in far-off corners that can be pretty easily missed, leading to a much more disjointed narrative and thematic experience, so i can understand how you would arrive at that impression.

 

I played through the game twice and was pretty thorough about it, and in having that experience i was left feeling like the story generally is able to hit all the notes it needs to hit. The pieces are there, the player just isn't necessarily being forced to look at them.

 

This obviously isn't a problem unique to Soma, and if you're watching somebody else play through the game, it's just going to be exacerbated.

that is fair, I do tend to play exploration-focused games more thoroughly than the people I was watching so it's likely I might have had a better time actually playing.  I heard others discuss a moment in that game where the player sees their face long before the actual facts of their physicality were revealed in the playthrough I watched.  But aside from things like that, I think my problems went a bit deeper than missing pieces.

 

I guess the simplest way I could describe it is that it didn't make me feel anything.  It presented a hopeless situation in which the player was trying to complete an objective that seemed even more hopeless to me, but it never really sold that sense of hopelessness.  The characters were all so flat, their dialogue wonky and often delivered strangely, and the pacing seemed really off, with how much of it is about constant setbacks just as things seem to be in a good place to enter the last act.

 

I don't think there is anything wrong with the concept of this game.  I just think there are almost literally thousands of things that would need to be different about how it was executed for me to be into it.  I don't think I would have finished it if I wasn't watching folks with interesting commentary go through it: their discussions of the subjects the game deals with were invariably more interesting than what Soma had to say on said topics.

[Sno]

Well, you're describing very subjective experiences and i certainly can't deny you how the game made you feel.

 

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For my part, I thought the writing and acting were pretty consistently great, Simon's breakdowns at various points especially came across as feeling pretty genuine to me. He can come across as insistently oblivious to certain realities of his circumstances, but i generally took it as the character having a degree of genre blindness. (Not everybody is a sci-fi nerd.) It's a reading of the character that i think is supported by the way Katherine talks down to him at times, trying to explain his situation with simple and manipulative metaphors while other corners of the game were far more explicit about the mechanics of what was happening to Simon.

 

I think there are some fumbles earlier in the game, the intro sequence in particular has some especially awkward dialogue. Some of it at least, the nightmare in particular, i believe is meant to put you somewhat off balance. On the other hand, when he wakes up in Pathos II, i think he comes across as a little too at ease with his circumstances in the sequences leading up to the the first big reveal. (Where he, at the very least, realizes that he's been wearing a diving suit and finally seems to be genuinely distressed with his situation.)

 

I mean, and... I don't know about that last comment. Soma comes across as almost an anthology of ideas in how it skips through its various topics of interest, relating them around the core of its sci-fi narrative, and i think it generally lands on at least a small handful of interesting conclusions about each of those ideas before moving onto the next. In particular, the whole sequence where Simon is struggling with the ethics of bringing a human consciousness in and out of existence for his selfish ends is kind of incredible. I mean, and it doesn't make the choices for you, i think that's kind of the key here. They aren't even reinforced by mechanics that might coerce you down one path or another, the game makes it entirely about doing what you feel is right. Perhaps having those experiences second-hand denies them some of their impact. I certainly don't think a let's play is in any way the ideal way to experience a game in its entirety, this is an interactive medium. Consider how the game presents a certain survey twice, because after having done it once already earlier in the game you're meant to reflect on the scenarios posed by the game in its duration and discover if your answers to the survey and really every choice in the game have changed upon its conclusion, it asks for personal reflection on the things you've done.

 

That's my take, at least.

 

Moreover, i think it's fair to say that it engendering interesting conversations around itself is a credit to it.

 

I really, really liked Soma. A lot.

[Calvarok]

thank you, that was actually quite helpful in explaining to me a bit more of what people see in this game.  I won't deny that it has contributed something to the conversation, as it were.  and again, i'll agree that my method of experiencing the game was not ideal, but i think i correctly identified elements that would have put me off in any circumstance. 

 

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I think I just have some very specific things that bother me about narratives and just completely pull me out of them.

 

I appreciated the idea of scenes like the continual reactivation and essential deletion of an artificial consciousness, but I just couldn't get over the sense that it was just another concept the game was curious about, and really meant nothing to my understanding of the characters, or their environment.

 

But perhaps this is just a style of storytelling built for other kinds of people, one that i find it really hard to interface with.  I could see my ideal version of Soma losing some of the things others love about it.

 

 I think i feel more frustrated at being unable to get much out of the game than anything else.  I think i was a little dismissive due to that, sorry.

[Sno]

I don't think you have anything to apologize for, differing opinions are allowed.

 

I'll concede that i am somewhat predisposed towards appreciating Soma, it's a game that promises the sort of story i love digging into, but it did actually surpass my expectations by quite a margin.

 

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I think Soma is interested in what happens when body and mind become detached notions and power of one over the other ceases, all of its narrative anecdotes coalesce around disrupting the reality of a singular personhood. So i do think it all comes back around to our main characters. What are Simon and Catherine relative to their originals? Do we empathize with them? Which version of them are we supposed to empathize with? Do we resent the ones that get to prolong their fates in comfort without a second thought to the selves left behind? The game is pretty explicit about these being the kinds of questions it wants you to have on your mind.

[melmer]

Just finished this. Absolutely stunning game. I'd highly recommend to everyone. Such clever design.

The only other game I've played like this is a couple hours of outlast, which annoyed me to no end, not being able to fight back against a human adversary, especially considering there's bricks and bottles lying around the place just felt so off and limiting. Closed the possibility space and killed the immesion.

But Soma on the other hand works around this in a really clever way. (Your'll have to play it to find out what that is). Which I can imagine what birthed the idea of the game in the first place. As linear as the experience is there wasnt one moment where questioned why can't I do this or why can't I go there or even questioned motivation etc super super clever design. These guys are genius

[melmer]

Ending question

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ive just been scouring YouTube, so it appears there isn't multiple endings. But the two ending play as a 50/50 coin flip which way round you see them? Left on earth/inside the ARK. I saw them that way round which was a more pleasant ending then I was expecting.

For literally the whole game I thought the wau was trying to trick me into taking it on to the ark. Be it the zombie guy or Catherine being an AI talking with a human face taking on a persona. Strange that it didn't go there. I though the ARK would go all corrupt and shit as I'd been sucking up the wau in to my hand all thought out the game. I think that would've been better, if when Catherine turned round she would've had robot stuff on her face.

I didn't kill the wau. Guess it doesn't make any difference either way, that the way j saw it anyway, I was going to to space. Who am I to kill this artificial life. Let it asimilate the planet. Humans don't need it anymore.

Does the zombie guy talk to you more if he survives?

Edit: just find it on YouTube. he was going to kill me but get turned into mincemeat, poor old Ross, fuck Ross

[plasticflesh]

This video has a great spoiler-full recap of SOMA, and also TACOMA. I hope its not annoying to cross post this simultaneously but it seemed tidy. Am I an un-feeling message board organizing algorithm?

 

[registradus]

just played through SOMA and loved it. did they ever discuss it on the podcast?