REVIEW: 'SOMA'

It's October soon, which means it's time for the annual deluge of horror-related stuff. Whilst here in the UK we tend to quickly skim through Halloween because the last few months of the year must be dedicated to our saviour: Santa Claus, we have the global entiry of Steam to ensure that Halloween thrives across the world within it.

It's odd that I don't really care for horror considering that some of the best games out there are horror titles. System Shock 2 is one I keep harping on about, and the reason why I keep bringing it up is because it's just so good. Aside from that, there's the best game on the Gamecube: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. There's the game that GOG.com desperately needs to re-release with a host of buxfixes: Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth. There's one of the best point and click adventure games: I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. There's the recent Alien: Isolation that to date is one of the best movie tie-in games ever made. And of course there's Silent Hill 2 which also needs a PC re-release.

Not to mention there are sections from great non-horror games that evoke horror. Thief: The Dark Project out of nowhere had you raiding zombie-infested crypt's, which later inspired Thief: Deadly Shadows to have that section in an abandoned orphanage/asylum. Thief 1 also inspired Half Life 2's section in Ravenholm where you're also suddenly dumped in a zombie-infested area. Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (another title GOG.com needs to patch and re-release) had a wonderful section in a haunted hotel. And whilst I wouldn't call Resident Evil 4 a pure horror experience, I'll always remember that bloody guy with the chainsaw...

Amnesia: The Dark Descent was a game I really liked at the time - but playing it again, it hasn't aged well. It's partly because Amnesia is to blame for the 'YouTubers recording themselves screaming' craze that's resulted in every horror game made since to be a jumpscare-fest...even though Amnesia features no jumpscares whatsoever. It's also because at the time there were no other survival horror games. There were action games with horror elements, but no games where horror was built into it's very code.

Oh, the visuals are great by the way. 

Because Amnesia bought back the horror genre, I at the time let slide it's kinda shoddy gameplay. I get why your sanity meter drains when you see a monster, but why does it drain when you're in the dark? Why do some enemies disappear when reloading after dying? Why are the puzzles so unintuitive? And the enemies appearing in System Shock 2 after you solved a puzzle weren't nearly as annoying because you actually had weapons. In Amnesia it just feels cheap.

Also, whilst I liked how the story was spread out over the gameplay, it has the most predictable plot-twist ever. So I was initially excited when SOMA was announced. It's by the same guys who bought us Amnesia, but this time the puzzles are refined, there's a greater emphasis on story, and the graphics are state of the art. Oh, and it's in the future.

You're Simon Jarret, some guy going for a really dodgy brain scan. Whilst this would normally lead to either brain tumours or waking up to find your kidney's missing - here you find yourself transported to a facility in the Atlantic ocean, far in the future. Like BioShock, the facility has gone to pot and you're one of the last souls still alive. But it's also like System Shock in how an AI has taken over and is creating its own version of life in order to survive. Oh, and it also turns out that the human race on the surface isn't doing too well either - just like Half Life. So everyone's copying their intelligence into computers to enable their survival...just like Portal 2. Props for taking after some of my favourite games, SOMA, but having an original thought wouldn't hurt you.

Alarm bells rang for me right from the start when you have to bustle around an apartment looking for some medication. After spending what felt like forever turning this studio flat upside down, it turned out that the meds were in a drawer I'd looked in right at the start, but I didn't hold the drawer open long enough.

"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?" 

This is a deceptively hard game. It's hard because it doesn't tell you anything. Later on as you make contact with others, you'll be given more direct orders - but most of the time you're completely on your own. To be fair: the majority of the puzzles involve logic. The power is down, so you need to look around for a generator. Simple enough. But sometimes the way forward is the last way you'll think of. After spending the first hour of the game wandering aimlessly around madly clicking buttons in the hope of progressing, I capitulated. So I had to play the game with a walkthrough, which always ruins the experience because walkthrough's always spoil what's going to happen next.

There's this glowing jellyfish thing that I initially refused to touch, but when I did it just made things light up for a bit. I only touched it because I'd run out of things to do in the area and so was at the stage of clicking on anything that might progress the game. It only turned out via research that the jellyfish actually restores your health. Well duh!

I'm not asking for an objective marker, or that annoying thing in the BioShock games where a rock blocks your way and big letters flash up on the screen saying "FIND ANOTHER WAY ROUND." But some kind of journal or hint you can access in the pause menu would be great because 70% of the time I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Even System Shock 2 had a helpful 'notes' page. God help you if you decide to go away from the game for a few days only to return and completely forget what you were supposed to do. You're not even told what stage you're currently on.

There are several sections right from BioShock 2 where you walk around underwater. I personally hated these sections because they're nothing but a blind stumble in the dark. You have to go against all known instincts and walk away from the light praying it's the right direction. Since at this point it's revealed you're in a diving suit, I was hoping there would be some kind of compass or sensor in the suit that could help point me in the right direction. In fact, you're given this 'Omni-Tool' thing to open doors and access computers with. Why can't the Omni-Tool also act as a radar telling you where to go underwater?

Also, you know how every game in the world lets you click on a door to open it? Here, you have to actually move the mouse across. It sounds like this'll be more immersive as for once you're required to physically exert yourself in a game, but it's just making the simplest mechanic in the world a chore. Why can't I just click or tap a button to open something? Later your required to flick switches under pressure, and it's a nightmare fumbling around with the interface. I feel like I'm playing as someone with severe arthritis. It just doesn't feel natural.

The plot's fairly standard stuff. There's some interesting things going on concerning artificial intelligence and our perceptions of sentience, and there are some moments that really got to me. The game undergoes the typical routine where as you explore this dead world you're forced to re-activate what killed this world, a trope games have been employing since Myst. In fact, it's the same trope Amnesia 2 employed. But how the game does this is that you have to kill some robots, and these robots are sentient. I actually stopped playing for a day because there's a part early on when you meet an irritable yet likable robot who thinks he's a human. Since I had no idea what to do next, I flicked a switch at the end of the room which made the poor thing scream in pain. I stopped this, checked he was OK, then looked around to see where the correct switch was. I couldn't find it, so I assumed that you have to kill the robot to progress.

But I didn't kill the robot. I ran out of the room so I didn't have to hear his cries for help, but I came back to find that I'd reduced him to a vegetative state. It turned out that the switch did nothing and was just put there by the designers to torture the poor robot. There was no reason to have this other than to harm an innocent life. Screw you game!

Aside from this, the plot's not really worth commenting on. It even pulls that trope where you're asked to meet up with the person you've been communicating with, and it's obvious that the person isn't what they appear to be. I think this tropes been used in every other game ever made, but at least here the game gets it out of the way pretty quickly so it can move onto the meat of the story.

Thankfully, there's no sanity meter in this game. There's still some screen filters, but like Amnesia this only adds to the horror as you're unable to see exactly what horrors are chasing you. Also, like Amnesia, the sound design is very well done. Monsters have a distinctive sound that can be used to alert you of their presence and also make you jump when they detect you.

The problem is that since you have no means to defend yourself, the game is forced to be extremely lenient with it's enemies. Even the later ones are very easy to outsmart and outrun. There's also a high chance of being able to break the AI so it just circles around one small room forever or stares at a wall for several minutes before remembering why it's here. This kind of ruins the horror as the monsters devolve from Alien to old school Doctor Who. I understand they need to be easy to avoid, but I don't think you're supposed to break them.

So overall SOMA is a solid effort, and I recommend it for horror fans. Just don't expect anything new.