SOMA

Frictional Games drafting The Chinese Room to develop the immediate follow-up to Amnesia: The Dark Descent was a stroke of brilliance. Not only could they shift the blame onto a polarizing developer when the result was inevitably less frightening than its predecessor and herald their own follow-up as a return to form, but they could learn from both their own mistakes and those of the other team. SOMA is thus something of a middle ground, gameplay-wise, between The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs, and is ultimately better than both of them in that respect. Where the first game’s puzzles were often intrusive and pedestrian, and the second’s were basically non-existent, SOMA’s are usually intuitively integrated into its existing physics and machinery-manipulation systems. As for the big question: no, it’s still not as frightening as The Dark Descent, but that metric isn’t measured on a linear scale.

Direct encounters with enemies in SOMA are often its weakest moments. This is especially disappointing, because the enemies are where Frictional is expanding their gameplay formula rather than just finetuning it, and because they’re so close to maintaining a terrifying high but can’t quite get the job done. The enemies have a variety of different behaviours, capabilities, and even senses – some are blind and rely on hearing, some will attempt to circle around and ambush you, etc. Understandably for the purposes of horror, these aren’t directly communicated to the player. However, Frictional’s otherwise-brilliant tradition of discouraging and/or preventing players from directly looking at their pursuers means these differences can’t be gleaned from observation either. And since the company’s past monsters all followed mostly-identical rules, players unaware of the change are likely to find these confrontations inconsistent and unaccommodating.

In all other respects, SOMA’s atmosphere of oppression and mystery is unparalleled. Its undersea sci-fi setting is depicted with painstaking detail, and its audio design is startling and uncanny. It’s also far and away the most psychologically gripping narrative that Frictional has ever crafted. When I played Amnesia: The Bunker, I lamented that their storytelling ability didn’t seem to have evolved since the first Penumbra, but it turns out that it had actually evolved and then reverted back to that point. SOMA raises questions about consciousness, humanity, and existential meaning with unforeseen sophistication. It doesn’t purport to have the answers, either; the story is dotted with organic and genuinely profound moral choices that almost always had me second-guessing my selections, even as I write this. It’s especially impressive that, apart from one extremely glaring deus ex machina sequence, these themes are woven into a plot that cohesively handles so many parallel events and seemingly-disparate narrative elements.