I don't get it. By which I mean, I don't get what the appeal is supposed to be. Was this supposed to be scary? Was this supposed to be deep? I jokingly called the premise and the ending two steps into the first proper level. Full spoilers because I don't respect this game.
I don't respect this game because it made me kill people multiple times for the sake of simple lock-and-key "puzzle" advancement. For reasons that are abstract enough I do not care to learn more about, multiple NPCs in this game are hooked up to power generators as a form of life support. The first time I encountered one of them, a robot named Carl, there was a puzzle elsewhere in the room that let me keep him alive while I diverted power to a door through alternate means.
"Ah ha!" I thought. The puzzle of the game will be: take the obvious route, and someone dies. Explore and find the more obscure route, and you save their life.
Except for the next one, a woman named Amy, you pull out her life support lines right in front of her. She screams. The player character says "you ok bro?" and then pulls out the second. She dies. "Oh no!" says the player character. And then goes about his puzzle solving.
I had to look up in a guide that I had to do this. Saving Carl had conditioned me to think that of course I would save Amy. It did not cross my mind that the main character would be so stupid, cruel, and selfish as to very obviously kill a woman just to open a door.
So, to spoil the premise: the player character is a digital brain scan of a Canadian man, Simon, who has been loaded into a computer chip. This chip has then been wedged into the brain of a dead woman. So using her dead body, Simon explores a science facility with another dead digitized woman, Catherine, (who lives in his PDA) in the hopes that both of them can escape into the Matrix.
I hate Simon. As a player character, I hate that he’s always breathing so hard. (He’s a zombie robot! He should not be respiring!) As a character, his writing is so myopic it drives me up a wall. He never mentions Amy to Catherine. But later, Simon needs to get into a pressurized suit. And instead of … putting on a new suit, Simon and Catherine make a copy of his mind and hijack the corpse of another dead woman who’s already in a suit.
Doing this creates two Simons, after which Catherine asks new Simon to kill old Simon now, or otherwise leave him to die when his battery runs out. This causes Simon to have a near mental break-down. “This is so fucked up! How could you do this to me???” And I’m sitting in the back asking, “What the fuck, you murdered Amy to open a fucking door????”
At the end of the game, when Catherine and Simon make it into the Matrix, they are copied, not transferred. And Simon is surprised by this again and throws another hissy fit.
I feel like this game, like many pieces of media dealing with mortality and robot bodies, focuses on the wrong end of the question. “What is death?” is not a very interesting question. “Who are we? What makes us, us?” The answer to all of those is settled. You are your continuation of memory. Death is that continuation being irreversibly terminated. The more interesting end of the question is, “What are the ethics for creating new life in hostile environments? Should new life be created when you know exactly what kind of person they will be, (a copy of yourself), and what kind of existence they will lead from the moment you create them?”
But SOMA breezes past that kind of discussion with easy “here, press this computer button to kill that inconvenient double” answers at multiple turns. It seems to think it has found depth by shoving the player’s face into the sentiment, “woah, did you just kill a dude? Isn’t that fucked up??”
Yes. That was murder. It was bad. What do you want from me?
Oh yeah, this game has monsters. They’re lame. Feel no shame in using Safe Mode.
God I hate it when games are secretly woman murder simulators.
What an eye-rolling affair. D+ / C- rank, 1.5 stars.
I don't respect this game because it made me kill people multiple times for the sake of simple lock-and-key "puzzle" advancement. For reasons that are abstract enough I do not care to learn more about, multiple NPCs in this game are hooked up to power generators as a form of life support. The first time I encountered one of them, a robot named Carl, there was a puzzle elsewhere in the room that let me keep him alive while I diverted power to a door through alternate means.
"Ah ha!" I thought. The puzzle of the game will be: take the obvious route, and someone dies. Explore and find the more obscure route, and you save their life.
Except for the next one, a woman named Amy, you pull out her life support lines right in front of her. She screams. The player character says "you ok bro?" and then pulls out the second. She dies. "Oh no!" says the player character. And then goes about his puzzle solving.
I had to look up in a guide that I had to do this. Saving Carl had conditioned me to think that of course I would save Amy. It did not cross my mind that the main character would be so stupid, cruel, and selfish as to very obviously kill a woman just to open a door.
So, to spoil the premise: the player character is a digital brain scan of a Canadian man, Simon, who has been loaded into a computer chip. This chip has then been wedged into the brain of a dead woman. So using her dead body, Simon explores a science facility with another dead digitized woman, Catherine, (who lives in his PDA) in the hopes that both of them can escape into the Matrix.
I hate Simon. As a player character, I hate that he’s always breathing so hard. (He’s a zombie robot! He should not be respiring!) As a character, his writing is so myopic it drives me up a wall. He never mentions Amy to Catherine. But later, Simon needs to get into a pressurized suit. And instead of … putting on a new suit, Simon and Catherine make a copy of his mind and hijack the corpse of another dead woman who’s already in a suit.
Doing this creates two Simons, after which Catherine asks new Simon to kill old Simon now, or otherwise leave him to die when his battery runs out. This causes Simon to have a near mental break-down. “This is so fucked up! How could you do this to me???” And I’m sitting in the back asking, “What the fuck, you murdered Amy to open a fucking door????”
At the end of the game, when Catherine and Simon make it into the Matrix, they are copied, not transferred. And Simon is surprised by this again and throws another hissy fit.
I feel like this game, like many pieces of media dealing with mortality and robot bodies, focuses on the wrong end of the question. “What is death?” is not a very interesting question. “Who are we? What makes us, us?” The answer to all of those is settled. You are your continuation of memory. Death is that continuation being irreversibly terminated. The more interesting end of the question is, “What are the ethics for creating new life in hostile environments? Should new life be created when you know exactly what kind of person they will be, (a copy of yourself), and what kind of existence they will lead from the moment you create them?”
But SOMA breezes past that kind of discussion with easy “here, press this computer button to kill that inconvenient double” answers at multiple turns. It seems to think it has found depth by shoving the player’s face into the sentiment, “woah, did you just kill a dude? Isn’t that fucked up??”
Yes. That was murder. It was bad. What do you want from me?
Oh yeah, this game has monsters. They’re lame. Feel no shame in using Safe Mode.
God I hate it when games are secretly woman murder simulators.
What an eye-rolling affair. D+ / C- rank, 1.5 stars.