Here, at the bottom of the dying sea, running through the last bastions of humanity, where even the machines screaming in sheer pain, rotten to the very core and with nightmares beyond our wildest dreams reshaping what was once built, down here, with life taking its last gasps for air… NOT EVEN HERE I’M SAFE FROM SPIDER LOOKING-ASS CREATURES OH JESUS H. CHRIST I’M GONNA HAVE A HEART ATTA―

Playing Soma has been one of the most difficult gaming-related experiences I’ve ever had, not because it’s a particularly challenging game ―most of its puzzles and monsters, while always superbly designed and distinct from each other while also managing to find ways to make everything fit in, are rarely difficult, puzzles being especially forgiving and never too complicated, and the enemies, while menacing, are turned into much more forgiving obstacles thanks to your surprising durability and the amount of opportunities given to you to breath and analyze the situation after getting caught by any of them―, in fact I’m pretty sure I only died two times across the entire game, and only one of those deaths was ‘caused by an active foe, so yeah, Soma is everything but a hard horror game, so that’s not why I took so much time to beat it, no… but rather because it’s one of the few pieces of media that’s made me feel actually physically ill.

The installations of Pathos-II only get more decayed and seem to be more poisoned than the last, a horrifying amalgam of organic life and metal that’s sickening, but that still grabs you with the beautiful seascapes of the deep blue, especially at the beginning. There’s still some beauty at the end of the world, some sense of lingering past glory remaining in what was once a glorious center point for investigation and progress, but that only gets blurrier and blurrier as the game goes on, to the point the only thing visible is sheer horror. This alone could at times make me feel dizzy, a repulsion I couldn’t really scratch off, it’s sci-fi visual horror brought to its more grounded and depressing limit, and yet, it’s gripping. Every single area, be it the outside in the dark depths or inside one of the many facilities, shares the same visual corruption of the WAU and the general architecture of Pathos-II, but it still feels ever changing, with each of the massive metal blocks serving a different purpose, and the WAU’s many experiments to accomplish its objective taking a more twisted form at every step, it’s such a tangible horror, but still one hard to comprehend at first sight. Soma’s visual style is one of nightmares, too perfect and too horrifying, forged by human and mechanical minds, but if Soma was only that, a trip across scary futuristic places with monsters thrown in there, it would still be a commendable visual achievement, but nothing more remarkable beyond that. Luckily, this tale has a few things to say.

Immediately after Simon’s ‘’photoshoot’’ and his awakening, the game gets what some would call ‘’spooky’’, there’s some really oppressing ambience and some pretty stressful situations, but it’s mostly just that, scary in a more perceptive level, simply because things look weird and there isn’t any context that allows to begin understanding it. And horror usually works at its fullest on those contexts, when you don’t fully know what you are up against, the fear of the unknown is a extremely powerful tool… and still, the more I learnt about Soma, the more logs and files I read, the more places I visited, the more characters I talked to, the more things I did… I was just even more horrified by it. From site Upsilon to Omega, Soma feels like a true hell, a hell made from dreams and run by an AI; the WAU and its monsters are terrifying to go up against, a legion of creatures forced to ‘’live’’, from walking automats forced to waddle along the corridors and seafloor as their mind is still stuck in a past that just isn’t anymore, to impossibilities of flesh and the abhorrent, engulfed by such a perpetual pain that the only way they seemingly can communicate it is through inflicting to others; this artificial mind is pretty creative when it comes to making what should be dead still breath, and its while gaining more understanding of it that more questions appeared, and it became more and more nightmarish. The WAU seems like a rogue AI, but in reality, it simply sought a way to fully accomplish its objective, in a way, this whole ordeal was still our species’ fault, a byproduct of the investigators at Pathos-II to maintain everything beyond its limits; even at the end of the world, humans still find ways to create unimaginable suffering… tho at this point, who’s to say that the WAU can’t really ‘’think’’…

Beyond its interesting history and rich future world, all so amazingly detailed and fascinating to learn on, what compelled me about Soma above of all else and what elevated all those aspects to a brand-new horizon are its themes. Soma doesn’t take too long to ask the question: At what point what we can still be considered human? What’s the limit before we stop being… us? This is not a easy question, to say the least, Soma explores every single possible angle of it, it never feels ‘’pretentious’’ because the game always finds interesting things to explore with it. Simon is the perfect main character to throw into this dilemma, a normal guy that took a coin-toss and ended up here, decades after his time, and on his new condition he can only ponder and question himself, his existence; he’s an amazing protagonist not so much because he says sensical things, but mainly because he’s as lost and afraid as we are, and every single task and act has a monumental conundrum tied with it in a way that makes sense and I honestly wished he had even more things to say. Catherine works amazingly both as its own character and person and a reflection of Simon’s thoughts, she isn’t cold, but she’s more decided about her own condition as a machine, more accepting and understanding of what she is or what she implies, both because she has a more in-depth understanding of how… everything about this works and because she just doesn’t feel as alien in its new form as Simon does, and as such, she doesn’t ask herself the same or similar questions. Simon and Cath bounce from each other perfectly, their conversations being either extremely calm or incredibly tense, and moments like their chat during the last descent are moments that I can only qualify as… beautiful… Their trip is one full of misfortune as never-ending problems carried from mistakes from the past, there’s no real victory at any point, and those moments where it should be one are short lived, and only bring more haunting memories or impossible questions.

Questions asked to you.

At each of the main sites, you may encounter persons, or rather its remains; the last humans put on a state of eternal life, corpses with each a story to tell if it hasn’t been wiped yet, and minds placed in robots that cannot fully understand their condition, and sometimes, in these encounters, there are decisions to be made. The game only has one ending, this story only has one possible outcome, but the game still lets you decide. You can spare other’s their suffering by taking a more difficult option or path, you can leave some people still ‘’alive’’, you revive a person over and over again just to get a bit of information that you need, and yet with every single possible path, the question always lingers… is their conscience, their mind, even real? And for those that are still human, is that a life that’s worth living? Many characters in Soma find their own, sometimes more extreme answers to that, while others never manage to find it, like Simon, but then it also asks you. The game throws these same questions at the player, and that’s where much of the horror plays out, when you begin to contemplate if you are truly inflicting pain to someone else or if it’s just a mere reflection of a past life, if you’ll do the same act that you once considered extreme not so long ago, if sharing the same mind makes both lives the same, or if one’s more meaningful than the other. This is when the horror of Soma shows itself, it’s not the monsters, the metal corridors or the spooky sea spiders, it’s what’s beneath it all, a question that doesn’t expect itself to be answered, one that maybe shouldn’t be done in the first place, or maybe it should in spite of the internal turmoil it can bring.

I took every step in this game with doubt and more questions than answers, with horror and shame, and it was not until close to the end, where I met a character that hadn’t shown up until that point, that the final decision was for me to be made, and this time the answer was clear, and in a mix of a final definitive realization and sharing those final moments, I could only feel my eyes get teary…

Soma is a narrative marvel, a story that I wasn’t expecting to cause me to ask so many questions and think about it so much, and in those moments after I stopped playing after a session, those stuck out of my mind as much as the terror, if not more, tho that’s part for the course since they kind of go hand in hand… It feels too real at times, too sickening, too horrible, but in the best possible form imaginable, it’s a horror that touches the soul, and it does so while looking astonishing and sticking with you, and it will stick with me for a long while; in a way, I feel as if there could be so much more to be talked about Soma, or maybe those are questions to ask oneself…

The game ends with yet another coin-toss, this time there may seem to be a clearer winner and loser, but in both outcomes, both lead to life in an endless abyss… but at least in one of them, the sun can shine again…