Loses a half star for station Alpha feeling underdeveloped given its build-up and climactic placement in the story. It’s taken me nearly a decade to get around to it but SOMA is undoubtedly Frictional Games’ highest artistic peak and a genre high point for sci-fi, horror and adventure games.

It’s a shame they only started experimenting with traditional survival horror guns and inventory management in last year’s Amnesia: The Bunker, which I consider a superior game mechanically and would argue virtually proved that being able to fight back makes horror games better. The same avoider gameplay they've been doing since Penumbra works fine here, but this story and setting combined with some of The Bunker’s mechanical cleverness would have instantly made it into my top 5.