Soma: Halloween Special

Welcome, to the spoooOOOoookiest entry into the blog so far! This Halloween I’ve put on my big boy pants and actually played a horror game, and that is Soma, the other game that Friction Games developed after their cult hit Amnesia: the Dark Decent. In case you repressed those memories, Amnesia was a sensational survival horror game that came out at a time when all the major publishers were spouting the same line: that survival horror games just weren’t profitable enough to make.

Frictional Games made sure that they knew that they were wrong.

Amnesia scared the ever loving Buh-Jesus out of pretty much everyone who played it. One the downside it also made PewDiePie famous, proving that behind every silver lining there is a cloud.

Soma is the studio's follow up, and still deals with Lovecraftian horror but via different narrative vehicles. The game centres on Simon, a man with a brain injury that is slowly killing him. After sitting down for an experimental treatment and scan of his brain, Simon wakes up in an underwater facility, where things are going less than stellar.

As you can probably guess from the setup and the studio, Soma is a sci-fi survival horror that aims to isolate the player and remove any sense of strength or bravery, instead filling them with dread. Levels are design to disorientate, forcing players to circle them and double back in order to complete objectives.

Frictional Games, 2015

The dilapidated, leaky, rusting hallways and chambers of the facility, called Pathos-II are deliciously threatening. Every creak, groan, and structural strain on the metal framework in the crushing pressures, combined with a near persistent electrical hum, create a real sense of a building in decay; slowly corroding in the inky black of the ocean. This world puts the player on edge before anything has even happened.

This type of horror – building, creeping, subtle – is far more effective than the usual jump scares that plagued many of Soma’s peers at the time (looking at you, Five Nights at Freddy’s). Frictional Games are masters of this more cerebral experience, and their crushing atmosphere is by far one of the most intense I’ve ever been subjected to; even playing in “safe mode”, where the player cannot die, is tense and creepy.

What might kill the player? The monstrous menagerie of, err, monsters, obviously. Their designs vary wildly, from the obviously mechanical to the creatures that blur the lines between human and machine, taking much influence from Giger’s biomechanical creations. These enemies behave uniquely, for the most part. Some are slow and easy to evade, whilst others will remain still as long as they are undisturbed. Then there are monsters that will make the water creature of Amnesia look friendlier than Elmo.

Frictional Games, 2015

Once again, the player is unable to physically defend themselves, instead relying on stealth which, compared to Amnesia, doesn’t actually work quite as well. Throwing objects to create a distraction often doesn’t have the desired effect, and it becomes all too easy to let the AI roam to a far corner, and sprint for the exit.

Some of the machines found inside the foreboding corridors can be interacted with, instead of simply run away from, either through dialogue or puzzle solving. Early on, a machine will be plugged into a terminal the player must access, but removing the cables causes her to scream in agony, and her dying words are “Why did you do that? I was happy…” Players will also meet a robot that is certain that it is a man with a leg injury unable to get up or move, only to come across his corpse a few metres away, as well as a woman on life support who begs the player to end her life.

These puzzles and choices provide a hefty dose of cognitive dissonance for the player by making them do things that make them hate the game in order to progress, similar to how Spec Ops: the Line forces the player to kill civilians and then berate them for it later. What makes this worse is the way the controls are implemented: players, on PS4 at least, must grab hold of an object by holding one button and then use the analogue sticks to pull it free. By creating a cognitive relation between the game’s controls and how an action would be performed in real life, Soma’s kills have far greater physicality and realness than simply aiming a gun and pulling the trigger.

These poor, formerly human, creatures are tied thematically to the narrative. The robots are vessels for brain scan copies, and this includes Simon, whose brain scan from the prologue was the first successful one and shared worldwide. Simon’s mind is copied into several dead bodies throughout the course of the game, with the end goal being copying himself into the ARK, a virtual reality lifeboat for human conscious’ that is to be launched into space. The monsters, too, are a bid to save humanity, but created by Pathos-II’s marauding AI without consequence or awareness of their situations.

But with each of these copies, Soma begs the question: which brain scan is the true one? Which copy gets to continue its perspective, and which one losses the coin toss? It is this existential questioning that resides in Soma’s narrative core, ultimately asking the player whether they think they themselves are real, or whether they personally would risk becoming the copy left behind. Soma is a decent effort in terms of survival horror, even if the AI are too oblivious at times, but it is the game’s atmosphere and story that truly elevate it.