Soma

This review contains spoilers.

Developed by Frictional Games, Soma is a sci-fi adventure game that mixes horror with philosophical discussions about identity. However, with poorly developed characters and troubling design decisions, the game ends up sinking under the weight of its own ambitions.

The protagonist is Simon, a young man who gets into an accident after proposing to a woman without success – an accident that causes her death. Weeks later, he decides to take an experimental test and have his brain scanned. All seems well until he wakes up and realizes he’s no longer in the doctor’s office, but in a ruined underwater facility filled with corpses, robots that believe themselves to be human, and dangerous monsters.

The first mistake the story makes is to quickly dismiss Simon’s past and the elements that have been presented so far. From the instant he wakes up in Pathos II – the name of the underwater complex – his backstory is forgotten and the focus is on the here and now. The car accident, the trauma of losing someone he loved but never managed to get into a serious relationship, none of this has any long-term impact in the story, despite the gravity of the events.

In other words, the accident serves just as a contrived reason for Simon to get scanned, while the girl’s death is meant only to generate some sympathy for him – after all, she ultimately doesn’t matter. So, we will proceed like the game and mostly ignore the opening scenes.

Soma’s story actually becomes interesting in its first few hours. The first major twist, for example, is foreshadowed in an efficient manner, even if it’s not a subtle one. In the midst of all the chaos in the facility, Simon soon comes across a robot that claims to be a person. He says his name is Carl Semken and tells Simon he must be crazy if he believes he’s talking to a machine: “I see both my hands, both my feet,” Carl explains, even though he’s clearly a robot.

Soon after this encounter, while tinkering with a radio, the protagonist manages to contact a woman named Catherine, who indicates her position in another installation on the bottom of the sea. After traveling to where she claims to be, Simon also discovers that Catherine’s voice is coming from a robot. Considering you don’t see Simon – the game is in the first person – the next step in the story becomes a logical one.

Just like Carl and Catherine, Simon realizes that he is the result of copying and installing human consciousness into a machine. This twist, although obviously predictable, works because it mirrors the confusion of those characters, putting the player in their position. We are led to empathize with robot Carl retrospectively, because now we are experiencing his confusion firsthand.

The big point of Soma’s story involves precisely this ability to scan a person’s consciousness, which results in some philosophical questions. Is the Simon who wakes up in Pathos II the same Simon who took the scan, or someone else entirely? How will the memories of the original Simon impact his personality, and how important all this is to the new Simon’s own sense of identity? Is he a mere digital clone of the first Simon’s mind, or a new person altogether? Soma is interested in these questions.

Simon and Catherine are established as the main characters of the story and these discussions arise organically from their conversations. This is due not only to their unusual situation but also to their final goal: they must launch into space a software containing the digitized consciousness of several people living in a simulation, as this program represents humanity’s last chance for survival. They were wiped out by the fall of a meteor and can now endure only digitally – that is, if the protagonist is successful.

The biggest problem besetting Soma‘s philosophical debates is that they star two flat characters. The issue with the opening is actually a symptom of a larger one: Simon’s personality doesn’t matter to the story. He doesn’t even get to be one-dimensional, because he doesn’t have a single defining characteristic: he just reacts with astonishment to astonishing things, doubts doubtful things, and gets scared by very scary things. He has no voice of his own, no desires, no goals, no internal conflicts unrelated to the situations in Pathos II: he’s so devoid of traits that he ends up functioning almost as an avatar for the player. But since this is a story interested in discussing identity, this approach doesn’t work: there’s no identity at play when the protagonist is a hollow shell.

Catherine is there to conduct the debates on a general abstract level, but the trouble comes when it’s time to apply these discussions into their journey. Catherine’s sole function in the narrative is to guide and lead Simon – physically to his goal, and philosophically as well, “preparing” him for the choices he has to make. Her main function in the story, therefore, is to offer exposition, explaining everything to Simon: she’s more of a plot device than a full-fledged character, even though we can still grow fond of her because she’s the only human voice accompanying Simon.

There are two specific moments in the game that deserve a detailed analysis. The better one involves an excellent puzzle that connects the game’s themes to the characters’ immediate goals. The scenario is simple: Simon needs to find a password but the employee who had this information is obviously dead. Their plan, on the other hand, is complicated: they want to create a simulation with this employee’s stored consciousness and discover the password by having Catherine interact with him.

The rub for them is that, since Simon and Catherine recognize themselves as individuals even though they are the copy of a person’s scanned consciousness, restarting the simulation every time they fail to acquire the employee’s password means that they are effectively killing the guy – and then having to create another being just like him to repeat the process. In other words, every time the player fails it means the characters murdered someone. The fact that the solution involves abusing the employee’s emotional relationships, manipulating him with the people he loves, further reinforces the notion of this character as a human being rather than an abstract set of data, making this puzzle the best moment of Soma.

The second scene worth a mention is much more flawed. It occurs when Simon copies his consciousness into another body because the only way forward is swimming through an abyss – and in his current state is unable to withstand the pressure. It’s only after making the copy, however, that the protagonist realizes what a copy actually means: that there are now two Simons instead of just one – and that the Simon who made the copy will have to stay behind and die anyway.

The force of the twist comes from the reminder that the Simon who woke up in the chair at the beginning of the game was (for all intents and purposes) a proper individual, and that he will be stuck in that particular monster-infested facility until he dies. But the scene still misses the mark.

The reasons are twofold. The first is that Simon doesn’t realize what copying his mind actually entails, which is just stupid considering everything that has happened throughout the course of the game. He disregards the exact reason why he considers himself to be a unique individual: a contradiction that simply doesn’t make sense.

The second is that the player immediately controls the new Simon, which dilutes the impact of the situation because we’re now following the perspective of the man who will save himself: instead of evoking despair and anguish by remaining for a time with the perspective of the Simon who will die abandoned – and who we’ve been controlling until then – the narrative prefers to evoke pity here, putting us alongside the more fortunate one, choosing drama over horror – although this makes the name “Pathos II” more fitting.

This is probably to get the player to buy into Catherine’s preposterous lie: she tells Simon that there’s a chance his conscience could go to the new body, if he’s lucky, while the copy he made would stay in his current one. However, this is clearly bollocks and something that only someone really stupid – perhaps this is Simon’s defining characteristic, after all – could believe.

So, when Simon copies his consciousness into the simulation at the climax, the game finally subverts what has been done before and finally stays with the perspective of the one who made the copy. This Simon, then, accuses Catherine of manipulating him and she accuses him of being an idiot, both being correct.

But here, this change in perspective adds nothing to the situation anymore. It’s framed as a twist, but Simon’s stupidity is the sole reason for it to be framed as such. In fact, if the player could have controlled the Simon who woke up in Pathos II at the beginning of the game until his death in the installation, the significance of copying the mind of the surviving Simon into the final simulation would have carried more weight, as the player would now have already felt the sacrifice this Simon is doing.

Moreover, if this Simon also knew what he was doing – having a shred of intelligence and seeing what happened to the previous one – the knowledge could generate melancholic reflections on his part, which could have developed his personality. Instead, Soma offers a decidedly stupid character and a silly twist that results only in a very brief moment of rage on Simon’s part.

Now it’s worth remembering that throughout this journey Simon is chased around by monsters, and if that sounds strange at this point in the analysis, it’s because the creatures do indeed appear out of place in the game. And if they also seem to have come from somewhere else, it’s because some of them were in fact taken from Frictional Games’ previous title, Amnesia: Dark Descent.

Soma copies the vision-distorting effect of looking at some monsters, but if in Amnesia this made sense – because it was a Lovecraftian story where the monstrous element is indescribable and causes madness – here it doesn’t connect to anything else. Here, they’re just a random antagonist – connected to a random AI – and add nothing to the game’s core themes.

The problems with their implementation don’t stop there, however. Each monster, for example, has a particular trait: there are some we can’t look at, some we have to be silent around, and some we can only attack in very specific situations. But these particular traits are not revealed upfront, and there is rarely anything in the creatures’ design that suggests their characteristics. Consequently, the player will probably only find out about them by making a mistake.

There’s a specific creature that only attacks Simon when he moves while it is not covering its face. How does it first appear then? On its back to us, making it difficult to notice that its face is even covered when it doesn’t attack. To make matters worse, in the second and last time it appears, it also deviates from its initial logic, attacking after something in the environment makes a noise, when Simon’s back is turned to it: you’re not looking at the monster, which means that Simon will die and you probably won’t even understand what happened.

Besides the monsters, the rest of the gameplay in Soma is also problematic. Most interactions with objects in the environment are irrelevant. Picking up cups, boxes, pens, stones, and crumpled paper balls, turning everything around 360 degrees, and putting them all back where they were is as useless as it sounds. And there are many cups, boxes, pens, stones, and crumpled paper balls scattered throughout the rooms and corridors of Pathos II. Looking at the abundant trash cans in the installation can make you wonder if Soma‘s first prototypes were called “Cleaning Simulator” and when they decided to change it to sci-fi horror, they forgot to change the mechanics as well.

There’s a small moment in the opening scene when interacting with objects makes sense, but it’s a very funny one. After entering the doctor’s office and not finding him, Simon must search through the guy’s documents for a password, use it on a locked door, and find the doctor inside – who doesn’t react to Simon opening the locked door and proceeds to talk to him as if nothing has happened.

Meanwhile, the early aquatic parts – where Simon walks from one station to another at the bottom of the sea – are dominated by boredom, with the protagonist slowly following a linear path to his goal, in silence, with nothing to do in the process or even to observe in the scenery – since it’s pitch dark in that depth – for several minutes. Apart from the last one in the game, which finds inspiration in the premise of Pitch Black, there is simply nothing remarkable happening in these sequences.

Finally, the game still fails to copy a trend formed by Bioshock, including numerous “recordings” of former employees of Pathos II, but forgetting to make them interesting. In Bioshock, they work because they serve to develop that game’s particular society, using contrasting perspectives to show how it used to function before its downfall. Here, such recordings are about the last moments of each staff member, dealing more with the circumstances of their deaths than with their personalities or with how the facility itself operated. This means that we’re left listening to the deaths of a bunch of people we have no reason to care about. It’s morbid, but random.

Soma is a game with great ideas, but also one that ultimately fails when it comes to developing them. Plagued by boring characters and problematic monster design, Soma doesn’t do justice to its own narrative ambitions.

May 12, 2021.

Review originally published in Portuguese on January 26, 2018.