Honestly, commertials bother me but I'm happy that you're getting sponsored. You make good videos so it's nice to see that you can get profit out of it
Exstistential horror, especially an eternity of torture, is literally the most horrifying thing to me. Especially when its done not out of malice, just NOT caring
I guess I may uppset someone by saying this, but.. that exiactly why concept of hell was invented. Religions tend to find their ways to scare people so they follow their rules.
@Human Person See, I think this comment is fascinating because I regard both heaven AND hell with the same kind of terror. Eternity itself is the problem, no matter the context you spend it in. Eventually, all stimuli becomes torturous over time. If you eat nothing but your favourite food, you will despise it before long because all sensation is relative to what we compare it to. Eternity breaks that relativity, because across eternity it is guaranteed that you will become sick of every sensation physically possible, and then you're the egg, as all your favourite things contort into a metaphorical white void. Its a frankly petrifying thought.
@@DrOmni I've had similar thoughts ebfore, but have since realized they are limited in their scope of logic. It necissarily assumes the idea that memory will be perfect or unalterable. Eventually if you do everything all the time you may be sick of everything at once, however we cannot do everything all at once forever (Assuming you remain a human consiousness and not say... a cloud of pulsing energy or something). Eventually you will egt sick of a thing, move on to another until you are sick of that and so on until you eventually loop backa round. Which seems managable to some extent.
@@DrOmni I feel exactly the same way! I was raised Christian and was always terrified of spending eternity in hell OR heaven. It sounds awful to me. Peace to me would be an end to my existence-like when you sleep and don’t dream so you don’t even know you’re alive.
I think the thing that messes me up about this game is that it finally made the concept of non-continuity through digital copies/teleportation/etc click for me. "Simon" as we played him was never going to get on that Ark. It really brings Catherine's actions into light - she understands that she "herself" is not getting on that Ark, she understands how the project works and knows she's going to die on Earth and the version that might make it on the Ark will be a copy of her, not HER her. Explaining that to someone else who still has that hope must be painful to the point of insanity. I know this game and Jacob Geller's video on head transplants are two pieces of art that made me have to go on a long walk so I didn't think too hard about it and collapse into crisis - I can't imagine what it'd be like to live it.
@@ExStepsister An I don't think it should, not really. In case of scan, transplant, teleportation or whatnot, continuity of our brain function is severed, that's why we can speculate about personhood. When we go to sleep our brain still works, and to an extent our personality is still active (in form of dreams), continuity is still there, we just don't remember the entire process
It really raises the question as to whether it is even worth activating the Ark. It is not saving people from suffering, only producing (self-aware) copies that the originals naively hope will experience heavenly pleasure in an artificial world. Humanity did not survive - a memory of humanity which no outside observer will ever witness survived, only to be inevitably lost as the station degrades over the ages.
I never saw Simon as an idiot but as an average person with false hope. Like many of us we latch on to the best outcome instead of the possibility of the most horrible situations. He is told it was a copy but doesn't accept it. There was nothing to return to, another option, or something else to do. It was only this and when you have 1 option you would hope for the best.
I agree! You see him panic when Catherine threatens to leave him alone, and whenever she's mean to him he makes amends very fast - I think he's just terrified of being alone and he does cling. My heart bleeds for him
The thing to remember is that Simon isn't "an average person." He's an artificial construct *imitating* human neurology according to a non-human's guess to what that's like. His mind is deliberately obfuscating the reality of his situation.
@chuth2768 Well no, he's a scan of a human brain fairly close to when that human died of a terminal disease. WAU doesn't have to guess anything about the scans, only the relationship between body and mind.
I think a lot of people forget that Simon was scanned after he sustained severe life threatening brain injury. Having a bit of trouble with brand new big concepts is pretty understandable for someone recovering from brain damage. He was also full of a lot of desperate hope when he was scanned that mindset probably carried over.
Amusing bit of trivia: "Story/Safe Mode" was not originally part of the game. As released, there was no way to disable the monster attacks. That changed when the "Wuss Mode" mod was released, which was basically identical to the eventual gamemode. Assumedly, Frictional saw the mod, decided that removing the monster AI really was a valid game experience, and included it in a patch to spread that experience to the non-modding playerbase.
Simon's "please don't leave me alone" as the power turns off around him gets me everytime :') I'm absolutely terrified of being completely alone like that and the ending just knocked me on my ass
It haunts me. He's trapped at the bottom of the coldest, deepest abyss, alone, in pitch blackness, forever... I can't even imagine the horror he must go through.
I watched someone else play this because I'm too much of a scaredy cat for horror games but I haven't stopped thinking about the ending since that day. It's so crushingly awful to think about - sometimes I'll just randomly be going about my day and think about Soma's ending again. Literally one of the most chilling stories in gaming
As is also mentioned in the video, the monsters feel kind of out of place - Simon can't die, after all, so there's no survival aspect in the traditional sense anyway. You could remove them, have a full-on "walking simulator" and still have Soma be one of the most horrifying games ever created. There are four moments in particular I can't forget even years after seeing the game for the first time: 1) The communication with loved ones on Earth leading up to the end of the world describing how ordinary humans experienced their last moments 2) The radio transmission from those surfacing a little outside of Portugal (IIRC) describing how everything is aflame after the impact 3) The part where you have to swap your consciousness into another body and realize that you just left another version of yourself stranded in that small room and finally, of course... 4) The dual ending. It truly is a unique story and is impossible to shake.
The way i interpreted idea behind "blowy" is that you have to choose between killing a robot that by this point you know it's a scanner of a real person, OR "killing" an object that's not conscious of itself but you attached yourself to it because it was useful to you, and it was kinda cute(even Simon express this). I believe the idea is to show how the value we give to life is relative. How we sometimes might give more value to an inanimate objects that we have history with (and in this case and object that we anthropomorphized) than a real human being that we just met.
@@MertKayKay For me it was more of a perception of sentience. When we unplugged the robot at the beginning, we didn't know a person was in it, when we make electricity go through the other robot we only had an inkling. Now when we get to blowy, we know that full people can be inside machines, and when we attack blowy, I found myself wondering if blowy didn't speak because it wasn't sentient or if it just didn't have a voice module to express it's sentience in a way we could understand. I think about that much more than the end, the wonderings of our perception of experience and sentience and feelings and thoughts in others, and those that others have in us.
@@jamiehart2191 If you kill the other robot, Blowy (or K8, model number in the game) gets angry & avoids you, & never helps you again. I tried both & didn't like either.
If I recall there's actually two people in that robot, it's a guy called Javid Goya and a silent backup copy of Terry Akers, who he thinks he's having a nice chat with.
This game literally gives me what feels like PTSD when ever i see that last part of Simon being left behind. No exaggeration, my heart clenches, breathing gets hard, and i get extreme anxiety, i become scared too. The crazy part is that it lasts only seconds. This is the only piece of media that does this to me. Idk what this means. Lets just say i would hate to be in Simons situation in real life.
The funny thing is that if SOMA were a movie, that's how it would had ended, with no glimpse of the Simon in the Ark (unless it was a Hollywood movie, then it would had the happy ending only and totally forget that Simon and Catherine left behind in the deep ocean)
@@MertKayKay Always a pleasure! Honestly, your videos give me that same warm fuzzy feeling inside that early Yogscast videos gave me. Pure UK energy with a good serving of Dick jokes, your mom jokes, and British humor.
When he said he literally had no mouth my brain flashed to the short story 'I have no mouth and I must scream', I initially dismissed it as just being similar wording, but in the end there is a sort of parallel both protagonists are the last 'human' creatures on a destroyed earth having mercy killed all of their companions, destined to be tortured forever and unable to die.
I never made the connection that Simon was a bit slowwith his realizations bc of his brin damage. I think both him and Catherine were, on some level aware what they were doing, Catherine with the "just robots" and simon with not realizing one of him would go on and one of him would stay behind. I think they were both compartmentalizing hard, not admitting to each other OR themselves what was happening, in order to reach a goal they both thought was the only good goal left. I always wondered how they left-behind-catherine felt. She wasn't surprised, but she also didn't seem scared or sad. Did she think of herself like she thought about the other robots? Would she stay with Simon and just vibe for eternity or would she shut herself down? I kind of feel like she believed what the suicide-ppl thought, that since a version of her made it, she made it. But I wonder if she actually ever let herself think about what would happen after. We know she considered the scans human when it came to preserving human-kind, but not when it came to... needing to kill or use them. How would she apply that to herself? SUCH an interesting character who raises so many interesting questions to ponder when we put herself in her position
@@steelbear2063 yeah but my point is that Catherine doesn't say "it's worth it to kill others that are just like us if that means we can reach our goal" but instead, she seems to see herself as a completely different from of being. She Both sees the robots as not real people while seeing the brain scans that reach the arc as "saving humanity". My point wasn't if a moral dilemma exists or not, but specifically about the inner workings/dissociation of the two ppl we actually spend time w
I liked Soma a lot more than the Black Mirror episode because the BM ep involves creating and torturing a sentient mind to do something my dad could program and schedule in the 1990s. In Soma, the situation where you can find and preserve human consciousness has a lot more stakes.
yeah, as much as I like black mirror I always thought that particular episode was kinda dumb, I can set my own alarm or whatever without creating a duplicate consciousness. hell, creating a duplicate consciousness not only seems inefficient, it also seems more likely to go terribly wrong. it's blatantly stated that the cookies can go insane, rewriting their code in an unintended way. there's no way after thousands of years that process of self rewriting wouldn't result in some sort of exploit resulting in a breach of security, and it would be practically impossible to stop since at that point your fighting against a mind tens of thousands of times faster than your own.
I'd use the comparison for this game and "I have no mouth and I must scream". Both are existential horror seeped in death and the decay of earth, with identity and choice being at the forefront of each experience. While IHNMAIMS isn't transhumanist per say, there are a lot of parallels through AMs treatment of the five characters you can play as, with death never being a true way of escape, and the idea of the mind being forced to live and relive it's own trauma through a computer simulation. Neither games ending is truly happy either, just a slightly lighter than true black.
@@MertKayKay if you're looking for transhumanist reading/listening, you should try the audible original "We are Legion (We are Bob)" by Dennis E. Taylor. It's about a man - Bob - who joins a club to freeze his head upon death only to find he's being used to manage an interstellar search for a planet to colonize.
@MertKayKay Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original short story, voiced AM in the game and helped write it. Worth watching a playthrough if you don't want to deal with 90s point and click
People usually put all the attention into their Amnesia franchise, and while I do agree that Amnesia is an amazing game, I still think Soma is by far the greatest masterpiece of the studio. Great video as always, keep it up!
This is one of those cases where the most jaw dropping moments of this game don't even involve the gameplay. The way our minds try to adapt to the existential-script with such atmospheric environments really is an experience beyond words. Genuinely love your content! Keep up the amazing work! :)
I love your analysis, this might be my favourite video on SOMA I've ever watched. I honestly find Catherine a deeply relatable and compelling character - when Simon asks her how she's so chill about her situation, she says something like "I never felt comfortable being human anyway" and it really paints her as someone who's always been unable to relate to other people (even before becoming a disembodied computer voice), and someone excited for the transhumanist innovations of the future. I'm not sure if she was written this way on purpose, but she reads as an autistic character to me (an autistic person) and I find her storyline sympathetic. She was just a scientist trying to do her own little project and then the world ended and suddenly she had to 'save humanity' and try to answer philosophical and ethical questions that are simply not possible to answer. And then everyone gets mad about her answers.
20:05 It's been about a year or two since I've played Soma, but it impacted me so profoundly. I felt such incredible empathy for these "robots" that I did not want to progress the game if it meant hurting them. If I remember correctly, there are many additional dialogue options that you can go through after achieving certain objectives. With Carl here, I could tell him that he was a machine, and he would break down into an inconsoleable existential mess. I also vaguely remember that I was able to "deactivate" him prematurely. I did this as a mercy kill, as it seemed the only humane option. Many of the characters you meet in Soma have these hidden options to understand them further or to achieve some sort of secondary objective, if you will. Even the monsters have lore associated with them. One "person" in particular that I developed an incredible fondness for was this little helper bot who would open doors or illuminate areas on this small island area. It cannot speak, you cannot touch it, and really outside of the context of this game, you might not even recognize that the bot is actually human. I can't remember exactly what happened, but I was seperated from him, probably in getting onto the ride back to the main plateau area(?). I hesitated before getting on. The doors closed, and I thought, "I'll never see him again."
I find it interesting that Simons naivete and physical composition and Catherine's computer expertise and unique introspection are the only reasons they haven't gone mad like the others. I always considered that it wasn't just for selfish reasons she shut down Simons questions about the nature of their existence, she may also be trying to prevent his slip into madness. Like he could end up stuck in a recursive logic loop or something by getting too philosophical....
Actually, i've never seen that note telling Simon about the vivid nightmares, i've replayed this game atleast a dozen times and explored every inch and that has always slipped unnoticed. how real is reality when we can't even pick up on all the cues of things not being... 'real'. what a hellish reality we could be very well trapped in, unable to see further. oh and someone did climb the omega gun in adjacent side material to SOMA, basically when *spoilers* catherine dies and everyone goes back to Tau, someone starts putting together a plan to climb it. well once things go very sour, the woman in the story starts climbing the whole way up, having little in the way of bearing as she ascends from the abyss foot by foot. eventually she makes it to the surface the moment before sunrise and with the freedom to choose her own fate. takes off her suit and waits to succumb to the toxic atmosphere, smiling content as she watches the clouds break and the sun rises.
As someone who never allows themselves to catch a thought in their brain in silence (yes I am listening to this during chores because who would clean up all alone with their thoughts running?!) the thought of being all alone, just conscience no body just thoughts floating around throughout infinity...absolutely terrifies me😭
“I have no mouth and I must scream”and “Dark Wood”, are up there but Soma is truely its own box of frogs. This game made me feel truely sad as a human being. The rush to get them out at the end only to find a copy was sent in to space, as if there was any other way…god
@@MertKayKay it’s the scariest game I’ve played easily, and does it all in its own very unique way without anything cheap like jumpscares or scripted segments. It and soma are the best horror games ever made in my eyes
I… actually spared the WAU I feel with enough time it can actually make a real living thing with the scans. I really think it made Simon and he was so successful with such little time, why not give it a chance. I really recommend the video Devils Advocate - SOMA an argument to spare the WAU
I really wish the ending had been the digital copies living at the bottom of the ocean survived and decide to do their own thing along with people surviving on the spaceship.
I absolutely adore SOMA. It is a game that grips me every time. I love that you can burden yourself to help out NPCs, but if you are not paying attention you can accidentally do irreversible harm to the world. I have seen a lot of people argue that Simon is stupid. Even Catherine says so. But I think that he has been put into the nightmare and is simply trying to cling to what he knows so that he doesn't loose his mind. He is literally in over his head, and clinging to any strand of hope he can get. He is much more composed and rational than I would be tbh. But I also love how Catherine plays into this aspect of Simon to keep him on track. Because all that matters in the end is the Arc.
@@MertKayKay i’m literally begging i can tell u all abt how i can only play mariokart wii and wii sports resorts but only the fencing minigames and you can tell me abt how halo is actually abt god
Soma is a game I've heard of, but never played. That said, your narration of the story, sprinkled with humorous takes and references, just hit the right spot. Loved it, probably more so than if I had played through the game myself.
This remains one of my favorite games to this day. You're right, the actual gameplay is very straightforward, but the story itself was what got me hooked. Years after first playing it/watching others run through it and I still think about it. Soma was one of the first games that made me sit back and just debate with myself about what made you human (within the context of the game). Very fun, even if it was trying to trigger an existential crisis. Edit: That moment when Simon realizes that he wasn't "transferred" and was actually copied in Omicron was both heartbreaking and horrific. But even so, he still didn't fully understand until the end of the game. Edit 2: Was there a reason you disliked Catherine so much? Lmao. She had a goal she felt she needed to achieve - to save humanity. While, yes, she manipulated Simon, what other choice did she have? He was an idiot. He REFUSED to accept the reality of his situation, even when she tried to explain. And when he finally accepted that he was no longer human, he was still in denial about the coin toss until the very end. So, yes, she used him, but Simon also used her as well. Her goal was to set off the ARK no matter the cost. His goal was to get himself ON the ARK no matter the cost.
I definitely understand Catherine and her goal, but I think I dislike her because she took advantage of Simon's isolation and loneliness and brain trauma to reach her end goals - you can see how much he panics when she tells him she'll leave him alone. I know she has a proper goal in mind and I do think it's a noble goal, but when you consider Simon, she's taking advantage of a man in an extremely vulnerable situation and my heart just bled for him. I think he had a right to understand what was going on even if it meant he refused to do it. I think she had a good idea, but executed it with cruelty :D
Honestly I kinda empathize with Catherine. It's a bit like being in a life threatening situation in irl. You'll have people who take charge, who work through their own trauma in the situation by finding a goal they can accomplish and fixating on it, then you have the people who just panic and close themselves off. Simon is essentially the panicking person who needs to be slapped and Catherine has no hands lol.
Excellent video! I originally shared your dislike of Catherine until I found one particularly interesting theory the game revolves around the processing power of her robot brain. As you discussed most of the machines with human minds have difficulty perceiving reality, and the Simons are the most functional people we meet. Given how Catherine is both extremely dismissive of Simon and hyper focused on her goal I believe it's reasonable to assume her mind may be compromised due to the limitations of her vessel. This is especially noticeable if we compare PA Catherine's detached mannerisms to the almost affectionate greeting ARK Catherine gives to ARK Simon. I think it adds to the tragedy of the story that not only is Simon a man out of time, but that he is being led by a barely functioning Catherine. It doesn't redeem her entirely in my mind, but I no longer hate her character overall.
I keep telling myself “he made it, he made it on the ark as a copy, he’s okay in one way” cause I’m trying to make myself feel better about my fears of a similar fate. I’m in such deep denial that all of Simon is stuck forever cause I’m afraid of jinxing myself a similar fate by being scared
ultimately Simon either died when you turned off his battery under sedation, or lived alone in the facility, deep Simon simply experienced what happened to his earlier counterpart, though the real fault lies with original Simon who decided to donate a version of him which didn't exist to consent to its new reality.
Also- the welder robot that helps you out from the escape shuttle actually runs away in fear after you "BEAT THE SHIT" out of the bloke robot to take his chip. Because yeah, you have choice there- either you murder the barely lucid bloke or the welder bot who fkin saved you out of a can
when I played Soma it kinda reminded me of Prey (2017), not just because of the whole twist at the end but because of the walking around an abandoned facility and seeing what everyone left behind. Both games also give you moral choices to make that have little to no impact on the gameplay, they're just there to make you think really. They're also both seriously underrated
Your essay launched an interesting discussion with my friends about "the end." Simon the robot never realized when he was doing something for the last time (which could be as big as speaking with his impassive AI companion or opening a door) because he was so busy trekking forward. When you hit a dead end and are left with all the things you lost having gaining nothing equivalent, like paradise, it's crushing. That's a bit of a tangent from what you were discussing, but the way you zeroed in on Simon's situation was especially fun to listen to. Great video, as always!
Aww thank you TL! Really glad you enjoyed it. And the idea of doing something for the last time without even realising is a pretty dark theme, I love it.
Kind of reminds me of World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt. A girl is contacted by a clone of herself from the future. She explains that a version of immortality is made available through cloning, but there is slight deterioration with each new generation. The clone shows the girl glimpses of future lives she'll live, then looks for a memory from the original girl that's been lost over time.
Wow that sounds like a really intimate story of transhumanism, I love the ones that are more about the individual than the whole. Should be awesome, thank you so much for the recommendation!
@@MertKayKay Hope you enjoy it. Another thing I'd strongly recommend that has some similarities to this is The Talos Principle. It's a game similar to Portal in that you're doing a series of puzzles at the command of a disembodied voice. Interacting with computers spread around leads into discussions about religion, free will, subjective vs objective reality, and how to define a human. They also reveal pieces to a story about humanity trying to preserve their legacy in the face of a global extinction event.
“Imagine if you put all the cookies on an island with all the stimulus in the world and fast forward a thousand years” That is, for better and for worse, an actual plot line in Sword Art Online: Alicization
@@dustgraystone9448 Yes! Time is accelerated in the game, so he was able to live there for what seemed like years, when really it was a few weeks or months at most in the real world.
I think this also fits into the Lovecraftian-esque fear of the unknown. The person went into a spooky, weird place to have a not very standard procedure done, and got stuck living through infinite lives because of that one action, because of just knowing something, or experiencing something. He does something without thinking or realizing what it means, and, essentially, makes a deal with the unknown.
I'm so glad you covered this game! It's definitely one of the most haunting pieces of media I've ever seen. As you said, the gameplay isn't really anything, so it's super hard for me to recommend this game to people, but it's story singlehandedly boosts it up to a sort of "masterpiece" status for me. For most of the game, my understanding was pretty much on par with Simon's, I took the biggest blow after the "transfer" to the new body leaving the original Simon still alive. From that point on I pretty much understood everything and anticipated the ending I figured would come. Even with figuring out how it will possibly end though, the ending still hit me like a ton of bricks. The decision to have the perspective switch to the new body in Omicron, lulling us into a false sense of safety only to later have the ending of the game stay with our current Simon first, rather than immedietly showing the ARK was so brilliant. I'd love to interview the devs and see if they had any debates over which order to show the ending in, the one they went with is definitely the right choice in my mind. Game aside, your content is absolutely incredible, I'm shocked you haven't been picked up by the algorthythm sooner. I found your channel a while ago and have been going through most of your videos, your writing is crazy good! This was the first time in years that I've sat through a Raid ad, just 'cause I was super happy you got a deal with them, get your coin girl, you really deserve it!! It's been a hot minute since I went through your content so it could be that you mentioned it already, but in case not, do you ever plan on potentially making a video on What Remains of Edith Finch?
Hey Balo! Thanks so much! I'm really glad you and I had a similar experience with Soma being roughly on the same wavelength as Simon, some of my friends played it and they predicted the storybeats very early on and I felt like a mug 🤣 I played Edith Finch for the first time this month and I really enjoyed it! I'd love to do a video on it one day once I come up with some inspiration for what to discuss; I would hate to just rehash what other people have said. There's a lot to discuss regarding it Anyway thank you so much for watching Balo 🥰
This game and what remains of Edith Finch were both games that gave me serious existential dread about how easy you could lose something or someone you love, and I think it really gave me a feeling that 2020 was going to be a bad year because of something big that was going to happen and it also gave me the thought and feeling the world was going to end throughout the summer of 2019 it definitely was an eye opening experience
Catherine is very interesting in this because whoever she was as a human, we only really know her as the person she was copied as. Obviously at the very end of the game when we find her murdered corpse and the last logge from her and her old ark team she was adamant that her ark project be launched as quick as possible and ended up being killed because the others wanted to wait longer for one reason or another. We hear first hand she was determined and unswayable in her goals, and she seems to have always had that streak to her seeing as Data chip Cathy was scanned well before the very end of her human days. I think by the very end of Human Catherine's life she had accepted the fact that her project was the only possible thing left that had a chance to continue on in some capacity, everyone left alive on Earth was in the station under water, time was destroying it little by little and everyone who was still alive and scanned tended to kill themselves because they knew there was no future; they couldn't live down in the ocean forever when time was destroying the facility little by little, everyone they loved was dead- no food fresh supplies, the ever present threat of being imprisoned under the ocean with an increasingly unstable strcucter around you and piling up dead bodies and science experiments going rogue . There was just nothing, nothing to live for, and nothing that supported continuing to be alive. I think Catherine realized this at some point and at the very least her scanned form was heavily imprinted by this nihilistic mentality in some unconscious way (or maybe she fully acknowledged it and just accepted it for what it's). She just has a goal and that's the most important thing to her. She needs it to be done and done as best as it can be done, and she doesn't want to acknowledge any extra problems by anyone else because they pale in comparison to her ultimate goals. She doesn't want to keep talking about how things work with Simon because he doesn't ultimately need to know because that doesn't *matter* he' he'll never have an opportunity to actually better himself or get over it in any meaningful way, or do anything else meaningful with his existence even if Catherine did take the time to explain things and allow him to get over it, because nothing was ever going to be left for him or her to do, but launch the ark and sit around until they power off or get destroyed in some capacity.
I spared the second Simon after the transfer. It was actually slightly reassuring at the end when i realized Deep Sea Simon had someone to hang out with
Soma's weird "what is sentience/what is life" conundrum (and by extension those Black Mirror episodes) reminds me of the teletransportation paradox. If you were broken down into base components on Earth, had that information sent at lightspeed to Mars, then reformed using base components there, would that still be you? They addressed that in Star Trek a lot and their answers never satisfied me. For instance, there's an episode of The Next Generation where the crew discovers that a long time ago a copy of Commander Riker was made during a transporter accident. One William Riker went on to become the first officer on the Enterprise while the other got marooned on a desolate planet. When the question "who is the real Will Riker" was finally asked, the show just said that they both were as, physically at least, they were 100% the same person. They've done this with time travel, spacial anomalies, all sorts of stuff, but that particular story always bothered me because the Will Riker character was my template for what being a man was (Nigel funfact: I was raised by a single mom). I felt like they had done the character dirty somehow and since then I've always been fascinated with the paradox. That fascination won't get me to play a thinly veiled walking sim, but I enjoy listening to people talk about it. On that note, thank you for knocking out another A+ video.
Watching this a second time this mirrors Nier and The Outer Wilds in a lot of ways. How life and the time we have should be valued and how random things can lead to massive changes. The meteor killing most surface life really shows the chaos of the universe and how even in our final moments humanity tries to create order from this. Attempting to launch what is a perfect world in a virtual world in defiance of the chaos of the universe. But like the meteor who says that world will last, will it crash, the solar panels get damage, or maybe Simon will find more robots like him and they'll continue to live on like the Mages from FF9. It's a lot of what ifs but that's what makes Soma great, on the surface there's a lot of dread but when you peel back and use the same chaos that set the game into motion it can lead to something hopeful. That or KayKay is right and Simon is just having a last vision before death.
You asked for recommendations (sorta) and hearing you describe this reminded me of I have no mouth and I must scream! It’s one of my favorite books and I believe it has a graphic novel and a game as well!!
While the ending is an absolute punch in the gut, nothing caused me more dread than hearing the other Simon talk after switching suits and the conversation with Catherine in the elevator afterward.
It’s the same for me! I remember not really processing what was happening at first, assumed that the Simon we controlled was speaking but was just muffled due to the new body. Even when he asked if it didn’t work, I just thought he was disoriented or something was wrong with the suit that we couldn’t see yet. But then when new Simon spoke up loud in clear, asking what that was. Man, did my stomach drop. You still feel so attached to old Simon that playing as new Simon feels so uncomfortable. Like your playing as someone else, but is it really someone else if they have the same memory? It’s excellent existential horror! In my opinion, the ending hits even harder because of that brilliant scene!
I think there's one sentient robot you encounter earlier than your example, but he's very hard to hear with all the static and scary noises the game throws at you and I only noticed he was even there in hindsight. Very early on, you're in a lit room and then the lights go off. There's a robot on the floor saying things like "you, not me" over and over. It's the only room where you have to touch the WAU flower/butthole. And when you do it cuts his power and kills him I found this one creepier in hindsight because on my first playthrough I had killed him without ever knowing he was there.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this game to me is how thorough and singular it is in keeping up this one specific kind of horror without wearing it out. It slowly ramps up the existential questions and dread with carefully placed scenarios and moral dilemmas for a multi-hour experience keeping it fresh. Only a single episode (And another that sort of references it briefly) of Black Mirror is all that’s necessary for it to make a point about the horrifying implications of consciousness through technology. The amount of editing and workshopping layout design to make it not a complete drag must have been astounding on top of all the other work that goes into making any game
Completely agree, this story most likely wouldn' t work in any other media. For me one of the strongest moments definitely was the last living human on Earth. What a bizzare, sad and frightening idea for a scene.
Finally someone pointed out that there is no coin tossing at all. Conscious existence is not an moveable object, its a process. If someone made a clone of you, there is no 50/50 chance that you gonna be moved to the clones body. Its a new existance with your memories up to the point of its origin.
Oh btw It is stated why Simon is there as a scan- he is a legacy scan used as a example to what AI should be. Essentially- he is a template of human brain on which all newest AI in world of SOMA were built. Not literally turning Simon's brain into AIs, but as a... showcase how human brain works so people can program AIs in "it's image". And if you listen to one of the logs in Delta (or Omicron) you can find that Simon agreed for his scan to be used for science while he was on his death bed. And you technically meet another robot that you unplug before the one in the powerplant control room. In the room before a vent section is the first "WAU butthole you finger" and there is a voice that tells you to not touch it, after you touch the "WAU flower" the voice is gone. My thinking is that the scan was probably built into the control panel you just touched, WAU isn't above putting scans into industrial equipment (Dunbat as an example) And WAU's "Magnetic Shriek" aside from being a gesture of self preservation might have been "allowed to kill" because WAU was already on it's way of "resurecting" people. The law was baypassed because it had a way to return the human to life, even tho this state of living is extremaly dubious and stress inducing for the creation
This whole thing, with the slices of consciousness and 'cookies,' reminds me a lot of the movie Source Code! Ignore the presence of Jake Gyllenhell, and there's a really interesting story there. I don't want to say anything else because spoilers though :x
YEEEEEEESSSSSS! I absolutely ADORED SOMA. This game had all the horror vibes with just the right amount of let up between the chases and drag down horror moments. All that aside, I've only found your channel a week ago or so and have accidently chewed through all your videos. Listening at work is exactly what I need to get by during these hellish summer days. Thank you for the hours of entertainment.
This hands down the best analysis of Soma I have seen. It is one of my favorite games, and it was amazing to see someone cover the themes of existential horror that it evokes! So many essays only scratch the surface of these themes, but you dove deep into them! The comparison to black mirror was excellent too, that is another piece of media that lives rent free in my head. Those same thought experiments with the cookies have haunted me as well and I can’t believe I never thought to compare it to soma! Thanks so much for making such a great video!
Once, I met one of the vice presidents of the United States, backstage at a concert. Nice guy, kinda nerdy, big on environmentalism. So he decided he'd show me his musical talent, turns out the dude plays drums. Unfortunately, it wasn't that great at first, he was a little off beat, kinda slow. But I recognised some symptoms, and I realised it was because his blood sugar levels were kinda low. So I popped to the kitchen, made him a jam sandwich, and after he ate it, he played perfectly. Now you may be wondering why I'd make this long, obviously false story in this comment section. But in that story, I did the same thing I'm doing right now. Feeding the Al-Gore-Rhythm.
All Game developers and movie producers could learn much from Soma, it shows very clearly how vital a coherent story is to anything with ambitions above the mundane, with decent graphics and interesting puzzles it relies on little else but its unfolding plot, the player's immersion with the character leads to a devastating conclusion that rattles around your brain for a long time afterwards.
I loved how the game got you to interrogate your own relationship to existence and its value. I did kill the lady that wanted to die and if I can recall you can sit with her until she passes so she won't be alone and I did. I don't think the suicides were quite as stupid as it might first appear. If all Simons are equal, then when Simon 1 kills himself once Simon 2 is created and they do it at the same moment (which is the goal) there is no fork in the path and there is a "continuity" of existence. The current Simon doesn't have to deal with the moral issue of any previous ones, there is only the singular existence of the current Simon and as long as he does this for future incarnations it will be, for all practical purposes a "transfer" of consciousness to another body. I don't think it's true or a good road to go down but it's not stupid. If anything it's overthought. I do sometimes still get chills thinking of the Simon on the ocean floor locked up in that cage. But I think your "final exam" for what constitutes life is how you handle the WAU. Do you think life is to be valued absolutely? Then the WAU must continue keeping everything alive. Does life only have value if it's recognizably human? At what point does non-human life inherit the right to exist? It's a lot to chew on.
I’ve always liked Catherine and I view her relationship with Simon as “warming up slowly” rather than how you describe her, but I get it and maybe I’m just coping
if i remember right you can actually take the time to reroute the power that would have been going through Carl to go through somewhere else safely, but you would have to evade one of the murder robots to do so
Aww DBG I feel you on that! I always just watch videos about horror films instead of watching them because I'm a big poo poo baby. I'm glad you like my videos and I'll have to make some more! :D And gosh I started F.E.A.R when I was about 14 and turned it off out of... well, fear. Haha! I'll have to go back to it. Thank you so much!
@@MertKayKay If you love sci-fi writing in general, I might recommend 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim! It's a half visual novel, half tactical rpg that has almost every sci-fi trope in the book and nails each of them rather well.
Just watching it now and congrats mert you've come along way since 2020 and I'm super happy for you and the progress you've made. You deserve every bit of success from the youtubes. Keep it up dude!
27:00 This is why the writers are absolutely genius. This is the Three Laws of Robotics, warped and bastardized in such a way no one would have thought of. It's a horrifying thought.
The White Christmas episode reminds me a lot of the short story collection Axiomatic by Greg Egan, particularly "Learning to be Me" and "Closer" (also a bit of "The Cutie"). All very creepy sci-fi stories with existential questions.
Idk if the gameplay will be to your liking, but I think you will enjoy the story of the zero Escape series. 1. 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors 2. Virtues last reward 3. Zero time dilemma They are available on steam. Each of them is a visual novel with a lot of endings and decisions. In betweem you will also be placed in Escaperooms which you need to solve. I loved it and the topics discussed in these games seem to interest you.
I wish I could play this game again for the first time. I literally sat in stunned silence and wept silently when you realized Catherine was gone and you were left behind. This is an absolute masterpiece of a game and it's favorite horror game of all time.
"Hells of our own creation" is a topic Jacob Geller did some time ago and something Id love to go into myself. SOMA, ...And I Must Scream, SuperHot Series, Silent Hill 2&3, Returnal, Risk Of Rain 2 in a way, and literally and IRL convention. A cool topic for sure. Oh and by the way what the SOMA's humans did with their consciousness is word for word what the humans did in Kirby as confirmed by Forgotten Land.
I was about to say that Soma could be great season 1/2 Black mirror episode! White Christmas is probably the closest thing we have to Soma on the small screen. That being said I personally found "Well be right back" as my favorite episode of black mirror as it asked what are humans? What is loss? And what is grief? And how we deal with these subjects while we have these digital footprints that for many of us will long outlive our own lives.
Oh my gosh yes! I rewatched that episode a few weeks ago when binging the series again and the second watch really worked for me. Like when humans never HAVE to face closure or grief, when there's an 'easy out', when you can bandage it with a fake but permanent fix, you do have to wonder what someone would choose
Awesome this game is amazing. I have a lot of trouble getting through the scary games where you can't defend yourself and the inclusion of a mode where the monsters don't chase you around and insta kill you is great. This is one of my favorite games, my love of transhumanism stuff and my fear of the ocean really made this game shine
Honestly really reminds me of "i have no mouth and i must scream" Maybe the technology isn't as personally and emotionally out for torture but the idea of "everyone else is dead... its more merciful if we die too" is still present in both Technology going rouge as well and creating unspeakable horrors Less copie-of-a-copie-of-a-copie-of-a-copie-of-a-person More "enteral hell, alone and aware of everything"
Remarking on your comment at the end; sometimes it's perfectly fine to have a video that exists just for the sake of existing. Even though you can look at something from an analytical perspective, the ultimate takeaway of "it was simply fun and enjoyable" is just as valid as a scientific breakdown. I've always heard stuff about this game, but never really bothered exploring further than seeing a few random thumbnails here and there, so thank you for making this video and helping me understand why I've heard so many people praise it before.
I remember getting this as a freebie some years back and just never bothered to play past the first hour or so. I definitely should have given it more of a chance, especially since it's setting is very much my jam now. Also congrats on 30k!!
Oh hell yeah Chris! The gameplay is a bit like piloting an RC car down a straight corridor but the story is good shit. Hope you enjoy it :D And thank you!
I'm so excited to see this, gonna repeat watch for sure over the course of a few days leading into going to bed (I promise that's a compliment, it's why I've seen so much hbomberguy!)
Great to see a new upload from you Mert, you've quickly become one of my fave creators (binged your stuff the past couple of weeks). Also love the ideas discussed in SOMA so can't wait for your take
There's this video game - I can't remember for the life of me what it was called - but the whole concept was you were the last human not in this digital 'afterlife' scan, and the planet or ship or whatever you were on was doomed, so you had to go through the game and find the scanner to save yourself... only for the scan to indeed take a copy of your brain... but leaves you, yourself, in reality. Because, yeah, scanning your brain wouldn't take your soul with you, so... what's the point? It's literally this game but ...not! Because the ending - you see and hear your 'copy' make it safely into paradise. It was pristine and white, the room, however. And your copy was physical and you could HEAR them in the other room...
I find that Brooker often relies on his characters being sociopathic, stupid, or both plus unfettered for his stories to work - but JESUS is White Christmas terrifying. (Black Museum also gave me a full on panic attack.)
Something I often thing about with regards to Soma is how similar the WAU and Catherine end up in attempting to "preserve humanity". I'm referring specifically to the WAU's practice of putting humans into a deep dream vs Catherine's Ark; two solutions to the problem that in practice are not that radically different. Both offer an artificial fantasy for the last vestiges of humanity to escape into as they are preserved in perpetuity, and both have been paid for in blood and suffering at the hands of a callous creator in pursuit of a greater good. Yet while the latter is generally accepted as a worthwhile endeavor, the former is often considered something so grotesque and inhumane that death is a mercy in comparison. How eagerly people jump at "mercy killing" in games is a whole other can of worms I won't get into, but I just wonder if the WAU's yucky looking meat dream network gets such a bad rap just because of the physical form it takes.
Oh yes that's very true! I never noticed that. Both are consciousness in 'fake' worlds, never actually achieving anything or living their fullest lives. And if you destroy the WAU I imagine the sleeping victims all just die being that there's no longer life support for them.
This is so interesting! It reminds me of the times when I first started doubting my old faith and was really scared of the idea of the Heaven that I had been taught to look forward to. That our capacity to do wrong things/free will could just be...stripped away. Having to spend life in this unchanging strange existence forever, submitting to a deity who I could no longer see as all-loving. No way out, no massive changes of time, and the only alternative being Hell which is even scarier. You explaining this game brings back that strange feeling.... On a more positive note, your mum being really proud of you is really wholesome awwww xD
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Raid shadow legends more like Shit game Boredom legends.
Honestly can't even blame you for that, rent ain't pays itself
Honestly, commertials bother me but I'm happy that you're getting sponsored. You make good videos so it's nice to see that you can get profit out of it
Raid is the true existential horror. Except when it pays for a flat or something, that’s pretty good.
Exstistential horror, especially an eternity of torture, is literally the most horrifying thing to me. Especially when its done not out of malice, just NOT caring
Yeah! Like so much scarier to just be forgotten
I guess I may uppset someone by saying this, but.. that exiactly why concept of hell was invented. Religions tend to find their ways to scare people so they follow their rules.
@Human Person See, I think this comment is fascinating because I regard both heaven AND hell with the same kind of terror. Eternity itself is the problem, no matter the context you spend it in. Eventually, all stimuli becomes torturous over time. If you eat nothing but your favourite food, you will despise it before long because all sensation is relative to what we compare it to. Eternity breaks that relativity, because across eternity it is guaranteed that you will become sick of every sensation physically possible, and then you're the egg, as all your favourite things contort into a metaphorical white void. Its a frankly petrifying thought.
@@DrOmni I've had similar thoughts ebfore, but have since realized they are limited in their scope of logic. It necissarily assumes the idea that memory will be perfect or unalterable. Eventually if you do everything all the time you may be sick of everything at once, however we cannot do everything all at once forever (Assuming you remain a human consiousness and not say... a cloud of pulsing energy or something). Eventually you will egt sick of a thing, move on to another until you are sick of that and so on until you eventually loop backa round. Which seems managable to some extent.
@@DrOmni I feel exactly the same way! I was raised Christian and was always terrified of spending eternity in hell OR heaven. It sounds awful to me. Peace to me would be an end to my existence-like when you sleep and don’t dream so you don’t even know you’re alive.
I think the thing that messes me up about this game is that it finally made the concept of non-continuity through digital copies/teleportation/etc click for me. "Simon" as we played him was never going to get on that Ark. It really brings Catherine's actions into light - she understands that she "herself" is not getting on that Ark, she understands how the project works and knows she's going to die on Earth and the version that might make it on the Ark will be a copy of her, not HER her. Explaining that to someone else who still has that hope must be painful to the point of insanity. I know this game and Jacob Geller's video on head transplants are two pieces of art that made me have to go on a long walk so I didn't think too hard about it and collapse into crisis - I can't imagine what it'd be like to live it.
Makes you feel weird about going to sleep
@@ExStepsister An I don't think it should, not really. In case of scan, transplant, teleportation or whatnot, continuity of our brain function is severed, that's why we can speculate about personhood.
When we go to sleep our brain still works, and to an extent our personality is still active (in form of dreams), continuity is still there, we just don't remember the entire process
It really raises the question as to whether it is even worth activating the Ark. It is not saving people from suffering, only producing (self-aware) copies that the originals naively hope will experience heavenly pleasure in an artificial world. Humanity did not survive - a memory of humanity which no outside observer will ever witness survived, only to be inevitably lost as the station degrades over the ages.
I never saw Simon as an idiot but as an average person with false hope. Like many of us we latch on to the best outcome instead of the possibility of the most horrible situations. He is told it was a copy but doesn't accept it. There was nothing to return to, another option, or something else to do. It was only this and when you have 1 option you would hope for the best.
I agree! You see him panic when Catherine threatens to leave him alone, and whenever she's mean to him he makes amends very fast - I think he's just terrified of being alone and he does cling. My heart bleeds for him
The thing to remember is that Simon isn't "an average person." He's an artificial construct *imitating* human neurology according to a non-human's guess to what that's like. His mind is deliberately obfuscating the reality of his situation.
@chuth2768
Well no, he's a scan of a human brain fairly close to when that human died of a terminal disease. WAU doesn't have to guess anything about the scans, only the relationship between body and mind.
I think a lot of people forget that Simon was scanned after he sustained severe life threatening brain injury.
Having a bit of trouble with brand new big concepts is pretty understandable for someone recovering from brain damage.
He was also full of a lot of desperate hope when he was scanned that mindset probably carried over.
Amusing bit of trivia: "Story/Safe Mode" was not originally part of the game. As released, there was no way to disable the monster attacks. That changed when the "Wuss Mode" mod was released, which was basically identical to the eventual gamemode. Assumedly, Frictional saw the mod, decided that removing the monster AI really was a valid game experience, and included it in a patch to spread that experience to the non-modding playerbase.
Frictional appealing to the masses 😂 give the people what they want
Simon's "please don't leave me alone" as the power turns off around him gets me everytime :')
I'm absolutely terrified of being completely alone like that and the ending just knocked me on my ass
It's actually so gutting isn't it, I feel dreadful for him
It haunts me. He's trapped at the bottom of the coldest, deepest abyss, alone, in pitch blackness, forever... I can't even imagine the horror he must go through.
I watched someone else play this because I'm too much of a scaredy cat for horror games but I haven't stopped thinking about the ending since that day. It's so crushingly awful to think about - sometimes I'll just randomly be going about my day and think about Soma's ending again. Literally one of the most chilling stories in gaming
As is also mentioned in the video, the monsters feel kind of out of place - Simon can't die, after all, so there's no survival aspect in the traditional sense anyway. You could remove them, have a full-on "walking simulator" and still have Soma be one of the most horrifying games ever created.
There are four moments in particular I can't forget even years after seeing the game for the first time:
1) The communication with loved ones on Earth leading up to the end of the world describing how ordinary humans experienced their last moments
2) The radio transmission from those surfacing a little outside of Portugal (IIRC) describing how everything is aflame after the impact
3) The part where you have to swap your consciousness into another body and realize that you just left another version of yourself stranded in that small room and finally, of course...
4) The dual ending.
It truly is a unique story and is impossible to shake.
@@madspeterrommedahl4679 I do wonder what Ark Simon and Catherine are doing after the game ends.
The way i interpreted idea behind "blowy" is that you have to choose between killing a robot that by this point you know it's a scanner of a real person, OR "killing" an object that's not conscious of itself but you attached yourself to it because it was useful to you, and it was kinda cute(even Simon express this).
I believe the idea is to show how the value we give to life is relative. How we sometimes might give more value to an inanimate objects that we have history with (and in this case and object that we anthropomorphized) than a real human being that we just met.
Very true! It has the sentience of a little helpful puppy in a way but damn it was hard 😔 RIP Blowy
@@MertKayKay For me it was more of a perception of sentience. When we unplugged the robot at the beginning, we didn't know a person was in it, when we make electricity go through the other robot we only had an inkling. Now when we get to blowy, we know that full people can be inside machines, and when we attack blowy, I found myself wondering if blowy didn't speak because it wasn't sentient or if it just didn't have a voice module to express it's sentience in a way we could understand. I think about that much more than the end, the wonderings of our perception of experience and sentience and feelings and thoughts in others, and those that others have in us.
@@jamiehart2191 If you kill the other robot, Blowy (or K8, model number in the game) gets angry & avoids you, & never helps you again. I tried both & didn't like either.
If I recall there's actually two people in that robot, it's a guy called Javid Goya and a silent backup copy of Terry Akers, who he thinks he's having a nice chat with.
This game literally gives me what feels like PTSD when ever i see that last part of Simon being left behind. No exaggeration, my heart clenches, breathing gets hard, and i get extreme anxiety, i become scared too. The crazy part is that it lasts only seconds. This is the only piece of media that does this to me. Idk what this means. Lets just say i would hate to be in Simons situation in real life.
The funny thing is that if SOMA were a movie, that's how it would had ended, with no glimpse of the Simon in the Ark (unless it was a Hollywood movie, then it would had the happy ending only and totally forget that Simon and Catherine left behind in the deep ocean)
There are two other pieces of media that touch on this feeling, in this same way, for me.
Also can I just say, I utterly love your style of humor. That perfect blend of a quality 2010's UA-camr with modern awareness.
Freedome you are my little chicken, thank you so much for watching my stuff
@@MertKayKay Always a pleasure! Honestly, your videos give me that same warm fuzzy feeling inside that early Yogscast videos gave me. Pure UK energy with a good serving of Dick jokes, your mom jokes, and British humor.
This is exactly why I subbed
When he said he literally had no mouth my brain flashed to the short story 'I have no mouth and I must scream', I initially dismissed it as just being similar wording, but in the end there is a sort of parallel both protagonists are the last 'human' creatures on a destroyed earth having mercy killed all of their companions, destined to be tortured forever and unable to die.
I never made the connection that Simon was a bit slowwith his realizations bc of his brin damage. I think both him and Catherine were, on some level aware what they were doing, Catherine with the "just robots" and simon with not realizing one of him would go on and one of him would stay behind. I think they were both compartmentalizing hard, not admitting to each other OR themselves what was happening, in order to reach a goal they both thought was the only good goal left.
I always wondered how they left-behind-catherine felt. She wasn't surprised, but she also didn't seem scared or sad. Did she think of herself like she thought about the other robots? Would she stay with Simon and just vibe for eternity or would she shut herself down? I kind of feel like she believed what the suicide-ppl thought, that since a version of her made it, she made it. But I wonder if she actually ever let herself think about what would happen after. We know she considered the scans human when it came to preserving human-kind, but not when it came to... needing to kill or use them. How would she apply that to herself? SUCH an interesting character who raises so many interesting questions to ponder when we put herself in her position
@@steelbear2063 yeah but my point is that Catherine doesn't say "it's worth it to kill others that are just like us if that means we can reach our goal" but instead, she seems to see herself as a completely different from of being. She Both sees the robots as not real people while seeing the brain scans that reach the arc as "saving humanity". My point wasn't if a moral dilemma exists or not, but specifically about the inner workings/dissociation of the two ppl we actually spend time w
54:30 this part always stuck with me. The VA for Simon (Jared Zeus) captured the pure disbelief and horror of the scene perfectly
I liked Soma a lot more than the Black Mirror episode because the BM ep involves creating and torturing a sentient mind to do something my dad could program and schedule in the 1990s. In Soma, the situation where you can find and preserve human consciousness has a lot more stakes.
yeah, as much as I like black mirror I always thought that particular episode was kinda dumb, I can set my own alarm or whatever without creating a duplicate consciousness. hell, creating a duplicate consciousness not only seems inefficient, it also seems more likely to go terribly wrong. it's blatantly stated that the cookies can go insane, rewriting their code in an unintended way. there's no way after thousands of years that process of self rewriting wouldn't result in some sort of exploit resulting in a breach of security, and it would be practically impossible to stop since at that point your fighting against a mind tens of thousands of times faster than your own.
I'd use the comparison for this game and "I have no mouth and I must scream". Both are existential horror seeped in death and the decay of earth, with identity and choice being at the forefront of each experience. While IHNMAIMS isn't transhumanist per say, there are a lot of parallels through AMs treatment of the five characters you can play as, with death never being a true way of escape, and the idea of the mind being forced to live and relive it's own trauma through a computer simulation. Neither games ending is truly happy either, just a slightly lighter than true black.
I read the comic a long time ago and it was pretty bleak! I'm excited to check out the game, thanks Tuttle 🥰
@@MertKayKay if you're looking for transhumanist reading/listening, you should try the audible original "We are Legion (We are Bob)" by Dennis E. Taylor. It's about a man - Bob - who joins a club to freeze his head upon death only to find he's being used to manage an interstellar search for a planet to colonize.
@@ken.droid-the-unique Thank you Kenneth! :D
ageeed
@MertKayKay Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original short story, voiced AM in the game and helped write it. Worth watching a playthrough if you don't want to deal with 90s point and click
People usually put all the attention into their Amnesia franchise, and while I do agree that Amnesia is an amazing game, I still think Soma is by far the greatest masterpiece of the studio.
Great video as always, keep it up!
Thank you Rogelio!
The line "oh no i lost my dunbat, my mum's gonna fkn kill me" delivered in that *chefs kiss* way always gets me
Hehehe thank you
This is one of those cases where the most jaw dropping moments of this game don't even involve the gameplay. The way our minds try to adapt to the existential-script with such atmospheric environments really is an experience beyond words.
Genuinely love your content! Keep up the amazing work! :)
Cookies you are so sweet and excellent, thank you!
@@MertKayKay No, thank you! You are exceptional. Looking forward to whatever your next video is...
*cough Alan Wake cough*?
@@cookiescream1993 Oh damn I need to play that remaster, seems like it might be a good opportunity
@@MertKayKay it’s a quality remaster on console highly recommend. Has a few new changes that hint at the events of Alan Wake 2 as well.
I love your analysis, this might be my favourite video on SOMA I've ever watched. I honestly find Catherine a deeply relatable and compelling character - when Simon asks her how she's so chill about her situation, she says something like "I never felt comfortable being human anyway" and it really paints her as someone who's always been unable to relate to other people (even before becoming a disembodied computer voice), and someone excited for the transhumanist innovations of the future. I'm not sure if she was written this way on purpose, but she reads as an autistic character to me (an autistic person) and I find her storyline sympathetic. She was just a scientist trying to do her own little project and then the world ended and suddenly she had to 'save humanity' and try to answer philosophical and ethical questions that are simply not possible to answer. And then everyone gets mad about her answers.
Ah, the game that made me have a nervous breakdown about the horror of immortality.
Enjoy the ride!
20:05
It's been about a year or two since I've played Soma, but it impacted me so profoundly. I felt such incredible empathy for these "robots" that I did not want to progress the game if it meant hurting them.
If I remember correctly, there are many additional dialogue options that you can go through after achieving certain objectives. With Carl here, I could tell him that he was a machine, and he would break down into an inconsoleable existential mess. I also vaguely remember that I was able to "deactivate" him prematurely. I did this as a mercy kill, as it seemed the only humane option.
Many of the characters you meet in Soma have these hidden options to understand them further or to achieve some sort of secondary objective, if you will. Even the monsters have lore associated with them.
One "person" in particular that I developed an incredible fondness for was this little helper bot who would open doors or illuminate areas on this small island area. It cannot speak, you cannot touch it, and really outside of the context of this game, you might not even recognize that the bot is actually human. I can't remember exactly what happened, but I was seperated from him, probably in getting onto the ride back to the main plateau area(?). I hesitated before getting on. The doors closed, and I thought, "I'll never see him again."
I find it interesting that Simons naivete and physical composition and Catherine's computer expertise and unique introspection are the only reasons they haven't gone mad like the others. I always considered that it wasn't just for selfish reasons she shut down Simons questions about the nature of their existence, she may also be trying to prevent his slip into madness. Like he could end up stuck in a recursive logic loop or something by getting too philosophical....
Actually, i've never seen that note telling Simon about the vivid nightmares, i've replayed this game atleast a dozen times and explored every inch and that has always slipped unnoticed. how real is reality when we can't even pick up on all the cues of things not being... 'real'. what a hellish reality we could be very well trapped in, unable to see further.
oh and someone did climb the omega gun in adjacent side material to SOMA, basically when *spoilers* catherine dies and everyone goes back to Tau, someone starts putting together a plan to climb it. well once things go very sour, the woman in the story starts climbing the whole way up, having little in the way of bearing as she ascends from the abyss foot by foot. eventually she makes it to the surface the moment before sunrise and with the freedom to choose her own fate. takes off her suit and waits to succumb to the toxic atmosphere, smiling content as she watches the clouds break and the sun rises.
As someone who never allows themselves to catch a thought in their brain in silence (yes I am listening to this during chores because who would clean up all alone with their thoughts running?!) the thought of being all alone, just conscience no body just thoughts floating around throughout infinity...absolutely terrifies me😭
“I have no mouth and I must scream”and “Dark Wood”, are up there but Soma is truely its own box of frogs. This game made me feel truely sad as a human being. The rush to get them out at the end only to find a copy was sent in to space, as if there was any other way…god
I've heard Darkwood is REALLY creepy. Definitely one to play. Thanks for the recommendations Cucks :D
@@MertKayKay it’s the scariest game I’ve played easily, and does it all in its own very unique way without anything cheap like jumpscares or scripted segments. It and soma are the best horror games ever made in my eyes
I… actually spared the WAU I feel with enough time it can actually make a real living thing with the scans. I really think it made Simon and he was so successful with such little time, why not give it a chance. I really recommend the video Devils Advocate - SOMA an argument to spare the WAU
You make a good point! Simon could have been the first successful 'human' :D And thanks for the video recommendation!
You'd think the cyborgs and digital copies now invented their own machine religion, worshipping WAU.
I really wish the ending had been the digital copies living at the bottom of the ocean survived and decide to do their own thing along with people surviving on the spaceship.
Black Mirror was received INCREDIBLY well in America.
The similarities between BM and SOAM is actually insane tbh.
Man Soma is an absolute masterpiece. Haunting and thought provoking.
Was hoping you'd cover this gem. SOMA messes with you in more than just one way.
I absolutely adore SOMA. It is a game that grips me every time. I love that you can burden yourself to help out NPCs, but if you are not paying attention you can accidentally do irreversible harm to the world. I have seen a lot of people argue that Simon is stupid. Even Catherine says so. But I think that he has been put into the nightmare and is simply trying to cling to what he knows so that he doesn't loose his mind. He is literally in over his head, and clinging to any strand of hope he can get. He is much more composed and rational than I would be tbh. But I also love how Catherine plays into this aspect of Simon to keep him on track. Because all that matters in the end is the Arc.
BABE WAKE UP NEW MERTKAYKAY JUST DROPPED A VID ABT A GAME THAT IM HYPERFIXATED ON
less than a minute in and there’s already a CBT reference i’m in love with her
Karissa literally just put me in a little mug and carry me round with you, let's talk about hyperfixation games
@@MertKayKay i’m literally begging i can tell u all abt how i can only play mariokart wii and wii sports resorts but only the fencing minigames and you can tell me abt how halo is actually abt god
Soma is a game I've heard of, but never played. That said, your narration of the story, sprinkled with humorous takes and references, just hit the right spot. Loved it, probably more so than if I had played through the game myself.
That is infinitely flattering, thank you very much!
This remains one of my favorite games to this day. You're right, the actual gameplay is very straightforward, but the story itself was what got me hooked. Years after first playing it/watching others run through it and I still think about it. Soma was one of the first games that made me sit back and just debate with myself about what made you human (within the context of the game). Very fun, even if it was trying to trigger an existential crisis.
Edit: That moment when Simon realizes that he wasn't "transferred" and was actually copied in Omicron was both heartbreaking and horrific. But even so, he still didn't fully understand until the end of the game.
Edit 2: Was there a reason you disliked Catherine so much? Lmao. She had a goal she felt she needed to achieve - to save humanity. While, yes, she manipulated Simon, what other choice did she have? He was an idiot. He REFUSED to accept the reality of his situation, even when she tried to explain. And when he finally accepted that he was no longer human, he was still in denial about the coin toss until the very end. So, yes, she used him, but Simon also used her as well. Her goal was to set off the ARK no matter the cost. His goal was to get himself ON the ARK no matter the cost.
I definitely understand Catherine and her goal, but I think I dislike her because she took advantage of Simon's isolation and loneliness and brain trauma to reach her end goals - you can see how much he panics when she tells him she'll leave him alone.
I know she has a proper goal in mind and I do think it's a noble goal, but when you consider Simon, she's taking advantage of a man in an extremely vulnerable situation and my heart just bled for him. I think he had a right to understand what was going on even if it meant he refused to do it. I think she had a good idea, but executed it with cruelty :D
Honestly I kinda empathize with Catherine. It's a bit like being in a life threatening situation in irl. You'll have people who take charge, who work through their own trauma in the situation by finding a goal they can accomplish and fixating on it, then you have the people who just panic and close themselves off. Simon is essentially the panicking person who needs to be slapped and Catherine has no hands lol.
Excellent video! I originally shared your dislike of Catherine until I found one particularly interesting theory the game revolves around the processing power of her robot brain. As you discussed most of the machines with human minds have difficulty perceiving reality, and the Simons are the most functional people we meet. Given how Catherine is both extremely dismissive of Simon and hyper focused on her goal I believe it's reasonable to assume her mind may be compromised due to the limitations of her vessel. This is especially noticeable if we compare PA Catherine's detached mannerisms to the almost affectionate greeting ARK Catherine gives to ARK Simon. I think it adds to the tragedy of the story that not only is Simon a man out of time, but that he is being led by a barely functioning Catherine. It doesn't redeem her entirely in my mind, but I no longer hate her character overall.
That is a really good point! I never considered that but it's really valid
I keep telling myself “he made it, he made it on the ark as a copy, he’s okay in one way” cause I’m trying to make myself feel better about my fears of a similar fate. I’m in such deep denial that all of Simon is stuck forever cause I’m afraid of jinxing myself a similar fate by being scared
ultimately Simon either died when you turned off his battery under sedation, or lived alone in the facility, deep Simon simply experienced what happened to his earlier counterpart, though the real fault lies with original Simon who decided to donate a version of him which didn't exist to consent to its new reality.
Also- the welder robot that helps you out from the escape shuttle actually runs away in fear after you "BEAT THE SHIT" out of the bloke robot to take his chip.
Because yeah, you have choice there- either you murder the barely lucid bloke or the welder bot who fkin saved you out of a can
when I played Soma it kinda reminded me of Prey (2017), not just because of the whole twist at the end but because of the walking around an abandoned facility and seeing what everyone left behind. Both games also give you moral choices to make that have little to no impact on the gameplay, they're just there to make you think really. They're also both seriously underrated
Your essay launched an interesting discussion with my friends about "the end." Simon the robot never realized when he was doing something for the last time (which could be as big as speaking with his impassive AI companion or opening a door) because he was so busy trekking forward. When you hit a dead end and are left with all the things you lost having gaining nothing equivalent, like paradise, it's crushing.
That's a bit of a tangent from what you were discussing, but the way you zeroed in on Simon's situation was especially fun to listen to. Great video, as always!
Aww thank you TL! Really glad you enjoyed it. And the idea of doing something for the last time without even realising is a pretty dark theme, I love it.
Kind of reminds me of World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeldt. A girl is contacted by a clone of herself from the future. She explains that a version of immortality is made available through cloning, but there is slight deterioration with each new generation. The clone shows the girl glimpses of future lives she'll live, then looks for a memory from the original girl that's been lost over time.
Wow that sounds like a really intimate story of transhumanism, I love the ones that are more about the individual than the whole. Should be awesome, thank you so much for the recommendation!
@@MertKayKay Hope you enjoy it. Another thing I'd strongly recommend that has some similarities to this is The Talos Principle. It's a game similar to Portal in that you're doing a series of puzzles at the command of a disembodied voice. Interacting with computers spread around leads into discussions about religion, free will, subjective vs objective reality, and how to define a human. They also reveal pieces to a story about humanity trying to preserve their legacy in the face of a global extinction event.
“Imagine if you put all the cookies on an island with all the stimulus in the world and fast forward a thousand years”
That is, for better and for worse, an actual plot line in Sword Art Online: Alicization
Also didn't the main character basicly go through another life through that simulation?
@@dustgraystone9448 Yes! Time is accelerated in the game, so he was able to live there for what seemed like years, when really it was a few weeks or months at most in the real world.
"I can't believe I'm getting gaslit by a fucking screen saver" that's getting put in the quotes to live by book XD Great video!
Maybe the real Simon was the friends we made along the way
I think this also fits into the Lovecraftian-esque fear of the unknown. The person went into a spooky, weird place to have a not very standard procedure done, and got stuck living through infinite lives because of that one action, because of just knowing something, or experiencing something. He does something without thinking or realizing what it means, and, essentially, makes a deal with the unknown.
I'm so glad you covered this game! It's definitely one of the most haunting pieces of media I've ever seen. As you said, the gameplay isn't really anything, so it's super hard for me to recommend this game to people, but it's story singlehandedly boosts it up to a sort of "masterpiece" status for me. For most of the game, my understanding was pretty much on par with Simon's, I took the biggest blow after the "transfer" to the new body leaving the original Simon still alive. From that point on I pretty much understood everything and anticipated the ending I figured would come. Even with figuring out how it will possibly end though, the ending still hit me like a ton of bricks. The decision to have the perspective switch to the new body in Omicron, lulling us into a false sense of safety only to later have the ending of the game stay with our current Simon first, rather than immedietly showing the ARK was so brilliant. I'd love to interview the devs and see if they had any debates over which order to show the ending in, the one they went with is definitely the right choice in my mind. Game aside, your content is absolutely incredible, I'm shocked you haven't been picked up by the algorthythm sooner. I found your channel a while ago and have been going through most of your videos, your writing is crazy good! This was the first time in years that I've sat through a Raid ad, just 'cause I was super happy you got a deal with them, get your coin girl, you really deserve it!! It's been a hot minute since I went through your content so it could be that you mentioned it already, but in case not, do you ever plan on potentially making a video on What Remains of Edith Finch?
Hey Balo! Thanks so much! I'm really glad you and I had a similar experience with Soma being roughly on the same wavelength as Simon, some of my friends played it and they predicted the storybeats very early on and I felt like a mug 🤣
I played Edith Finch for the first time this month and I really enjoyed it! I'd love to do a video on it one day once I come up with some inspiration for what to discuss; I would hate to just rehash what other people have said. There's a lot to discuss regarding it
Anyway thank you so much for watching Balo 🥰
This game and what remains of Edith Finch were both games that gave me serious existential dread about how easy you could lose something or someone you love, and I think it really gave me a feeling that 2020 was going to be a bad year because of something big that was going to happen and it also gave me the thought and feeling the world was going to end throughout the summer of 2019 it definitely was an eye opening experience
Catherine is very interesting in this because whoever she was as a human, we only really know her as the person she was copied as. Obviously at the very end of the game when we find her murdered corpse and the last logge from her and her old ark team she was adamant that her ark project be launched as quick as possible and ended up being killed because the others wanted to wait longer for one reason or another.
We hear first hand she was determined and unswayable in her goals, and she seems to have always had that streak to her seeing as Data chip Cathy was scanned well before the very end of her human days.
I think by the very end of Human Catherine's life she had accepted the fact that her project was the only possible thing left that had a chance to continue on in some capacity, everyone left alive on Earth was in the station under water, time was destroying it little by little and everyone who was still alive and scanned tended to kill themselves because they knew there was no future; they couldn't live down in the ocean forever when time was destroying the facility little by little, everyone they loved was dead- no food fresh supplies, the ever present threat of being imprisoned under the ocean with an increasingly unstable strcucter around you and piling up dead bodies and science experiments going rogue .
There was just nothing, nothing to live for, and nothing that supported continuing to be alive.
I think Catherine realized this at some point and at the very least her scanned form was heavily imprinted by this nihilistic mentality in some unconscious way (or maybe she fully acknowledged it and just accepted it for what it's). She just has a goal and that's the most important thing to her. She needs it to be done and done as best as it can be done, and she doesn't want to acknowledge any extra problems by anyone else because they pale in comparison to her ultimate goals. She doesn't want to keep talking about how things work with Simon because he doesn't ultimately need to know because that doesn't *matter* he' he'll never have an opportunity to actually better himself or get over it in any meaningful way, or do anything else meaningful with his existence even if Catherine did take the time to explain things and allow him to get over it, because nothing was ever going to be left for him or her to do, but launch the ark and sit around until they power off or get destroyed in some capacity.
I spared the second Simon after the transfer. It was actually slightly reassuring at the end when i realized Deep Sea Simon had someone to hang out with
Soma's weird "what is sentience/what is life" conundrum (and by extension those Black Mirror episodes) reminds me of the teletransportation paradox. If you were broken down into base components on Earth, had that information sent at lightspeed to Mars, then reformed using base components there, would that still be you? They addressed that in Star Trek a lot and their answers never satisfied me.
For instance, there's an episode of The Next Generation where the crew discovers that a long time ago a copy of Commander Riker was made during a transporter accident. One William Riker went on to become the first officer on the Enterprise while the other got marooned on a desolate planet. When the question "who is the real Will Riker" was finally asked, the show just said that they both were as, physically at least, they were 100% the same person.
They've done this with time travel, spacial anomalies, all sorts of stuff, but that particular story always bothered me because the Will Riker character was my template for what being a man was (Nigel funfact: I was raised by a single mom). I felt like they had done the character dirty somehow and since then I've always been fascinated with the paradox.
That fascination won't get me to play a thinly veiled walking sim, but I enjoy listening to people talk about it. On that note, thank you for knocking out another A+ video.
I just wanted to say that I appreciated the "called a fat cow" -> "spent time ruminating" joke at the beginning.
Watching this a second time this mirrors Nier and The Outer Wilds in a lot of ways. How life and the time we have should be valued and how random things can lead to massive changes. The meteor killing most surface life really shows the chaos of the universe and how even in our final moments humanity tries to create order from this. Attempting to launch what is a perfect world in a virtual world in defiance of the chaos of the universe. But like the meteor who says that world will last, will it crash, the solar panels get damage, or maybe Simon will find more robots like him and they'll continue to live on like the Mages from FF9. It's a lot of what ifs but that's what makes Soma great, on the surface there's a lot of dread but when you peel back and use the same chaos that set the game into motion it can lead to something hopeful. That or KayKay is right and Simon is just having a last vision before death.
Hugely flattered that you watch my stuff Harbinger :D Thank you
Soma is one of those games that you’ll never forget- I think about it often
You asked for recommendations (sorta) and hearing you describe this reminded me of I have no mouth and I must scream! It’s one of my favorite books and I believe it has a graphic novel and a game as well!!
While the ending is an absolute punch in the gut, nothing caused me more dread than hearing the other Simon talk after switching suits and the conversation with Catherine in the elevator afterward.
It’s the same for me! I remember not really processing what was happening at first, assumed that the Simon we controlled was speaking but was just muffled due to the new body. Even when he asked if it didn’t work, I just thought he was disoriented or something was wrong with the suit that we couldn’t see yet. But then when new Simon spoke up loud in clear, asking what that was. Man, did my stomach drop. You still feel so attached to old Simon that playing as new Simon feels so uncomfortable. Like your playing as someone else, but is it really someone else if they have the same memory?
It’s excellent existential horror! In my opinion, the ending hits even harder because of that brilliant scene!
I think there's one sentient robot you encounter earlier than your example, but he's very hard to hear with all the static and scary noises the game throws at you and I only noticed he was even there in hindsight. Very early on, you're in a lit room and then the lights go off. There's a robot on the floor saying things like "you, not me" over and over. It's the only room where you have to touch the WAU flower/butthole. And when you do it cuts his power and kills him
I found this one creepier in hindsight because on my first playthrough I had killed him without ever knowing he was there.
"Simon sits down, there's a bright flash and- TRY GOOGLE FI"
i really enjoy your voice and commentary on just about anything! i’m really glad i found your channel, please keep making these great videos!
Aww Basic thank you
Perhaps the most impressive thing about this game to me is how thorough and singular it is in keeping up this one specific kind of horror without wearing it out. It slowly ramps up the existential questions and dread with carefully placed scenarios and moral dilemmas for a multi-hour experience keeping it fresh. Only a single episode (And another that sort of references it briefly) of Black Mirror is all that’s necessary for it to make a point about the horrifying implications of consciousness through technology. The amount of editing and workshopping layout design to make it not a complete drag must have been astounding on top of all the other work that goes into making any game
Completely agree, this story most likely wouldn' t work in any other media. For me one of the strongest moments definitely was the last living human on Earth. What a bizzare, sad and frightening idea for a scene.
Finally someone pointed out that there is no coin tossing at all. Conscious existence is not an moveable object, its a process.
If someone made a clone of you, there is no 50/50 chance that you gonna be moved to the clones body. Its a new existance with your memories up to the point of its origin.
SOMA is absolutely lit, I'm so glad to see you reviewing it!
Oh btw
It is stated why Simon is there as a scan- he is a legacy scan used as a example to what AI should be.
Essentially- he is a template of human brain on which all newest AI in world of SOMA were built. Not literally turning Simon's brain into AIs, but as a... showcase how human brain works so people can program AIs in "it's image".
And if you listen to one of the logs in Delta (or Omicron) you can find that Simon agreed for his scan to be used for science while he was on his death bed.
And you technically meet another robot that you unplug before the one in the powerplant control room. In the room before a vent section is the first "WAU butthole you finger" and there is a voice that tells you to not touch it, after you touch the "WAU flower" the voice is gone. My thinking is that the scan was probably built into the control panel you just touched, WAU isn't above putting scans into industrial equipment (Dunbat as an example)
And WAU's "Magnetic Shriek" aside from being a gesture of self preservation might have been "allowed to kill" because WAU was already on it's way of "resurecting" people.
The law was baypassed because it had a way to return the human to life, even tho this state of living is extremaly dubious and stress inducing for the creation
This whole thing, with the slices of consciousness and 'cookies,' reminds me a lot of the movie Source Code! Ignore the presence of Jake Gyllenhell, and there's a really interesting story there. I don't want to say anything else because spoilers though :x
I love sci fi so I will honestly have to watch that 😍 thanks for the recommendation!
By far the best Raid ad I’ve ever seen.
YEEEEEEESSSSSS! I absolutely ADORED SOMA. This game had all the horror vibes with just the right amount of let up between the chases and drag down horror moments.
All that aside, I've only found your channel a week ago or so and have accidently chewed through all your videos. Listening at work is exactly what I need to get by during these hellish summer days.
Thank you for the hours of entertainment.
This hands down the best analysis of Soma I have seen. It is one of my favorite games, and it was amazing to see someone cover the themes of existential horror that it evokes! So many essays only scratch the surface of these themes, but you dove deep into them! The comparison to black mirror was excellent too, that is another piece of media that lives rent free in my head. Those same thought experiments with the cookies have haunted me as well and I can’t believe I never thought to compare it to soma!
Thanks so much for making such a great video!
Once, I met one of the vice presidents of the United States, backstage at a concert. Nice guy, kinda nerdy, big on environmentalism.
So he decided he'd show me his musical talent, turns out the dude plays drums.
Unfortunately, it wasn't that great at first, he was a little off beat, kinda slow.
But I recognised some symptoms, and I realised it was because his blood sugar levels were kinda low.
So I popped to the kitchen, made him a jam sandwich, and after he ate it, he played perfectly.
Now you may be wondering why I'd make this long, obviously false story in this comment section.
But in that story, I did the same thing I'm doing right now.
Feeding the Al-Gore-Rhythm.
Man you had me THE WHOLE WAY THROUGH
All Game developers and movie producers could learn much from Soma, it shows very clearly how vital a coherent story is to anything with ambitions above the mundane, with decent graphics and interesting puzzles it relies on little else but its unfolding plot, the player's immersion with the character leads to a devastating conclusion that rattles around your brain for a long time afterwards.
I loved how the game got you to interrogate your own relationship to existence and its value. I did kill the lady that wanted to die and if I can recall you can sit with her until she passes so she won't be alone and I did. I don't think the suicides were quite as stupid as it might first appear. If all Simons are equal, then when Simon 1 kills himself once Simon 2 is created and they do it at the same moment (which is the goal) there is no fork in the path and there is a "continuity" of existence. The current Simon doesn't have to deal with the moral issue of any previous ones, there is only the singular existence of the current Simon and as long as he does this for future incarnations it will be, for all practical purposes a "transfer" of consciousness to another body.
I don't think it's true or a good road to go down but it's not stupid. If anything it's overthought. I do sometimes still get chills thinking of the Simon on the ocean floor locked up in that cage. But I think your "final exam" for what constitutes life is how you handle the WAU. Do you think life is to be valued absolutely? Then the WAU must continue keeping everything alive. Does life only have value if it's recognizably human? At what point does non-human life inherit the right to exist? It's a lot to chew on.
I’ve always liked Catherine and I view her relationship with Simon as “warming up slowly” rather than how you describe her, but I get it and maybe I’m just coping
if i remember right you can actually take the time to reroute the power that would have been going through Carl to go through somewhere else safely, but you would have to evade one of the murder robots to do so
Aww DBG I feel you on that! I always just watch videos about horror films instead of watching them because I'm a big poo poo baby. I'm glad you like my videos and I'll have to make some more! :D
And gosh I started F.E.A.R when I was about 14 and turned it off out of... well, fear. Haha! I'll have to go back to it. Thank you so much!
@@MertKayKay i uh, think you meant this comment for the one below mine XD
@@MiruninOath57 💀💀💀💀 I am so sorry Oath
Absolutely loved this video. Not played the game but watching this I got really intense I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream flashbacks
A piece of amazing sci-fi horror writing that I still think of years after playing it. So happy to see you doing a video on it!
Thank you Freelance! It really is just one of the greats, had to pay homage to it
@@MertKayKay If you love sci-fi writing in general, I might recommend 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim! It's a half visual novel, half tactical rpg that has almost every sci-fi trope in the book and nails each of them rather well.
@@FreelanceSeven Thank you so much! I heard of 13 Sentinels, apparently it's awesome
"...and look, there's a picture of you in here too!"
I love it.
Just watching it now and congrats mert you've come along way since 2020 and I'm super happy for you and the progress you've made. You deserve every bit of success from the youtubes. Keep it up dude!
Thank you so much Birch ; - ;
27:00 This is why the writers are absolutely genius. This is the Three Laws of Robotics, warped and bastardized in such a way no one would have thought of. It's a horrifying thought.
The White Christmas episode reminds me a lot of the short story collection Axiomatic by Greg Egan, particularly "Learning to be Me" and "Closer" (also a bit of "The Cutie"). All very creepy sci-fi stories with existential questions.
58:06 "the theme of letting go" and there is an incarnation of the Buddha on that shelf. Magnificent.
Idk if the gameplay will be to your liking, but I think you will enjoy the story of the zero Escape series.
1. 9 hours 9 persons 9 doors
2. Virtues last reward
3. Zero time dilemma
They are available on steam. Each of them is a visual novel with a lot of endings and decisions. In betweem you will also be placed in Escaperooms which you need to solve.
I loved it and the topics discussed in these games seem to interest you.
Thank you so much Sophie! I do love some dirty sci-fi
I wish I could play this game again for the first time. I literally sat in stunned silence and wept silently when you realized Catherine was gone and you were left behind. This is an absolute masterpiece of a game and it's favorite horror game of all time.
"Hells of our own creation" is a topic Jacob Geller did some time ago and something Id love to go into myself.
SOMA, ...And I Must Scream, SuperHot Series, Silent Hill 2&3, Returnal, Risk Of Rain 2 in a way, and literally and IRL convention. A cool topic for sure.
Oh and by the way what the SOMA's humans did with their consciousness is word for word what the humans did in Kirby as confirmed by Forgotten Land.
58:25 also thats a really specific reference and Im glad I caught that
Gone home is my personal favorite, it's simple and I like the sound of just walking around and looking at things
I never tried it and I NEED to! :D
@@MertKayKay Hope you eventually try Tacoma too, it's by the same devs and sci-fi!
I was about to say that Soma could be great season 1/2 Black mirror episode! White Christmas is probably the closest thing we have to Soma on the small screen.
That being said I personally found "Well be right back" as my favorite episode of black mirror as it asked what are humans? What is loss? And what is grief? And how we deal with these subjects while we have these digital footprints that for many of us will long outlive our own lives.
Oh my gosh yes! I rewatched that episode a few weeks ago when binging the series again and the second watch really worked for me. Like when humans never HAVE to face closure or grief, when there's an 'easy out', when you can bandage it with a fake but permanent fix, you do have to wonder what someone would choose
What about Caprica?
@@TheKatamariguy The sci-fi show? I never saw it myself :D
Perfect segue into the RAID commercial.... chef's kiss
Thank you Arlem 😍
Awesome this game is amazing. I have a lot of trouble getting through the scary games where you can't defend yourself and the inclusion of a mode where the monsters don't chase you around and insta kill you is great. This is one of my favorite games, my love of transhumanism stuff and my fear of the ocean really made this game shine
Aww we both have a fear of the ocean! Twinnies!
FINALLY! SOMEONE TALKING ABOUT THIS WONDERFUL GAME
Honestly really reminds me of "i have no mouth and i must scream"
Maybe the technology isn't as personally and emotionally out for torture but the idea of "everyone else is dead... its more merciful if we die too" is still present in both
Technology going rouge as well and creating unspeakable horrors
Less copie-of-a-copie-of-a-copie-of-a-copie-of-a-person
More "enteral hell, alone and aware of everything"
Remarking on your comment at the end; sometimes it's perfectly fine to have a video that exists just for the sake of existing. Even though you can look at something from an analytical perspective, the ultimate takeaway of "it was simply fun and enjoyable" is just as valid as a scientific breakdown. I've always heard stuff about this game, but never really bothered exploring further than seeing a few random thumbnails here and there, so thank you for making this video and helping me understand why I've heard so many people praise it before.
Aww thanks Shin! 💕 I'm really happy you liked it and I appreciate the feedback on that final comment
I remember getting this as a freebie some years back and just never bothered to play past the first hour or so. I definitely should have given it more of a chance, especially since it's setting is very much my jam now.
Also congrats on 30k!!
Oh hell yeah Chris! The gameplay is a bit like piloting an RC car down a straight corridor but the story is good shit. Hope you enjoy it :D And thank you!
thank you for making a video on soma! its one of my favorite games and i always love having discussions about it and its themes
great video!!
Thank you Michael!! :D
I'm so excited to see this, gonna repeat watch for sure over the course of a few days leading into going to bed (I promise that's a compliment, it's why I've seen so much hbomberguy!)
I am a HUGE Hbomb fan, glad to meet a fellow fan in the wild B)
Two Best Friends played this and their answers for the esoteric questions were hilarious. "I'm a toilet".
Black Mirror as a fictional world feels like an unholy marriage between "phone bad" boomer comics and fuckton of copium
Great to see a new upload from you Mert, you've quickly become one of my fave creators (binged your stuff the past couple of weeks). Also love the ideas discussed in SOMA so can't wait for your take
There's this video game - I can't remember for the life of me what it was called - but the whole concept was you were the last human not in this digital 'afterlife' scan, and the planet or ship or whatever you were on was doomed, so you had to go through the game and find the scanner to save yourself... only for the scan to indeed take a copy of your brain... but leaves you, yourself, in reality. Because, yeah, scanning your brain wouldn't take your soul with you, so... what's the point? It's literally this game but ...not! Because the ending - you see and hear your 'copy' make it safely into paradise. It was pristine and white, the room, however. And your copy was physical and you could HEAR them in the other room...
If you ever remember you have to tell me, it sounds absolutely arduous 😂 the perfect game for me
I find that Brooker often relies on his characters being sociopathic, stupid, or both plus unfettered for his stories to work - but JESUS is White Christmas terrifying. (Black Museum also gave me a full on panic attack.)
Yeah especially Rolo Haynes' dialogue! He's like "A SINGLE MOMENT OF PERFECT AGONY" while he's talking about the keyring. Very hammy haha
“She’s a payload technician which presumably means she likes overwatch” I fucking died oml
Something I often thing about with regards to Soma is how similar the WAU and Catherine end up in attempting to "preserve humanity". I'm referring specifically to the WAU's practice of putting humans into a deep dream vs Catherine's Ark; two solutions to the problem that in practice are not that radically different. Both offer an artificial fantasy for the last vestiges of humanity to escape into as they are preserved in perpetuity, and both have been paid for in blood and suffering at the hands of a callous creator in pursuit of a greater good.
Yet while the latter is generally accepted as a worthwhile endeavor, the former is often considered something so grotesque and inhumane that death is a mercy in comparison. How eagerly people jump at "mercy killing" in games is a whole other can of worms I won't get into, but I just wonder if the WAU's yucky looking meat dream network gets such a bad rap just because of the physical form it takes.
Oh yes that's very true! I never noticed that. Both are consciousness in 'fake' worlds, never actually achieving anything or living their fullest lives. And if you destroy the WAU I imagine the sleeping victims all just die being that there's no longer life support for them.
Even your Raid ad reads are full of wit and amazing vocabulary. Love it.
This is so interesting! It reminds me of the times when I first started doubting my old faith and was really scared of the idea of the Heaven that I had been taught to look forward to. That our capacity to do wrong things/free will could just be...stripped away. Having to spend life in this unchanging strange existence forever, submitting to a deity who I could no longer see as all-loving. No way out, no massive changes of time, and the only alternative being Hell which is even scarier. You explaining this game brings back that strange feeling.... On a more positive note, your mum being really proud of you is really wholesome awwww xD
Le Dizzy