Why SOMA is the Scariest Game I've Ever Played
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- Опубліковано 9 бер 2023
- Kat untangles the reasons SOMA took up residence in her mind and refuses to leave.
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Transcript: bit.ly/pixeladay_SOMAtranscript
Thank you to :
Pim of the YT channel Pim's Crypt (@pimscrypt)
Phil of the Pixel Lit podcast (pixellitpod.com/)
All game footage capped by me
Music used in this episode:
Laboratory - Mikko Tarmia
Subway 2 - Mikko Tarmia
Examination Room - Mikko Tarmia
Subway 1 - Mikko Tarmia
Ark - Mikko Tarmia - Ігри
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SOMA is a game you play physically once at least, then it plays inside your mind for the rest of your life
well said
Couldn't have said it better myself
How so?
Should I play it or no?
I think about it way too often lol
No movie book or film touched me like SOMA, it creates a new corner in your psyche and waves out occasionaly.
Pixel a Day is an underrated video essay channel
I love SOMA, really a terrific horror game.
The thing that I always found most sad about the woman at the bottom of the sea is that she thinks that she's in the ARC. She thinks that she's safe and sound on the ship, drifting through space with everyone else. I recall walking away from her and hearing her confused questions slowly fade into silence. Left a bad feeling in my gut.
Interesting hearing your take on it. My personal darkest moment was when we had to boot up the guy in a simulation to get information from him, then just turn him off.
That said, I always felt Soma was somewhat hopeful. The AI that created Simon, and all the other robots was programmed to preserve humanity, and it started off being really bad at it (see the infected fish, and robots lying around). But as it's gone on, it's most recent attempts have been far more successful. Look at Simon! The AI took a while to get things right, but it seemed to be trending in a positive direction, and with enough time, Homo Robotus could be a full proper society. With the right people, the Robots could even enter their own virtual worlds as their senses are all robotic, and could be swapped out. We know this technology exists in the setting from the ARC.
To me, the ARC is truly the worst ending, as there is no chance to ever make it better. They are living on borrowed time. Meanwhile, it's the Simons that got left behind that can work on slowly rebuilding the world, and making a version of the ARC that all those on earth can visit or leave as a will. Wake up in luxurious comfort, head out to work in the undersea facilities (or maybe even landbased ones, because a well built robot body could survive on the surface), than after a day of work and maintenance, return to your perfect city with your friends, and have a nice meal and some games before heading to bed.
It's not a perfect life, but it isn't a bad one either. That said, in the end, this game really does make you think.
I went back to this video just today, and Talos Principle 2 feels like a lovely companion piece to Soma in some ways now. That's a game where an AI tried to make a robot humanity and *suceeded,* and now the society is trying to figure out its own place in the now nature-filled and humanless world. It's a real interesting one! ^w^
I love this take. It's exactly the reason that through most of my playthroughs, I play SOMA yearly, I leave everyone alive. When Catherine flickers out at the end and Simon is left behind on the Space Gun, he is truly only alone if you killed the other characters like Amy at the beginning or Sarah Lindwall at the end. I imagine Simon going back and working with them maybe even scan them as their natural life runs out etc.
The Simon you leave in the room can't escape it, so he will be trapped there, alone, until his battery runs out or he ends himself.
The Simon trapped after launching the ARK is also trapped alone there, doomed to the same fate.
The WAU could only clone the few scans it already has so it would simply create a tonne of duplicates who would no doubt go insane at meeting themselves over and over again.
It can't create a new species like that.
Soma truly is one of those games that changes you. Question is if it changes you for the better or for worse.
Funny thing about Simon-2. He *is* you, so you don't have to guess what he would've wanted. Every earnest choice is the right one.
Robin Bass... we don't know enough to assume how she'd react once she realizes what's wrong. Or if she ever does. So it's not our decision to make for her.
He's the you from a moment prior, though. The you who's never stepped in your _current_ shoes. You're both different people, increasingly as your experiences accumulate. You know what he _thinks_ he would've done and you know what he would want as the person in the chair. What _he_ doesn't know is whether or not his mind would change if the moment came. If he was the current you, in your current shoes. 🤷🏿♂
That all being said, he likely would've made whatever decision the current you does. Each step and wander. Hesitation and decision. Problem is, what gives current you the divine right to decide for past you?
@@questioningespecialy9107 It depends on how your mind works, but I for one would always let the future me do what they want.
Since they have more informations that I do.
SOMA is a really unique horror game, honestly. The writing is truly impeccable. I played it shortly after it came out (I loved Frictional's Amnesia: The Dark Descent) and it wasn't really until the very end where I got hit by the dread in SOMA. Maybe it was because I was younger (I was 15 when I played it, so some of the robots suffering in agony/living ignorantly in peace went over my head), but I'll always remember seeing the ARK in space, with the destroyed earth behind it. It made me start to cry because the juxtaposition between the fact that humanity as a whole was obliterated while only living on as a digital simulation stuck in space is so beautifully haunting. The contrast of those two things was really profound to me.
This is one of the few games that not only puts important questions in front of you, but also makes you question life itself and often you might not like the answer.
I love it.
I hate it.
I've recommended it a dozen times, everytime saying "you probably won't like how this game will make you feel, but you will appreciate this discomfort regardless".
It's the true meaning of awe.
Years after playing this game I still, seemingly out of nowhere, remember its name and tense up, feeling something like a heartache. Then I sigh and shake it off. I never could kill off Simon, even on repeated playthroughs, even though I knew it was what he feared most, what I would fear most, being left there alone. And every time I would be reminded that I'm a piece of shit that has always ran away from his problems, even if it meant ignoring other people's suffering.
You're not a pos but thank you for sharing. This game is real and the shit it brings up is fricking real
There are actually some tangible consequences for some choices, or at least one. I read that if you choose not to electricute Karl and take the alternative rout, it lets a monster follow you into the next area and makes the game more difficult.
This game is just one of a kind. Absolute masterpiece
The thing that disturbed me the most, is that dead is not a relief for the artificial consciousness. For organic beings it is, because the brain realises a cocktail of substances to ease the pain and give us closure, but a chip can't do that... Catherine even talked about how she percieved the time with the plug and unplug, so if an artificial conciousness dies, it would felt like an infinit pause... an anguish suspended in eternity.
I played SOMA for the very first time just a year ago, shortly after my Great Grandmother passed away, well past 100 years old, after several years of failing memory and declining health...
I unplugged every copy of a person I could.
And yet... I played the game on No Hostile Monsters Mode or whatever it was called... and so when it came to the OTHER big moral dilemma of what to do with the AI... I let it live. It was THE New Dominant Lifeform on the planet... it was all that would be left of humanity. And it had shown me no ill will up to that point... it was just trying to do its job, fumbling through its first steps while humanity was on its last...
I think about these two almost contradictory gut reactions months later...
Good video. Thanks again as always.
I've juggled with that final choice a bunch of times. I think, ultimately, letting the WAU live is probably correct, since it seemed to be improving a lot at what it's doing. Simon and Catherine were more recent incarnations and they were better at living, and we need something exceedingly tenacious to live on the dust of the planet. Either we let the fish do it over the course of a couple million years, or we let the WAU do it way, way faster.
There's gonna be untold suffering either way.
So after having finished the game i was trying to think of what Simon 3 can do after the credits start rolling.
The first thing that came to my mind is that the launch dome is underwater. There's gotta be a reason for that, the most obvious being that the gun prevents a seal and so it may be possible for Simon 3 to make his way outside by forcing open some loose panels without having to reopen the pressure chamber that leads back into phi and requires an omnitool to operate.
If Simon 3 kept Sarah Lindwall alive, all he'd need to do is find a way to tell her he is alive, maybe by banging outside tau in a specific pattern to let her know it's not some sea monster. Sarah's computer has the ability to lock and unlock sections of Tau, so she could be able to let him back in through the airlock that leads to the transportation tunnel, thus avoiding having to deal with Jin Yoshida in her state. Now dont give me that crap about her having 60 seconds to live the moment she unplugs herself from the IV to feebly walk down and manually activate the airlock, I'm sure she can think of some way of doing it.
Now, once Simon 3 is back in Tau's living quarters, he could task her with repairing the omnitool (according to the SOMA wiki, Sarah Lindwall is an aerospace engineer and payload technician, so she'd have the skills) Or find a spare omnitool and transfer Catherine's cortex chip over to the new one.
With that, he could then head back to the lift, which after all is now at the bottom of the ocean and hence there's no need to notify Omicron to lower it; then ride it up, meet up with and revive Simon 2, and the 3 of them could then scrounge the other stations for enough food rations (believe me, i saw enough mess halls full of the stuff) to return to Sarah and get her off the IV and nurse her back to health. If there is a spare Haimatsu power suit in Tau or Phi, she could be brought back up to the plateau as well. Edit: The body of the original Cathering Chun in Phi is wearing a Haimatsu Suit, sans the helmet.
Once there, the - now four - of them could go back to find Amy Azzaro if Simon 2 had kept her alive. With the WAU being poisoned she might either be dead or they might be able to get her off the "life support" without killing her.
Robin Bass can be salvaged near the doors of Theta. And then there's Javid Goya who can be picked up in Delta. I'm sure he'd snap back to reality seeing so many people. And finally we have Carl Semken. He can be fixed as well.
So at the end we have a team consisting of Simon 3, Simon 2, Sarah Lindwall, Catherine Chun, Robin Bass, Amy Azzaro, Javid Goya, Carl Semken and a handful of K8 Universal Helpers to form the basis of post-launch civilization on earth. Since Sarah is mortal, she could have her mind scanned and transferred into a UH3 or a suit in a corpse with some omni gel. And nobody would need food anymore. Assuming the gel doesnt become useless with the WAU's death, they'd soon find a station without monsters they could reclaim and power up and maintain for maybe a century or two and have their own ARK at the bottom of the sea. And eventually try visiting the surface, maybe find survivors in bunkers and whatnot. Happy End.
I'm glad you wrote this. I occasionally think of Simon 3, left alone in the dark.
I love works that stay with you in that way, that make you think about your experiences with it well after you "finish" it. Thank you for sharing your personal experience, its an excellent video 💜
Great video essay. I just started a new playthrough today and completely agree, it's not just one of the best horror games, but one of the best horror stories out there in any medium. Chilling and soul crushing.
SOMA has a similar approach to choice as Spec Ops: The Line. Or even Telltale's The Walking Dead. Those games are ridiculed for the "illusion of choice", which makes me angry as they actually confront you with the true nature of choice, the ancient Greek stoicism's insight: that the only thing you truly control is the nature of your action, not the outcome. They make it impossible for the "gamer brain logic" to kick in and turn this into just an intellectual puzzle - what to do to achieve a "good" result, how to "win" the choice.
When I was a 7 year old being instructed on the machinations of a Pentecostal Jesus by my grandmother, I quickly discovered the underlying potential horror of infinity. As a teenager I became excited by the prospects of transhumanism and my consciousness living arbitrary long amounts of time. As an adult I came up with the prospect that maybe time for a conscious being can never truly end to relative to itself, but can only continue to slow down logarithmically while never completely stopping, thereby creating an individual afterlife for every being that has ever ceased to be. And as an old man waiting to die I just try to stay drunk so I don't have to think about any of it.
Suffice it to say you are definitely not alone in playing out such thought experiments with yourself. And Soma definitely tapped that vein for me as well...
And needless to say, very much appreciated and enjoyed hearing your take and finding your content.
Thank you so much for your comment
I'm seriously questioning myself because apart from the screaming robot, which I would hate, I would probably put them all out of their misery without a second thought.
But my empathy is seriously stunted because I'm on the spectrum and I would simply assume they would prefer death than an eternity trapped in a decaying wreck at the bottom of the sea
No way. My new fav channel and my recently played new fav game/story. How serendipitous. You’re channel and writing are so amazing AND BEAUTIFUL
Soma is just wonderful, it kept me thinking about it for days. Also, really awesome essay, you put all the points together nicely.
Thank you!
Really good video, and yeah, the choices i done i still remember after all those years
too.
Ultimately I thought and decided it was the right choice to not let anything live, not even the wau... Even if we as humans are long gone the idea of letting the wau affect or infect what's left didn't sit right with me. It's clear as day things still lived in the sea, things still lived on. The only copy of Simon that should live is the one that didn't know any better the one oblivious too it all on the ark. The weight of each decision only consumes me because I made them. Simon not knowing any better on the ark will live free and peacefully which is good, Simon "2" or even Simon "3" know too much for their own good and that is a detriment. Not because of what it might do to others but instead because of what it might do to oneself. The infinite possibilities the ark presents are as real as anything, but it still isint right because I know it isint real, I know they aren't ever coming back. That doesn't matter though because "Simon" on the ark accepts and enjoys how the "real" the ark is and how it's better than what anything on earth could ever acomplish. SOMA is game that starts at a wrong turn, this initial wrong turn subsequently makes everything else after also wrong. The humans should have never went so deep to go so high. They should have tried to survived old school, all natural. But even then it makes me think maybe "ignorance is bliss".
I keep coming back to SOMA by searching for videos like yours, and in particular by searching for other people's first/blind playthroughs. My own experience with this game left me very uneasy, questioning my choices, and I still seem to look for validation in how other players perceive SOMA and their respective decisions. No other video game had this impact on me, which is why I consider SOMA a masterpiece, although the "monsters" are quite silly in my opinion.
Adding to the pile of awesome discourse of Soma along with Jacob Gellar and Joseph Anderson.
i am closely following frictional games ever since penumbra: overture. the penumbra games were a bit rough on the edges, but also had some of the great ideas in them that later resurfaced in soma. i can really recommend playing them ^^
Great video! That game stuck with me so strongly, and you absolutely nail why, how it keeps you thinking about its premise.
You're so right, soma _is_ a playable thought experiment. I imagine that Plato would make something like this if he were a game dev
I played SOMA every single year once ever since it came out and it never fails to choke me up by the time it ends. It is an absolute masterclass from every conceivable angle. Every single playthrough for close to a decade now brings new aspects to light, something I haven't thought about before that sheds all new light on just how terrifying the entire premise and narrative of SOMA is. On my last playthrough what I noticed was this: every game you usually play, once you hit the end, there is a sort of resolution, even in world ending games like Doom Eternal etc., where you imagine the protagonist taking a breather, going home etc. In SOMA the world literally ended, there is nothing on the surface, even if Simon could mentally work through his issues we see in the game, there is nothing for him to go home to. No home, no family, no friends, nothing. A bunch of psychotic mutants and robots and even if he downloads scans into mockingbirds, he doesn't know those people, there is no connection. He is absolutely alone in the most horrifying aspect of that word. SOMA is absolutely one of a kind, I don't see anything topping it. Amnesia Rebirth and Bunker sure didn't, but those are different games. I also hope they don't ever attempt some sequel to SOMA, because there is really nowhere to go from the ending of it that wouldn't be a huge cliché. SOMA is definitive and that's the most uncomfortable aspect of it from a gameplay perspective.
i was gonna listen to this in the background, but it drew me in and now i feel very disturbed, Thank you!
Sorry! XD
I was waiting until October to watch this video. Did not disappoint
Other required reading for this video: The Machine by Philosophy Comics
6:32 you say Robin could have been down there for decades in the UH, the idea is correct that the player has no idea when they first see her but shes really only been lkke that for a year of so. Since mockingbirds weren't created until telos hit ans she only got uploaded to a UH once her physical body died when she killed herself with the razor after her arc scan
Always love seeing videos on soma!
That was a good video, good analysis of the game. Good work.
For me, the reason I can't stop thinking of this beautifully terrifying game is a question that it made me ask. That simple question is, "What does it mean to be human?" I know there many answers to this singular question, but thats why it agitates me. I would rather just have one answer. One person may answer with "Oh its the flesh and bone." Another will answer with "Oh its the soul." But in turn comes another question. What if we humans found a way to do what they did in SOMA and be able to plant an exact replica of someone's memories and transfer their consciousness to a body thats not quite, well, human? Does that in turn make us less human? Does it make us less of a mortal? So many questions can stem from just one, and yet so many unsatisfying answers. So now, I ask anyone who comes across this comment. What does it truly mean to be human?
I think the worst part about this game is the fact the WAU could always put their brain scans back into other mockingbirds, an infinity for other copies outside the ARK.
This game stuck with me. It is amazing from start to finish.
It’s black mirror episode in a game format
It is also chilling that the game ends without seeing anything of the Arc except a forest and Catherine.
How well are those who were scanned fairing?
How well can a human mind deal with existing in the Arc for potentially hundreds or thousands of years..?
Will they have to delete memories memories in order to cope with immortality?
If you decide that you have lived long enough can you choose to die?
What effect would that have on such a small community, what about human issues of loved, hate and potential violence?
Soma ends with a tiny sliver of humanity with all its flaws and uncertainties. It seems so fragile that even if the parts endure those within must maintain their sanity and will to live or else the Arc could become a hell for the very last of humanity
I tried to go back and unplug her. But I had already gone too far, and I couldn't; the door wouldn't open. I left her there and I kept thinking about her for the rest of the play through, and based on your video, I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep thinking about her down there until our own sun goes out... I'm sorry, robot on the bottom of the ocean. I made a bad choice.
Ever since I was told at 5 that i could die at any moment because of my heart's birth defect and I went through and came out of a strong existential crisis and grappling with my mortality and the fragility of life and how we can just -poof- not exist anymore in an instant I've found a kind of catharsis in imagining my death every day.
I've tried to imagine new and different ones daily or even nightly before bed. My favorite ones are the slower deaths like cancer.
I've also found over the past four decades of living a kind of certain bent enjoyment in seeing people go through an existential crisis. Or even inducing a crisis in someone.
I don't particularly find existentialism horrifying anymore.
Your story reminds me of katawa shoujo's mc
Excellent philosophical SOMA vid :)
I found your channel through a recommendation from the Adam Millard architect of games and your most recent video is about one of my favorite games! And if that wasn’t already good enough it’s also a great video with a perspective I hadn’t heard quite like this in the many videos about Soma I’ve watched. Good stuff! Liked, subscribed and commented 😊
Great to have you!
Well... thanks to you I now started thinking how impossible that would be to make a great sequel to Soma. But a window for a tie-in about Carthage is still sure open. Awesome video btw,
Great video! Thanks for the content.
Thank you for watching :)
You don’t actually have to let Carl suffer like that to proceed. There’s another switch that turns off the main power and it causes him to shut down instead. You release another robot monster into the room by doing so however.
Sorry, I won't finish the video for now. Because you made me want to play the game !
PLAY IT NOW DON'T WATCH THE VIDEO YET
Alien Isolation says 'hold my motion tracker'
You make me think my dark twisted fantasy dear lady. Perfectly done video. Thx a lot
Well, I doubt this will make you feel better, but if you chose to kill the WAU at the end, then Robyn the Robot would have probably died sooner than later anyway, without the continued maintainance the master AI provided. In fact, *everyone* you left alive will die without the WAU, for better or worse. And on the other hand, keep the WAU alive, and anybody who got scanned and then killed will just be able to be brought back, again and again and again...which will probably be unending horror for most of them, but hey, the WAU is getting better at the whole 'mentally stable constructs' thing, so maybe it will make a livable (robot) world at the end of it all. We just don't know.
Wonderful essay for a wonderful game
Love your analyzes
Amazing video!!!
Soma is a game that i couldn't play to the end. For me it was too brutal and final. It's a great story about certain things you may also encounter in real life.
This game honestly is one of those things that just sticks with you as mentioned, but it’s on the same level as The Langoliers for me. I’m always questioning stuff in that movie, I made 3 stories one sucks but it could’ve been worse and I’m always reminded of it daily. Whilst Soma isn’t quiet daily it’s pretty damned close. Also the only Omicron I know is near the abyss and it’s a very beautiful place.
I wished the game had been more fleshed out and longer. But I suppose the issue was they had plenty of ideas and than dumped them all and than we got what we have. But in doing so we missed a lot of opportunities for more creature variations like the shark and more creepy bottom of the sea locations.
I feel way more could of been added. Maybe even as DLC parts, too bad that never happened.
Anything their working on will be similar but it won’t be Soma, unless it is. But than would it still hold the same feelings even if it was? most 2nd games don’t feel anything like the 1st ones and often tend to ruin the 1st games, for me anyways.
Debug mode allows you to really explore some extra stuff, look at how detailed the monsters really are and going out of bounds and taking the viper fish with you like I did in my videos lol extends the game even further. So I suppose there’s always that.
I'm playing SOMA. I've played for four or five days and haven't finished it, it's harder than I thought (I hate puzzles, they steal hours and hours from my life and in the end I almost every time have to find guide). I must be 70% through but I really want to watch your video, and so I will (and so I did). At least I have a good understanding of what's going on.
Anyway, what's the worst thing I can think of? My first thought was the same Harlan Ellison story (a story I have had in mind while playing SOMA), eternal suffering. But when I met Robin, the robot, I thought eternal loneliness might be just as bad. But I though of that a little too late, once I had proceeded to the next area and was unable to go back and unplug her.
Thank you.
You should have way, way more subscribers
it touches everybody who have played it.
Excellent essay.
Excellent game.
Gurl I haven't even made it through Soma and I think about it once a month at least
'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' is definitely *thematically* an interesting game, but if you do play it, save often, and use a walkthrough. It is, in my experience, very poorly put together, and you can softlock yourself not only by doing the incorrect steps, but doing the (otherwise unordered) steps in the wrong order. Definitely something I'd recommend watching a Let's Play for.
Oh goodness yes. I remember soft locking myself on my first playthrough
The way I justified it was that as Simon, you have the same exact traits and thought process, you are the exact same as that being. If anyone should decide whether or not Simon 2 gets to live, it should be Simon 3, since he is literally the same being. The way I see it, Simon is terrified of isolation and dreads being alone, so the most sane course of action would be to just make sure he doesn't get the opportunity to wake up and see what kind of a hell he's been abandoned in.
7:07 oh I never noticed you could unplug her 0_0
Most of your "fears" are based on ignorance, you fear things which you don't understand.
Infinity is a "curse" but also a "blessing" because with "infinite time" you could solve ANY physically solvable problem.
And if "there is no right thing" it automatically means that there's NO WRONG THING also.
Oh god yes, I *love* SOMA. It really changes you as a person. How many other games can say that. A flawed masterpiece.
12:30 SOMA has better choices that games that claim player choice.
Not for nothing this is my all time favorite sci-fi story.
What's the worst way to die? Probably acute radiation poisoning wherein you are kept alive medically for study purposes, that or prions.
How would you kill someone?
Well the most successful method is just random bikes with people in full motorcycle gear shooting wildly before speeding off.
The worst thing you can think of?
Humanity collectively losing its human spark, that or the idea of undeath, of experiencing every moment after your death eternally with no way out.
Oooh, first jacob gellers video, now yours, I'm being spoiled!
Nice
I think, for me, one of the most interesting things the game poses is the coin flip metaphor - it took me a long time to fully wrap my brain around it, and ultimately I've come down on the side that there is indeed a coin flip.
Incidentally, if there's ever teleportation invented, I am never, ever getting in it, because with my luck I'll lose the coin flip. I'd rather not just cease to be.
Yep after playing SOMA it's a big NO THANKS from me
It's not a coin flip: it's a split. One of you always wins, one of you always loses.
13:08 being born
The apocalypse only happened a year before the events of the game, so the robot couldn't have been there for longer than that.
Who are you playing as in SOMA? It can't be the Simon that had his brain scanned because he died before Pathos-II was built. It can't be the Simon that woke up in the future because he went into a coma during the transfer. It certainly isn't the Simon that braved the ocean floor. The only person it makes sense to be playing as is the Simon riding the ARK. He remembers doing all of those things. Once the game ends and the credits roll, so will you...
do you know the concept of "Plato's allegory of the cave"? if not, i encourage you to look it up! im kinda amazed that this storyline first came into human minds such a long time ago by the old greeks. reality and determinism are such intresting devices for storytelling. i thinked about all this shit way too much and my conclusion is there is no such thing as an objective reallity. our eyes and ears are just sensors and our brain is the CPU that computes all the inputs. math, morals and emotions are all concepts that only makes sense percieved trough a human brain. a brain that is programmed trough evolution. there is this old philosophical question "What if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a sound" and i think the answer has to be NO! sounds are pressure waves and you need an ear and a brain to form a sound from a pressure wave. i hope my gibberish makes slightly sense.. im from germany and dont speak english to often. im really vibing with your style of thinking. normally im an sarcastic and misanthropic type of person but for once i didnt feel like the smartest person in the room. lol.. do you have many people in real life that would get all the references and understand your reasoning? for me its quite rare to come across people who thinked about these concepts. this video was really satisfying to watch.
Thanks so much for the kind words. Who knows how many philosophically minded people there are out there! Probably a great deal! I like to think I'm not that special in this regard :)
@@PixelaDay for sure.. but its rather rare that i meet someone at a party that would get all the references and has an unique opinion about stuff like this.
Hate to have to tell you this, but you don't have to torture the robot at upsilon, there's a way to humanely do it.
I found that out...after I finished the game XD
Sth I noticed here is that we take for granted that what happens is in fact a person getting copied - which is what's going on. Idk if people remember this, but back when this game came out there were all kinds of people actively misinterpreting what happens in the game in order to feel better about what happens in the plot.
Gonna have to watch in the am but leaving a comment for engagement!
Thank you for the engagement
Please do Prey and Alen Isolation Next ? ❤❤❤❤❤❤.
Soma is really good
It wasn't actualy scary (to me)
It whas rather interesting.
The only horror game I like, did you know you can kill carl semken by flipping a switch over by the Upsilon Airlock?
I didn't find this out til I read about the game after I'd played it!
The protagonist was the only thing that kept Soma out of my top 10 favorite games. Dude needs everything explained to him over and over, and it causes the game to insult the intelligence of the player as a result.
Grabbed this based on your vid.
Nice to hear a fellow female Aussie gamer.
Hello fellow Aussie! 👋👋👋
ooo soma
maybe the best video essay on soma
Sorma, not soma :p
Actually it's the Aussie "sourrrma"
What I don't like about Soma is that the protagonist is really stupid and even at the ending still surprised. That makes it hard to connect for me.
I really didn't click with Soma. I found those moments where awful things happened because the player character did terrible things to be artificial. As in the game was literally forcing you to do them - you had the choice to stop playing the game (which I did after a while)
Now, I'm neurospicey and at the time I was playing Soma I was taking care of people who had dementia so things like leaving the robot on the sea floor didn't land with me as they might. One of my dudes with dementia had a short term memory only around a minute long and he was generally a pretty happy guy despite living in pretty terrible circumstances.
But...leaving that robot... If that were to happen in real life, you could talk to the robot. Ask her if she wanted to carry on, ask if she wanted you to end her life. Same with leaving yourself in the chair.
To me, it felt as if Soma was really forcing these awful moments and trying to make you confront actions which were fundementaly outside of your control, because you didn't have any agency in that moment beyond an A/B choice given to you by someone else. As a metaphor for living under capitalism it's actually pretty good, but I don't think that's what the text was going for.
It's amazing writing, but bad at actually being a video game. I don't think the designers had player agency at the forefront of their minds while making the game.
You can actually leave all of them alive, except for the first robot you run into that doesn't really speak.
It's harder to do, but possible. Though, I do agree that it's a rather rail-roaded story; if it wasn't it probably wouldn't hit those beats right. It'd be fascinating if they remade SOMA with GPT3+ where you can type directly to the robots/humans, but it wouldn't be the same game.
As for how to keep them alive, train can run on low power. You don't have to reroute power through the robot that is stuck, you can ignore the warning in the other room and reroute power from there (though that opens the path to the crazed robot). I think that's all of them that you'd be "forced" to punish/kill. Though the human at the train is certainly worse off. You do have to pull the power on one of the robots for the zeppelin, but you can choose if you use the friendly helper bot that doesn't seem to be a full on AI or one of the delusional human clones.
To me, the point that Simon-0 has been used as the basis for all the AI robots is a bigger dread moment. Not only doesn't he understand what's going on, but he's been copied millions upon millions of times. In essence, he's all the robots without human memories in the game. He's also a dumbass that didn't figure out what's going on after he got into the last physical suit, obviously the same thing that's happened twice before is going to happen for the third time as well…
@@Sylfa One correction - the rerouting power thing does not torture the robot, yes, but it *does* permanantly shut off power to the entire sector, effectively killing them. Still probably the least mortifying choice to pick though...
We are, at last, in a situation where I have a very negative hot take on a game that you really liked, lol
The universe is in balance once more
Great video essay on the game. I already played the game but you really should put a spoiler warning for players who come across the video and might want to play it.
Thanks, glad you liked it! There's a spoiler warning 32 seconds in.
Yo why you sound like SKYE
I hate this game! It forcing me to make bad choices! I have deleted it, after the robot chip! Not going to Theta!
The monsters in SOMA were the least scary parts of the game, and I almost wish they weren't in the game.
I wish I'd played it in safe mode.
SOMA is one of the MOST important video games to talk about, imo, because it represents arguably the HIGHEST point in video game writing while simultaneously being absolute shit at actually being a video game, and thus represents a perfect battleground wherein we can debate each other on what is actually important in a video game. The art style, if you can even call it that, is completely uninspired, the horror/stealth gameplay is shallow and terrible even if only compared to previous games by the same developer, and the "choices" are incredibly shallow and forced. It's only as loved as it is because the writing is so good, arguably some of the best there's ever been in a video game.
I've noticed that typically how people feel about SOMA more or less maps onto how they view gaming as a whole, and that people fall into two camps.
The people who love it and consider it an all-time favorite game generally see no problem with games trying to be movies, stuffed full of increasingly long non-interactive cutscenes with shallow gameplay that isn't designed to be fun and challenging in and of itself but is only a method by which you obtain more story. They might even see such a state of affairs as actively desirable.
The people who don't like SOMA very much tend to be like me: people who want games to stop trying to be movies (and "walking simulators" which is just the indie, more budget version of AAA interactive movie games like Until Dawn), take control away from the player less, utilize non-interactive cutscenes less, focus primarily on gameplay, and increasingly lean into either essentially having no story whatsoever (in the case of great games like Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, and Vampire Survivors) or tell their story in a way that only works in a video game, doesn't just copy film or literature's way of telling a story, and thus isn't actively at odds with the gameplay and the player's agency (Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Bastion, Hades, Transistor, Outer Wilds, Quadrilateral Cowboy, etc.)
It is NOT normal to think about how to kill someone in the slightest. Normal people don’t think about weird and creepy stuff like this. And mentioning such sick behavior casually is even more creepy.