SOMA is a game where the scariest thing is an idea, not a monster. Frictional Games, the studio known for the Amnesia series, this time set its story in the underwater research complex PATHOS-II, where the main character wakes up with no clear explanation of how he got there. The gradual unraveling of what happened at the station, and what happened to him personally, forms the backbone of the whole experience and leads to questions about what actually makes a person a person, and whether a copy of consciousness is identical to the original.
The gameplay is deliberately simple. The player moves through corridors, opens hatches, reroutes cables, reads logs, and listens to recordings, occasionally having to avoid disfigured creatures that cannot be fought. Sneaking and hiding in the dark is the studio's classic discipline, but here it serves more as a periodic heart-rate spike than as the main focus. The strongest moments come when the game confronts the player with a decision that has no good answer and leaves them to live with it afterward. The stretches along the ocean floor, where visibility extends only a few meters, rank among the best-constructed passages in the genre.
On PlayStation 4 the game leaned on a dense atmosphere of flooded interiors, excellent lighting, and sound design full of groaning metal and pressure impacts. Visually it isn't the technical pinnacle of its generation, but the art direction of the crumbling station works flawlessly. Contemporary reception was very positive, especially thanks to the storytelling and the philosophical dimension rarely found in horror games. A later update added a so-called safe mode, in which enemies do not attack, letting players focus purely on the story. Today SOMA ranks among the best-written science-fiction games ever made. Its ending is among the most frequently discussed conclusions in the medium and can occupy someone's thoughts long after the console is switched off. That is precisely why it is recommended to play it in one sitting, in the dark, with headphones on, since more than anything it works through silence and through what it chooses not to tell the player.
Game 86 of 278 for Sony PlayStation 4
