Review | SOMA for Nintendo Switch - Maybe there are worse fates than death
SOMA’s one of those games that people say that everyone should play. I’ve been hearing that it’s a one of a kind experience that’ll stick with you for some time, but it's still remained a firm part of my backlog until now. As it turns out, everyone who recommended the game to me was right. SOMA presents a kind of existential horror that most games in its genre only scratch the surface of. Was the Nintendo Switch version the best way to experience it? Probably not, but it wasn’t hindered by it either.
For those who’re interested in playing the game on the Switch — either again, or for the first time — this version of SOMA runs pretty solidly at around 30fps in docked and handheld modes in all but a couple of in-game locations. When the frame rate does drop, it’s never at an important moment in the story or during intense gameplay segments, so it didn’t bother me at all during my playthrough. Otherwise, it’s graphically inferior in every way to its older console and PC counterparts: Every texture is slightly blurry, the draw distance is lower, and there’s a bit of pop-in here and there, but I don't think anybody's really going to be surprised by that at this point in the Switch’s life. In the realm of Switch ports, it’s nowhere near as bad as Mortal Kombat 1, but at the same time it’s no Nier: Automata, either. Strangely, I found that the layer of haze that covers the screen on the Switch version tended to add to the atmosphere, but your mileage may vary. I have been informed that it looks better on Switch 2, but I only played the original Switch version, so I can’t confirm if that’s the case. Patches are planned for this version of SOMA, so game performance may improve post-publication. Below is a screenshot of the Switch version compared to a similar screenshot of the PC version. All other screenshots in this review will be from the Switch version.
A screenshot of SOMA on PC (left) compared to the Switch (right).
Technical specifications aside, if you’ve made it this far and haven’t yet played SOMA, here’s what’s up:
SOMA is a game about Simon Jarrett, a man who accepts an offer involving an experimental brain scan after a car accident left him terminally injured. At the beginning of the game, he somehow wakes up a century in the future on PATHOS-II, an abandoned research facility that has been overrun by biomechanical entities created by an on-site artificial intelligence called the WAU. The story follows Simon as he works to survive the harsh environment and the hideous creatures residing in PATHOS-II. He finds a friend in Catherine Chun, one of the site's researchers who speaks to him through various devices as a picture of a face with a disembodied voice and offers him an escape to a safe haven called the ARK.
SOMA proceeds to posit a truly uncomfortable future where emotions, memories, and identity are all just quantifiable chemical reactions and electrical impulses that can be replicated and stored on a memory stick. Each station Simon travels through shows a different side of this revelation through the people that once worked there and their uniquely horrible current situation. It‘s a tightly-paced story that never gets dull. You don't get desensitised to the horror at any point, and it might hold the record for the most times I've thought “oh God that's awful” in a single video game. SOMA’s stroke of genius, however, is in what it doesn't say and what it chooses to brush past or ignore entirely. The moments that really stick with you don't involve the monsters at all. It's every person you can't help, every conscious robot you're not sure is really alive or not, and even the simple act of looking in a mirror. These little bits of dread keep building up when you least expect them to let the gravity of Simon's newfound existence kick in.
All that said, I couldn’t help but feel that Simon himself was a bit of a wet rag compared to the story playing out around him. So much of his dialogue is either too cheesy or trying too hard to be witty or clever that it takes you out of the experience. More often than not, I desperately wanted him to just stop talking. He’s hardly the first horror game protagonist to have that problem. I recently played the original Silent Hill for the first time and Harry Mason might be one of the densest characters ever written, but with SOMA, it feels different. Where Silent Hill uses its best scares in its environmental storytelling, uncomfortable camera angles, and oppressive atmosphere, the cutscenes, unintentionally hilarious as they may be, are more of a reprieve from the horror. The script is much more closely intertwined with the gameplay in SOMA and therein lies both its strength and the problem.
I think there are good ideas at the core of the parts of the game I have issues with. It's clear for most of the runtime that Simon’s in denial about his circumstances, and that's a key part of the first act. He wants to be optimistic in a hopeless situation. However, once he understands why he's really been thrown into the future, he doesn't change enough. He accepts everything and gets his confidence back quite quickly. Admittedly, this does do wonders for the ending, but even leading up to it, he still has a constant need to tell the player that they’re doing morally dubious things and making one impossible decision after another rather than talking in a way to show that he’s sharing the same feeling as them. This ultimately comes across as an underlying lack of confidence in the game’s brilliant narrative design.
Catherine on the other hand uses her archetypical helper role to lull you into a false sense of security. It's not that she doesn't want Simon to get to the ARK; it's that she just so happens to need Simon to get herself there. To make sure she gets what she wants, she never tells him, and thereby you, the entire truth unless it's necessary. While I understand that Simon would place his trust in her, as she's his only human contact with a face in an otherwise isolated hellscape, I wish he was a bit more clingy or scared. That fear could then come through as him being too pathetic to start questioning Catherine or too suspicious to keep following her every request. Both sides do come out in the game from time to time, but when they do, it never has a lasting impact on the characters’ relationship until the very end. As you read more information via notes and computers found throughout PATHOS-II, you learn more about Catherine's role at the station and others’ opinions of her. This adds an interesting angle to the relationship between her and Simon. As the player, you may start to feel paranoid thinking about how bad the things she’s hiding are and what she's made Simon (and by association, you) do to survive.
Because the heart of the game is in the story, SOMA’s gameplay is incredibly simple. The only options you have are walking, running, crouching, interacting, and peeking around corners. There's also a jump button, though it's mostly for flavour, and a good old-fashioned flashlight button. You can pick up almost anything you find lying around, but the most you can do with an item is break a couple of windows. There's no combat and nothing to collect — it's all about getting the hell out of PATHOS-II as soon as possible. That's not to say that it's all systems go the whole way through, as the game is split between chase sequences and slower exploration segments.
The chase sequences are games of cat and mouse between you and the many creatures that roam the empty halls of each station. They start slow, with you trying your best to learn each monster’s quirks and how to avoid them, then typically end with a mad dash to the exit of the particular station they haunt. The game attempts to modify the encounters beyond just the creatures to varying degrees of success. At their worst, chases are just a trial and error process that kills a lot of the suspense they've painstakingly built up for the hour leading up to them. Most chases try to mix up the core gameplay loop with a secondary goal that forces you to approach each monster differently and, at their best, play around with how safe you think you are. They're not the highlight of the game by any stretch of the imagination, but the monsters’ designs all feel distinct, even if they’re not always especially scary. With the exception of a few chases towards the end feeling somewhat boring, I didn't find them as bad as other critics have.
The other side of SOMA is much more quiet and contemplative. Most of your time with the game will be spent wandering the lifeless halls of PATHOS-II and the vast swathes of ocean floor surrounding the facility. While the undersea setting might bring your mind to Bioshock, I found something more reminiscent of Metroid Prime in the way that just existing in the alien world of SOMA ignites the imagination. The contrast between the isolation of the seabed and the tranquility of the life that still exists there regardless of human interference is incredibly effective at both showing an oddly calming hope that life persists no matter how much humans interfere and the sobering thought that despite our efforts, all of humanity’s attempts to control life and everything that endeavour cost was ultimately for nothing.
This point in particular gets hammered home in each station. The more you read on computers and notes found in drawers and cupboards, the more you see the ways that the corporation running PATHOS-II used the isolated location to try to cover up what its researchers were doing. There’s infighting among staff, philosophical debates gone horribly wrong, and the forced cut-off of communications between stations to keep the WAU from affecting the company’s image all while its influence has encroached on every station at once. This is all set to the backdrop of an apocalyptic event playing out on the surface. The dysfunction of the whole station wraps back around to the theme of powerlessness that the game revels in, and the more time you take to explore, the more the hopelessness sinks in.
As you walk around and hear the dull electrical hum that constantly echoes across the station as well as the recordings of the last moments of the researchers who used to live in and around the rusty structures littered across the ocean floor, you feel a calm sadness like an acceptance of death for the world you knew — something that few games capture this consistently. There is a distinct inability to do anything but engage in small talk with the robotic residents of PATHOS-II or simply look at the human corpses being forced to breathe by the WAU for seemingly no reason. Even in the chase sequences, the only role you can play is an observer, watching the formerly human creatures hobble around and scream while you look for opportunities to leave them behind. The small number of mechanics are therefore another vehicle for SOMA to tell its story, as they’re used to make you feel completely powerless rather than a reflection of a limitation of the game’s design. This is then taken further when the player is given the power to kill for a few scattered, but impactful decisions that take you by surprise. These choices feel so uncomfortable to make that they bring the whole experience together.
All my minor qualms with SOMA seem to fade away the further I get from actually playing it. That’s not to say that they’re not there, but so much more of what I love about SOMA has stuck with me over what I didn’t. Its hauntingly captivating world, its excellent sci-fi story with big, terrifying concepts, and its bitter ending have given it staying power in the horror game conversation over the last decade. The feeling of all-consuming hopelessness SOMA provides is something that no other game I've played has replicated. Whether you play the Switch version or you've had it in your backlog for years, SOMA is well worth picking up. Its gut-wrenching and immersive core is wrapped in a story of desperation to find purpose in the face of the commodification of the human soul, which may feel even more relevant now than when the game was originally released.
