SOMA

@TAPETRVE,

Oh, no. SOMA has pretty decent philosophical depth. It has a strong thematic focus and treats it's core ideas and concepts consistently. The interplay between the protagonist Simon and deuteragonist Catherine is also quite strong, with well written dialogue competently voice-acted.

Where it suffers is in terms of wasted potential. I loathe the ending to SOMA. Watching the Let's Play had me on the edge of my seat the entire time, but after I watched the ending I had no desire whatsoever to actually get the game, and regretted the investment I had put into seeing it through.

I feel they could have done a lot more than they did, and the game's biggest twist isn't a twist at all. Though, in a way I ought to commend them for not making it one. It would have been the most obvious twist in the world given the subject matter.

Also there appear to be entire segments of gameplay that appeared in pre-release media that just aren't in the game. That whole bit about brains in jars- that never appears.

edited 23rd Sep '15 9:45:04 AM by Gault

Can't be worse than the stupidly Gainax Ending in Stasis that tries so hard to be dark and grimey

edited 23rd Sep '15 10:10:34 AM by YoKab

That's because concept demos almost never are part of the final product.

Also just checked the tropes page incl. spoilers (I can actually read the entirety of a book/film/game's plot, and then still consume and perceive it as if I never heard of it before). Seems the big mistake Frictinal made was to have a disparity in knowledge between the protagonist and the player, i.e. the player knows actually more than the person they are playing, which works in movies, but is pretty damn bad thing in a video game.

edited 23rd Sep '15 9:58:46 AM by TAPETRVE

That's definitely a part of it. For instance, I know for certain that I'm smarter than Simon. I figured out stuff that ended up surprising him.

And even then, a whole bunch of shit goes unexplained, and even more potential goes unused.

Gotta admit, I laughed my ass off at that silly novel called Hooked (Oh, no people got hooked with the hook and spooked, this book will get you hooked!) and the description of a movie called Massive Recoil (Curropt cop fights triads and supernatural Underground stuff show up), and the sequel Massive Recoil 2: Flawless Execution.

The interactions with items have certainly improved with the better physics, and the sound design for said items is so perfect. Almost like Throwing Random Shit Simulator 2015

edited 23rd Sep '15 10:54:50 AM by YoKab

I mean, you'd have to have writing pretty bad to not be better than most other horror games currently out there.

If you can nail atmosphere, environment, and interactions, along with some good writing, you have a good horror game. Most of the recent indie horror are "shallow scare-fests" with nothing more to them.

EDIT: Just to get this out of the way. You can disable the glitching Interface Screw in the game by going to Options>Game.

edited 23rd Sep '15 11:34:54 AM by YoKab

I guess the fact that the entire existentialist stuff is sort of a red herring and ends up cast aside as entirely irrelevant in favour of a what seems to be a deliberately anticlimactic anti-twist that mimics Phil K. Dick's Impostor might piss off a lot of people, but to me it actually seems kinda clever at least on paper; it smells almost like a spiteful, Ellison-esque parody of the overly pseudo-intellectual plot twists the Bio Shock games have been indulging themselves in .

There's a lot of influence from Bio Shock in this game, that's for sure. In many ways it does Bio Shock better than Bio Shock does.

Jim Sterling speculated in his review that SOMA might be some sort of reaction or parody to some twist elements in games. Which is not that implausible considering that the game displays some decent deal of self-awareness at times.

edited 23rd Sep '15 11:58:44 AM by YoKab

Yeah, it definitely seems to outdo BioShock in both the shock and the bio department. The whole structure gel business - while still outlandish - makes a million times more sense than that ridiculous magic elixir thingie that was ADAM.

edited 23rd Sep '15 12:05:47 PM by TAPETRVE

But does it give people half-life (not the game, altough that would have been cool) like the greatest spray of all time called Ubik?

Not even the game did that .

It would be hilarious if the creator of Amnesia: The Second Dimension, which was a wacky parody of Amnesia that received Approval of God, decides to make a parody of SOMA, in which he shoves evey wierd thing Philip K. Dick ever wrote in the game. Guy has a good sense of stupid humor

edited 23rd Sep '15 12:35:03 PM by YoKab

How is stasis anyway? Besides apparently really downer of an ending?

Anyhoo, so how is this game for those who have played it?

edited 23rd Sep '15 12:44:27 PM by SpookyMask

Stasis is a solid adventure game with impressive isomteric visuals. The problem is that towards the end it almost turns into a B-Movie and it gets really silly along with absurd puzzles. The puzzles also lacked feedback leading to ones getting stuck on a logical puzzle sometimes. Suddently the comparison to Sanitarium are way too accurate, as that game too got stupid towards the end, only worse! Then again, Stasis is mostly made by one person and it was his very forst game, so he can get better.

As for SOMA, it's about what I expected, and the puzzles are defenitely better compared to Amnesia and there is more interactions. It gets the atmosphere and sound design just right, and it is really intriguing from what I'm playing, it is pretty consistent and step up from Manesia in terms of writing. It kinda reminds me of some of Philip K. Dick's works.

edited 23rd Sep '15 1:03:53 PM by YoKab

From what I gathered, it essentially starts off very Dickian, and then turns arguably into pure Harlan Ellison fare (the ending is pretty much a perfect mashup of Demon with a Glass Hand and I have no Mouth and I must scream). Which I am perfectly fine with, considering the latter is some of my favourite non-Lovecraftian horror out there.

edited 23rd Sep '15 6:33:19 PM by TAPETRVE

How are the puzzles in this game anyways? Are they frustrating to figure out, or are they just right?

I've been meaning to give this game a try, but the thing that almost always turns me off from these types of horror games is the puzzles.

I just finished watching an LP, and they all seem pretty straightforward and intuitive.

On that note, holy shit the ending is brutal. I mean, Simon really should have figured out by then that it was copying and not transference, but still. I love that this game actually examines this technology instead of just using it as a plot device.

Yeah, do you think it would be fair to say that most of the game's plot is a huge deconstruction of Brain Uploading, or at least a thorough examination of all that trope's consequences?

& I hated the ending. It's entirely predictable, and moreover Simon is an idiot. Maybe it's just because I'm more familiar with the subject matter than most people, but I understood exactly how the scanning worked the entire game. Anyway, given how early they popped the "reveal" I was convinced they would do something to mess with you at the end.

The entire game I was expecting some kind of twist, like maybe the WAU has corrupted the Ark, and the entire game takes place inside a simulation of Pathos-2 inside the Ark, so that Simon and Catherine never were in the real world to begin with. Or maybe Pathos-2 and the world it exists in is itself a simulation, with everything including the apocalypse and the WAU as a part of the simulation to test the scanning technology and gather data on how Humans would react to the technology of brain-copying. Y'know, cool shit like that.

But no. We get exactly what we think we'll get, which is an immense let-down for something with this kind of potential. SOMA barely scratches the surface of the potential of this technology.

edited 29th Sep '15 12:36:33 AM by Gault

No offense but I think your twist is even more predictable, but that may be due to me reading those classic sci-fi books

edited 29th Sep '15 2:29:14 AM by YoKab

I get where you're coming from, but there should have been something. They can't have given us exactly what we expected.

I read somewhere that it is more user-friendly to create custom stories with SOMA. I am sure there will by a lot of custom stories soon. Hell, SOMA is already packed with level editing files.

Also, there is a semi-joke file in the pc version called supersecret.rar. It has a bunch of workig titles for the game including:

• Simon is a Sexy Beast
• Dead Fear 4: Fearerer
• Maple Leaf Chronicles
• There Once Was A Man From Toronto
• XYZZY
• Awesome game
• HPL Level Editor: The game

And it has a secret video of a glitch

edited 29th Sep '15 2:43:01 AM by YoKab

It's aggravating for a video game, esp. a first-person viddy game, where the protagonist is supposed to share as much situational awareness as possible with the player, but as a fan of Ellison's "Fuck everybody, fuck my stupid readers in particular, and most of all, fuck YOU!" mentality I absolutely get where Frictional are coming from with their shitty protagonist, so I'm not complaining too much .

edited 29th Sep '15 4:30:09 AM by TAPETRVE