Soma (

2015

)

I’m not opposed to walking simulators in principal. Sure, if you read my reviews for Gone Home [2013] or Tacoma [2017], or Rainy Season [2020], you could get the impression that I hate the genre but that’s not true. I don’t hate those games because they’re walking simulators, I hate them because they suck. Sure, I would be more than a little depressed if every game made or even a majority of them were walking simulators as the genre tends to discard much of what makes a game a game, I certainly don’t mind a good example when I see one. I don’t need a game to have brilliant combat or an addictive core gameplay loop to dig it. Well-written characters, a compelling story, and some meaty philosophical themes to chew on are more than enough to compensate for a total lack of the “game” part of video games. The problem is, most walking simulators out there have shit stories and shallow characters.

Gone Home [2013], the poster child of the genre, is the worst example of this. Sam reads like an obnoxious authorial self-insert, the like of which should be confined to fan-fiction and Junior High School creative writing assignments. Gallingly, she was the more believable of the two, as her love interest, Lonnie, is so incomprehensible and self-contradicting that she’s more plot device than a character. Since the characters feel inauthentic and this is very much a character-driven story, then the larger narrative feels phony as well. Tacoma [2017] was an improvement of sorts, but still only rose to the lofty heights of a TV series you put on in the background while you’re folding laundry. It’s doubly frustrating because this form of game design is not particularly demanding and the components of a good story have not changed in the thousands of years since we’ve been telling them. There is nothing stopping developers from crafting a walking simulator equivalent of Crime and Punishment, save the fact that the next Dostoevsky is probably writing a novel rather than a game.

Indeed, I began to despair if there really were any walking simulators out there that got it right and delivered on the promise of the genre. Thank god I found this game because Soma is just that. It has a sci-fi story that is utterly unafraid to force the player to ask unsettling questions about their own existence and to what extremes they would go to preserve it. It has puzzles that require some brain activity to solve, and just enough scares to keep the player pushing forward. I wish that I could force every developer planning on making their own low-effort walking simulator trash to go through at least one playthrough of Soma because this is how it’s done.

We begin with a deceptive tutorial where the player character, Simon Jarrett a Canadian bookseller, wakes up in his mundane apartment and goes about his mundane life. The most interesting thing about him is the fact that he was recently in a car accident that left him with a serious brain injury. Simon’s brain injury could prove fatal, even if given cutting-edge treatment so he seeks out help from an experimental brain mapping program. The gist is that scientists create a complete scan of his brain, and then use that scan as a way to chart the progress of several different treatment options so they can settle on which one would be the most effective. It’s a neat idea, and something that seems just on the cusp of technological possibility.

As Simon goes from his apartment to the medical imaging laboratory the game introduces us to the basics of the controls, how to interact with the environment, and gives us an extremely simple puzzle to solve. This tutorial section is an excellent chance for the player to get accustomed to Soma’s controls and its slightly wonky physics engine that requires you to swing open doors and cabinets by moving the mouse. There’s nothing scary here, and indeed very little incentive to push the player along the critical path. It also gives us a chance to get to know Simon a bit and understand his personality and place in the world. This is vital because once you sit down for your brain scan both you and Simon will be catapulted into a strange nightmarish realm full of incomprehensible technology and monstrous machines.

The effect of this sudden transition is jarring and disorienting for both Simon and the player. We’re catapulted from a familiar, contemporary setting to a strange alien world with no explanation save what we can dream up on the spot to explain it. Additionally, many crucial facts about this setting are obscured from our understanding at the start. It’s clear from the get-go that we’re not in Ontario anymore, but at this point in my first playthrough of the game, I had no idea if I was on a space station, in a bunker, on an alien world, or in a parallel dimension. The thought that I was on the bottom of the sea didn’t even occur to me until I got past the first area and came to my first plexiglass corridor and saw the aquatic life drifting by, afterwards I learned this was an underwater station called Pathos-II. Even then, this discovery only raised further questions: How did I get here? What year is it? What is the purpose of this facility? Why was it abandoned? Why do all the robots seem to be going insane around me?

All things considered, the opening of Soma is masterful. I can’t remember a time where I felt myself fitting more naturally into the perspective of the character. I, like Simon, was just taken from a comfortable and familiar world and simply dropped into this nightmare with no idea of how I got there or even what this strange place was. Until I progressed further in the game there was no conflict between my perspective and Simon’s, we were completely harmonious in just how confused, scared, and desperate we were. This carried over to the puzzles as well, most of which are derived from the crumbling infrastructure of Pathos-II. Simon, like myself, has little technical understanding of the many machines and systems of the station and has to rely on common sense, error messages, and convoluted UIs to repair or bypass the systems around him.

Gradually, the world of Pathos-II and the 22nd century opens up to the player and we begin to discover just what the hell has been going on for the past century we’ve missed. For starters, it seems like all life on the surface has been completely eradicated by a comet that impacted the earth a few years back. Pathos-II, being on the bottom of the ocean was able to survive the impact well enough but the station was not designed to be operated perpetually without a steady stream of supplies and replacement parts from the surface. As a result, it began to gradually fall apart and succumb to the grinding attrition of time. Its inhabitants were ultimately doomed by the comet impact just as much as anyone on the surface, the only difference being the length of time they would linger before going gently into that good night.

The player and Simon also begin to understand just what they are as you explore the environment. It quickly becomes apparent that though the player character may have the same memories and personality as the mild-mannered Canadian bookseller, he is not really the same entity. Indeed, he’s no longer really human. Instead, the scan of his brain was uploaded into a robotic body in the depths of Pathos-II. Since the last thing the scan of Simon’s mind remembered was getting his brain scan, it gave the appearance of being transported across huge gaps of time and space.

To make matters worse, when the comet hit earth Pathos-II’s secret research facility was in the middle of a confidential AI experiment. They’d constructed a complex AI called WAU and given it the task of keeping all the people at the secret research facility alive and well. When the comet struck WAU went ballistic, as it correctly realized that the small number of people in Pathos-II were now the last remnants of humanity. Sticking to the parameters of its original mission it spread out to infest most of the station, dominating any animal lifeforms it came into contact with and capturing the human beings it found so it could keep them alive in a vegetative state, linked up to machines. None of the survivors of Pathos-II that WAU can capture are permitted to die, though calling them alive is a bit of a stretch. It also seems to be installing human brain scans into robotic bodies as an attempt to perpetuate humanity, which explains where the version of Simon we’re playing as comes from.

WAU’s not the only one looking for a way to preserve humanity either. A group of scientists working in Pathos-II before the impact put together a computer system called the Ark, and loaded scans of their personalities into it. The plan was to launch the Ark into space and have it use solar power to last in perpetuity. The only problem is that somewhere along the line the project stalled out and the Ark is currently sitting at the bottom of an oceanic trench, not far from the massive railgun that can launch it into space. This is all explained by a robot who has the personality of an early scan of the project’s leader, Catherine. Her body is busted up pretty bad, so she recruits you to help see the project to completion, in exchange she offers to scan you into the Ark once they find it and give you a chance at a blissful existence among the stars.

This raises some immediate questions though, to wit: Is what we’re doing any different than the actions undertaken by WAU? Some of the people plugged into WAU seem distressed or confused, but others are content enough with their situation, to the point where unplugging them causes them to scream out in pain. Indeed, when the player character is captured by the WAU at one point he’s taken back to the 21st century, and momentarily reunited with the girl who died in the car crash that gave him a brain injury. It seems a pleasant enough existence, certainly a step up from the misery of life in the actual 22nd century on earth and a fair bit better than the yawning uncertainty of death. So, when faced with the option to kill WAU entirely towards the end of the game, no doubt some players will be deeply conflicted with the choice, as the mission with the Ark is comparable with the only significant difference being that everyone on the Ark chose to have themselves scanned.

A further layer of complexity is added when you encounter the last biological human being in the world, hooked up to a life support system at the bottom of the ocean. She begs you to unplug her as her current existence is little more than a prolonged exercise in misery and hopelessness. The obvious moral decision here and the one that nearly every player will make is to unplug her and sit with her while she slowly dies. This sequence casts doubt on the whole mission of preserving humanity either through WAU or through the Ark and suggests that perhaps the only noble thing left is to accept our mortality.

These are not simple moral dilemmas. There are no easy answers or quick fixes to the plight you find yourself in while playing Soma. As a result, Soma is the game that actually has an intellectual component of some significance. Most games with these pretensions are all surface gloss like Gris [2018], where if you strip away the slick animations and nice music the central message boils down to something as banal as “sad person learns not to be so sad.” Even games with moral choices almost always tell the player when they are making the moral/immoral ones, least we experience a moment of doubt. Soma is so refreshing because it merely presents the quandary and asks us what we think about it, without claiming to know what’s right and what’s wrong in such an alien and challenging situation.

Of course, the game is not simply an intellectual exercise, it is also a visceral horror game that manages to be intermittently terrifying. Soma excels at the sudden jump scare where a monster appears suddenly where you don’t expect to see one, like when you’re in Tau Station opening up a sealed door to discover a WAU corrupted corpse bristling with tentacles, waiting for you on the other side. It also captures the feeling of dread when you know that a difficult and dangerous mission lies in front of you, like when in the Theta station where I knew I would have to break down a window to get into a locked room but would have to manage this feat without alerting the WAU-corrupted abomination roaming the halls. It also does a good job of capturing moments of sheer helplessness and desperation, like when I was on the bottom of the abyss following a trail of colored lights only for them to vanish suddenly leaving you stranded in the darkness with only one flickering beacon to cling to, unsure of what way to go next and dreading whatever horrors lurked in the gloom beyond the faint light. These are all vastly different kinds of fear playing on surprise, dread, and hopelessness respectively, and they are all executed with remarkable skill and ability.

Obviously, horror is a subjective emotion, and the terror you feel while playing through the game may vary based on what you do and do not find scary. However, since Soma has more than one type of terror and all of them are handled with a high degree of skill, it’s all but guaranteed that at some point the game will get to you. For me, the moment in the abyss was far and away the most interesting of the game’s horror set pieces, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t more frightened when trying to outfox half-human abominations in the ruins of Theta’s lower levels. The fast pace cat-and-mouse game was far more frightening for me personally than the grim existential dread.

The weakness of walking simulator horror games is that they often lack something to keep the player invested in-between the infrequent moments of horror. Merely walking around the level waiting for a scare invariably becomes tedious. Games will sometimes try to ameliorate this tedium by giving the player busy work like simple puzzles to solve or even pointless tasks like restocking shelves (as was the case in The Convenience Store [2020]). Soma has little need for these tricks though. While it does have plenty of puzzles to decipher, overall the game is able to keep the player invested thanks to its stimulating intellectual core.