SOMA

Set at the bottom of the ocean in a place the playable protagonist has never been to before and played in first-person, Frictional Games' SOMA seems like it has a lot of similarities with BioShock. And while both have complex narratives centered around philosophical and ideological debates, those similarities start to wane as your journey presses on and instead of getting more powerful and capable, you become more vulnerable and ill-equipped. And that's not a bad thing at all. SOMA's strength lies in it's impeccably paced narrative and fantastic environment design coming together to form an experience that only gets better as it goes on, and one that will likely stay with you for some time after you put it down.

After surviving a terrible car crash, Simon Jarrett is diagnosed with severe brain damage that will prove fatal sooner rather than later. Agreeing to an experimental and unorthodox brain scan to help find a way to cure him and others, Simon loses consciousness during the scan in Toronto and wakes up in a strange facility seemingly at the bottom of the ocean. This facility, he soon learns, is PATHOS-II, a functionally abandoned research center in the North Atlantic, currently inhabited solely by robots (who believe themselves human) as well as a woman's voice over the radio. Going any further would risk telling too much, but suffice to say that (obviously) things are not all as they appear, and that the idea of what makes something "human" is explored - from multiple sides - in full.

For a game as heavily dependent on it's narrative holding up, good voice actors are needed to believably live in this world, and thankfully SOMA has just that in it's two main leads. Jared Zeus as Simon and Nell Mooney as Catherine (your guide throughout the majority of the game) are excellent in carrying the bulk of the spoken story-telling, with Simon coming across as confused and angry as one would expect given his situation, and Catherine is awkward but determined as the shut-in scientist. There are other voiced characters in the game in the form of "black box" recordings found by interacting with the dead bodies of the erstwhile scientists - SOMA's own take on audio diaries - and each of these are just as well acted, and often provide useful context for what may have happened at the station.

As wonderful as those characters and performances are - and as cliche as it is to say - the most interesting character is the world itself. The entire station has the look of somewhere that had been lived in and worked in some time ago, while clearly having been unused completely since then. As well, the invasive WAU artificial intelligence, ostensibly now biological and growing in some capacity, covers many of the walls and ceilings, making the very structure seem like it is alive and breathing. The art direction - and atmospheric tension - only becomes more striking during the portions of the game where Simon ventures between the various stations on the ocean floor, one of the last examples of these sections standing out as easily the most mesmerizing - and terrifying - segment of the game.

While the game looks unquestionably terrific, especially in those ocean floor parts, the PlayStation 4 version has some technical problems. Although not the worst there's ever been, the game has a significant load from the main menu that was at it's longest sixty seconds. The loading problems don't end there, as it every time it saves or loads, the game will pause entirely until this is done. One particularly bad instance had the game pause to save, load, and then save again in the span of walking across a very small room, taking just under a minute before I could progress. As well, coming into and out of these loads can cause the frame rate to drop substantially, and while these ultimately weren't deal breakers in any way, they were noticeable enough to jar me out of the game at times.

There are, however, times when the visuals are supposed to chunk up and blur, and those occur during the monster sections of the game. Like Amnesia: The Dark Descent before it, Frictional opt to remove any chance of combat from these encounters, focusing on avoidance rather than aggression. Each monster is amazingly well-designed and unique in their appearance and behavior, some being blind and allowing for sneaking past if quiet, while others require you to be even more careful of it's line of sight and your own movements and sound. As well, you don't really encounter the same monster twice, as each new are has a new monster design to go with it. When around the monsters, the screen will start to tear and blur the closer you are to them - even through walls - and looking right at them often ends up making the screen so blurry it's hard to see straight. This may seem like an annoying feature, but it ends up helping to train you to evade even being in the same room as the enemies, and while you're usually able to take at least one hit from them and wake up some distance from the now reset creature, there is a fail-state to being attacked too many times.

With the scattered remains of the researchers before you still lying around, there are ample opportunities to learn more about the people and the world you're now sharing in the form of papers, computer terminals, drawings and much more that can all be interacted with, giving everything a tactile feel. And while there are a lot of games that would rest on that alone to tell it's tale, SOMA goes all out by also having an expertly crafted and acted story to provide the skeleton for all of this exploration. There may be some performance hang-ups, and one or two of the monster segments went on a little too long, but these are nothing compared to the overall adventure. Although unmistakably a horror game, SOMA has very intriguing core themes about 'the self' and 'the body' that gives the roughly twelve hour expedition a lasting appeal by being so thought-provoking. The BioShock comparison may only be skin-deep in the end, but it's also very flattering, as there are few things that would ring out as higher praise. At the end of the day SOMA is a game that should at least be given full attention by horror game fans, but also by anyone who's interested in a superb story.