SPOILERS OPEN

Previous message:

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our fifth game of 2023 is Somerville. The target completion date is March 13, 2023.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after March 13, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You are also free to come back any time after the completion date and share your thoughts! This club is meant to be open to all whenever you want to join in the fun!

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Somerville?

A sci-fi puzzle adventure game from part of the team behind Limbo and INSIDE, with a similar vibe. It's about a man looking for his family during some kind of extra-terrestrial invasion.

How long is Somerville?

How long to beat lists it as 3.5 hours long.

I already finished this at release, so (for now?) I’m just going to say that while the game has some neat visuals going for it and a fun enough mechanic for puzzles, it’s a far cry from Inside kinda all-around, especially so at release when it was having technical hiccups on both PC and console. Hopefully that has at least been improved by now.

That said, I paid 1€ to play this on Game Pass, so I was left feeling more positive than negative by the end.

I haven't finished this game but...I do not like it so far. The puzzle mechanic is okay but a lot of the "puzzles" are bad. I was enjoying the beginning when it at least looked cool and was atmospheric but after it goes to the second environment it is dark and brown and ugly and it can be hard to see stuff. The interactions are super finnicky.

It's a huge disappointment to me. I knew it wouldn't be as good as something like Inside, which I love, but instead it's like Little Nightmares, which I did not enjoy that much, but without the great aesthetics. I hope it improves.

Building on my prior comment...I did not like this game. It's not the worst game I've ever played or anything but it's definitely in my bottom third of games from 2022 I played, and pretty low on the UUGPGC list for me.

It does get better aesthetically after the dull and way too long mine section, but the puzzles never really get interesting and the graphic style cannot carry a full game. I understand the choice to do narrative without speech, but it just left me totally uninvolved. The tiny characters do not emote enough for me to care about them.

So the gameplay can't carry it, the story can't carry it, there's not a lot of music, and while the graphics are neat they're just not enough.

It's also janky. I got stuck at one point because the dog wouldn't leave a room and I had to restart from checkpoint. Got stuck at another point because you're supposed to duck under a bus after jacking it up and the animation clipped through the bus so I didn't think you could actually go that way. Got stuck at the very end because the game is far too fiddly about where you stand your miniscule character to hold hands and interact with the alien monoliths.

There are some neat sequences and the powers are kind of neat the first few times, but I feel like the game promises way more than it delivers after its pretty good first act. Definitely spent the last hour or so just wanting the whole thing to end.

I loved Limbo and Inside so this was a big disappointment. I was expecting to like it and not love it, but instead I disliked it and wouldn't have finished if it wasn't so short and easy.

I'm about half way through this I think (just exited the mines where you learn the second ability). I felt the opening was pretty strong and way spookier than I expected it to be, but was surprised at how nonchalant the character is towards everything. I was excited to have my dog follow me for a bit, but realized that the dog mostly feels shoehorned in to signpost the gamer during some of the early moments and also does not provide much character.

My biggest issue comes with the fact that it is really hard for me to gauge the depth of the character on the landscape. There have been a number of instances where I forgot I was not running on a 2d plane (like Inside & Limbo were) and was confused as to why the character was not interacting with something right in front of him. I am colorblind, so maybe that had something to do with it, but either way, it ended up creating instances of thinking I was stuck.

I do plan on going back in and finishing it because when I was sitting down and playing, I was enjoying my time. I just haven't been compelled to go back in and see it through. But I am gonna be jobless after Friday, so I could definitely see myself popping back in and finishing this soon.

For now, it is a tentative 3/5. It's fine.

I feel bad for voting for this one nearly every time because I just couldn’t finish it. Basically got to the mines and thought, “man I would really rather be playing anything else right now” (which turned out to be the Final Fantasy VII Remake DLC in Power Wash Simulator, go figure). It just never felt good to play for the reasons described above, but especially for how your character moves in a 3D environment. It was pretty disappointing, but I don’t feel strongly about it.

Speaking of somewhat disappointing, that Power Wash Simulator DLC didn’t feature the Sector 6 playground! Just vehicles and Tida’s bar, basically. I need a W here.

@noboners: I am not colorblind and I sometimes had trouble seeing what you could interact with. Some of it is colored yellow (don't know if you can see yellow because there are lots of different types of colorblindness) but the game is dingy and the camera is pulled way back so it can be tough to see anyway. Plus there are other things in the world that are not interactable that are colored yellow, and some interactable items are not colored.

I think in general the game is way too subtle in its signposting. The biggest problems with the puzzles is figuring out what you can interact with rather than how to solve the puzzle, and that's not good gameplay.

@bigsocrates: I can see yellow just fine, luckily, since every major video game release uses yellow as the universal signpost since Uncharted 2. You mentioned there have just been some items to interact with that haven't been yellow, and so for those, I assumed I was just missing whatever the color marking was.

I agree about the signposting though. Every puzzle has just ended up with me walking around with double clenched fists trying to find something I can grab onto. Just trial and error puzzle solving, as opposed to really thinking about how to solve the puzzle.

Yeah, I couldn't get myself into this game. It has a neat aesthetic and can get sufficiently spooky, but playing it is a hassle. I think the big problem is the 2.5D nature of the levels, since going into the background usually isn't that useful and it's way too easy to get hung up on the level geometry. I'm pretty much in full agreement with @noboners about the puzzle design.

I was also never the biggest fan of Limbo, so that type of 2D puzzle adventure game was always going to be an uphill battle for me to enjoy. I should probably read more about the nominated games before voting for them.