If you listen to the internet, SOMA is one of the greatest video games of all time, a truly transcendent experience like no other game out there -- a flawless masterpiece of science fiction storytelling that sticks with you long after you finish, a life-changing event that forever alters your perception of yourself and the world around you. That's all a bit hyperbolic for my taste, but I do remember enjoying it quite a bit when I played it originally, not too long after its release in September 2015. At the time, I found its story strikingly thought-provoking and its atmosphere highly immersive, but felt the actual gameplay to be somewhat lacking, especially with it being advertised as a survival-horror game from the esteemed creators of the Penumbra and Amnesia games beforehand, which I had considered to be among my favorite horror games of all time. Still, it was an enjoyable experience overall that has stood out as particularly memorable in my mind, to the point that I was still recommending it to friends and family as recently as a few months ago. With its 10-year anniversary approaching and the game's subject matter on my mind as of late, I figured it was worth replaying to see how well it holds up nowadays, and if SOMA is still as good as I remember it being.
In SOMA, you play as Simon Jarrett, a man in 2015 who survived a car crash with heavy brain damage that has shortened his life expectancy to just a few months. The game begins with you waking up in your Toronto apartment before you're scheduled to undergo an experimental brain scan that purports to be able to model a virtual simulation of your brain in order to test various treatments in a faster, safer environment. The idea being that, if all goes well, they'll be able to try more aggressive or unorthodox options and find a cure to prolong your life, and if not, then at least your contribution will help to refine and advance the technology so that it can help others in the future. So you sit down for the scan as a contraption is lowered over your head, your vision flashes white, and the next thing you know, the room has gone dark, with no sign of the doctor who was administering the test. After getting up and fumbling around for a light switch, you realize that you're in a completely different place, now -- an all-metal facility with high tech computers, environmental suits on the wall, blood on the floor, and strange growths protruding around the structure. You investigate further and find the place seemingly deserted and left in a state of disrepair, with a call log from an intercom system in which two people talk about sealing the doors to keep something out and making sure everything is set to run on standby for when they evacuate.
From there, the game becomes a matter of exploring the facility to figure out where you are, how you got there, and how you can get back home to Toronto -- if you even can at all -- with you piecing information together from computer messages, audio logs, and imagery on the walls, that tell the story of what happened to Pathos II -- the research station that you suddenly find yourself in, and that you now hope to escape from. Gameplay takes the form of a walking-simulator-style adventure game where you explore environments looking for ways to advance to the next area by solving simple puzzles, finding particular key items, and occasionally even dodging monsters who appear to impede your progress. It is meant to be a horror game, after all, what with the dark and spooky atmosphere, the disturbing monsters that you're forced to run and hide from, and a fair number of scripted scares mixed with a heightened sense of dread and tension as you worry about what might happen next. And yet, despite Frictional Games' reputation for creating excellent horror games, the horror stuff in SOMA actually takes a backseat to other far more compelling elements -- that being its deeply immersive atmosphere, and its incredibly absorbing story.