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.
The story is really the whole point of the game, but it's a tricky subject to broach in a review, because on the one hand its impact sort of relies on a number of twist revelations that are meant to make you think one thing and then re-contextualize your beliefs and perceptions when the rug gets pulled out from under you, but on the other hand, these twists are somewhat essential for establishing the core premise of the story and gameplay to even explain the game at all, and why it's worth playing. It doesn't help matters that the game itself is somewhat confused about how it presents these twists, and what it actually considers a spoiler: for instance, if you've seen any marketing whatsoever, you'll know already that it's set in a facility on the ocean floor, but the actual game plays this as something of a mystery for your first 30 minutes after waking up from the scan (which might be almost an hour into the whole game) by always keeping you in enclosed metal rooms and hallways until you eventually step into an umbilical junction with windows, where you can see that you're actually underwater. So clearly, that's not a spoiler if the marketing is revealing that point long before you even start playing, but the game itself goes out of its way to obscure that fact at first so it can deliver a dramatic moment later on, so it probably would be an exciting reveal if you somehow didn't know about this in advance. In which case, yeah, it is kind of a spoiler.
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Likewise, the product descriptions all come right out and say that the story is about "identity, consciousness, and what it means to be human," while making you "question your very existence," with references to artificial intelligence and machines that think they're human. The game even begins with a quote from renowned sci-fi author Philip Dick: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." All of which is pretty on-the-nose and could be construed into a spoiler if you're thinking about those subjects when you start playing; with that in mind, it should be pretty obvious when you wake up in a different location after receiving a scan that was meant to form a realistic computer model of your brain so that doctors can run simulated tests on it, that that might have something to do with what you're experiencing. The game continues for another hour or two before officially starting to reveal what's actually going on, all-the-while with Simon insisting that he's a normal, functioning human as he interacts with AI-controlled robots that seem to believe they're human, as if the game is deliberately trying to hide its twist reveal that Simon might not actually be the normal human he thinks he is. So like, this is technically a spoiler for me to even suggest this, but it happens pretty early, and it's also the whole point of the game -- wrestling with your own identity, your perception of reality, what makes you You, if humanity is more than just biological functions, if the Soul is real and how that relates to consciousness, and so on.
As you quickly find out, pretty much everyone in Pathos II is already dead by the time you arrive, with all site functions either shut down or set to run on auto-pilot, and the only other living beings besides yourself -- if you even want to call them living -- are robots that have a tendency to speak in human voices, with some approximation of real human emotions. This is exemplified early on by Carl "The Human Robot" Semkin, who's adamant that he's a normal human, and that you're the one who's delusional for calling him a robot. But not far away, you can find the corpse of the real Carl Semkin, so obviously Carl Semkin is dead, but who, then, is this robot who's claiming to be Carl Semkin, and why does he insist that he's human? This is later explained by Catherine Chun, one of Pathos II's remaining personnel, who's in another part of the station and communicates with you remotely via the computer terminals. Basically, when the scientists all realized they were doomed and that no rescue could come from the surface, Catherine began what she called the Ark Project, in which she would scan a copy of everyone's consciousness and upload it into a sort of virtual environment, so that a part of them could live on after everyone died. Somewhere along the way, the centralized AI that regulates the station went ballistic in its efforts to try to save everyone, initially by hooking people up to machines to keep them technically alive, and then later by uploading their brain scans into robots, often to mixed results with them being oblivious to reality, or becoming mindless drones, or else going completely insane. Meanwhile, there's a weird black goop that seems to be infecting various parts of the station and corrupting some of the robots and even some of the human corpses, while mutating local marine life into some other, new form of life that's part biological and part machine.
The game's real story, therefore, is learning what actually happened to Pathos II that led to its downfall, and working together with Catherine to finish launching her Ark Project so that you can retroactively "save" everyone by sending some form of them into a simulated afterlife. To this end, you visit several different stations across Pathos II, which are connected by various transportation methods, sometimes requiring that you even walk along the ocean floor in a dive suit, where each station along the way has its own little story to uncover as to what purpose it served originally and what happened to all the people therein.
The vast majority of this happens through environmental storytelling, most of which is not overly explicit in spelling every single thing out for you. In that way, the backstory can be a little difficult to decipher, since it's treated as background details that don't really affect or relate to your main mission to revive the Ark Project, so you kind of have to go out of your way searching environments for little pieces of information, sometimes to the point of scouring through desk drawers hoping to find a random letter or whatever, and then you have to put in some mental work to connect all the dots and fill in the blanks yourself. Some of what you find, for instance, are hand-drawn illustrations or photographs that would seem completely meaningless at first, or else open to interpretation, but then become more meaningful later on once you learn more about the situation through other means, at which point it's on you to refer back to that source material and ascribe significance to it. This can mean drawing connections between a dispatch report you read somewhere and a contract agreement you found elsewhere that might explain why a certain character did a certain thing, or seeing dead corpses arranged in a particular area and inferring how they got there from what you hear in various audio logs. Most of the named characters in the game had some role to play in everything that went down, and you can actually track a lot of information as to where people were at certain times by checking against different records, and comparing the timeline of their own thoughts and movements against what you know of the greater story unfolding within Pathos-II. And each place tells its own story, like why Site Upsilon was abandoned, or why people at Site Theta started taking their own lives, or how the quarantine lockdown got triggered at Site Omicron, each of which is somehow related to the greater story and reveals progressively more details that shed new light on what ultimately caused all of this. You won't really learn any of this unless you put some effort into uncovering all the hidden information and interpreting it all together, however, which is kind of why the story is so satisfying because you have that element of discovery, in figuring things out for yourself in a more active sort of way than just being passively told what happened.
The real heart of the story, however, is in all the philosophical questions it poses, and all the difficult situations the gameplay puts you in, where you have to make choices about what to do, in ways that will affect other things or people besides just yourself. Going back to Carl "The Human Robot" Semkin, there comes a time when you need to redirect power to gain access to somewhere you need to be, and you're given two options for how to do this: one will generate extra power through auxiliary cables connected to Carl, causing him to experience constant excruciating pain, and the other will free up existing power by permanently shutting off all power to the area, thus ensuring that that section of the station can never be powered up again, and effectively killing Carl in the process. What do you do? He's effectively just a robot, not a real person, so it doesn't matter if he experiences pain because it's not real pain, right? But his screams and begging cries for help sure sound genuine, and can be sympathetic (or maybe empathetic) enough for you to reconsider your options. Maybe it's more merciful for him to die a painless death than be stuck in perpetual agony, but maybe it's better to not permanently damage the station in the process. There is no clear "right" or "wrong" choice to this dilemma, and the game won't judge you for it, so the decision is based purely on what you value more, how much you identify Carl as the living being that he claims himself to be, and how you FEEL about either option.
A later decision goes in a slightly different direction, when you need to take a functioning tool chip from a nearby robot to access a transit system, thereby deactivating whichever you take it from. Option 1 is the little K8 helper bot, who has only basic AI subroutines and no human consciousness, but who has been consistently helpful to you throughout multiple instances thus far; and Option 2 is the UH3 Tugger bot who clearly has the brain scan of SOMEONE in its cortex, but he doesn't really seem to be conscious -- just endlessly droning on while spouting non-sequitur thoughts and commentary. The helper bot is technically the least human of the two by not having a human mind inside of it, so it might be the more logical choice, but you might feel a genuine sense of affection for it because it looks and acts kind of cute with its small, rounded shape and sporadic beeps and lights that it uses for communication, and it might even feel like something of a comforting friend to you by that point in the game since it's been following you for a while and has even rescued you on occasion. It doesn't have any innately human qualities about it, but you ascribe human qualities to it. Meanwhile, the tugger bot is literally more human, but you probably don't feel a personal connection with it, so it might likely be the easier one to terminate. Then again, there is a human mind in there, somewhere, but is the mere presence of a human voice repeating dissociated memories enough to make this tugger bot feel more human than the helper bot? Which do you choose? The decision is made all the more difficult by the fact that you don't just flip a switch like you're shutting down a machine or whatever -- the game goes out of its way to give you a gun that you have to shoot, multiple times, to take the robot down, in an act that feels much more like murder, which can make the process a little distressing either way when the bots start reacting, especially when the little helper bot seemingly starts to act afraid of you after killing the tugger bot.
Other situations aren't explicitly choices that you HAVE to make, but instead give you the option to act if you feel compelled to do so -- like when you find a stranded robot outside of Site Theta with the mind of Robin Bass in its cortex, who was an engineer stationed at Theta. She expresses confusion and doubt as to whether this is supposed to be the Ark, and why it looks different than she expected. She seems happily content to be where she is, but you know that it's not the paradise she's supposed to be in and that her situation is actually completely dire and hopeless, since she will be forced to live down here by herself for the rest of eternity, always wondering if this is really what the afterlife was supposed to be. If you want to, you can unplug her from a nearby life support system so that she never has to face the possibility of going insane from her doubt and loneliness, but then again you might be effectively killing the last "living" form of Robin Bass if you can't get the Ark up and running. So is it "right" to kill a sentient being, even if it's just a robot effectively impersonating a real human? How do you FEEL about leaving Robin here to survive on her own, versus quietly terminating her existence? What would you want someone else to do if that were a version of your consciousness in her place?
Through these kinds of decisions, the game explores a lot of classic science fiction concepts like how you define "life" or "sentience," and "what it means to be human." I don't want to get into further examples for fear of spoilers, but such topics might include questions like: is the Soul a real thing that can carry on after you die? How much value do you place in your physical characteristics when it comes to what makes you You, or is it just your mind that counts? Is your identity anything special, or is it just a fabrication of your life's memories that could be recreated from scratch at any time? If you put a human brain in a robot -- humanoid body or not -- is that person still human? If you could scan someone's brain and create a perfect computer simulation of that person in a virtual world, would that person be human? Can an android be more human than a real human, if it has more capacity to express emotion or act autonomously than someone who's lost most of their bodily functions and is merely being kept alive by machines? If you were to perfectly clone yourself, and then kill your other self, does that count as murder? How would you feel about there being two copies of yourself in the world? Would that make you feel like less of a unique individual, or would you say that you became two different people at that point who will go on to have divergent lives with new identities? What makes life worth living?
I don't think the game ever comes down on trying to answer any of these questions, and I'm not sure it has anything concrete to say one way or the other, but it keeps putting you in these kinds of situations where you have to question your beliefs as the line between humanity and artificial life keeps moving with each new quandary. The game itself isn't particularly deep about how it presents any of this stuff, except for maybe a few specific instances, and in a way a lot of these subjects are actually kind of standard, basic topics that have been brought up in all kinds of science fiction stories before -- so if you're someone who's well-versed in science fiction (or I guess even just philosophy in general) and thus have already spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff, then SOMA probably won't be a huge eye-opening, life-changing experience for you, like some people claim it to be. But if you haven't really given these subjects much thought before, then SOMA works as a great vehicle to get you thinking, and thus can be a genuinely moving experience that makes you really question reality and your own existence. More than anything, the moral decisions that the game asks you to make in regards to what you would do in different situations, and how you would justify everything to yourself, and then having you actually act on those decisions, forces you to grapple with your own personal thoughts and feelings more directly than if you were broaching these same topics while reading a book or watching a movie. That's really what makes SOMA special, and it does a good job with contextualizing these decision points in such an immersive and thematic way that it feels like there's real, actual weight to what you do in this virtual video game environment.
The biggest weakness in the story might just be the main character of Simon. I, for one, found it a little hard to identify with him as the protagonist, given that he and I frequently had opposite reactions to the various plot twists, major lore reveals, or just incidental things in general. In some situations where I was horrified by the deeper implications of something, he was being completely stoic and nonchalant about it, or else he'd be aggressively bewildered over something that I had intuitively understood and accepted a long time ago. Sometimes he would be a silent protagonist, which was nice for letting me focus on my own thoughts and feelings in those situations, but then other times he'd still be completely silent when I wanted him to react or emote to something. Sometimes there's even a disconnect between optional things that you can discover through exploration, which Simon doesn't seem to acknowledge, and mandatory main story events, which Simon does, thereby creating a literal disconnect between what the player knows or understands and what Simon does, thus leading to potentially different reactions about certain things. Even when things are being explained to him in very plain, matter-of-fact terms through the main story, he later just forgets about it, I guess? Or blindly refuses to accept it? Leaving me to be like "come on dude, we've been through this already, you know exactly how this works, it shouldn't be this big a deal for you."
It was enough to pull me out of the experience in these moments where I had to consciously separate myself from the game and the character of Simon in order to allow it to tell the version of the story it wanted to tell. Obviously you kind of have to do that in games where you play an established character, but I find it a little problematic in something as immersive as this, where it really makes it feel like YOU'RE the one there making all these important decisions based on what YOU feel is right, not so much in the context of what SIMON would do. You're supposed to be Simon, but in a way the game also treats Simon as a proxy for you if you were in his shoes, and those two don't always mesh well together if you and him aren't seeing eye to eye in situations where the Simon character becomes more prominent. I guess the idea is that he's supposed to be a flawed character; like, there is a sort of consistent logic to his behavior where he's a fish out of water in an other-worldly situation with the added stresses of trying to survive against monsters and the station failing all around him, so it's understandable he might not be in a good state of mind to think about the deeper implications of things, or process all the information presented to him in a rational way. He also has literal brain damage, and it's possible that some aspect of the brain scan from the beginning of the game could be affecting his ability to perceive or understand things by the time he wakes up in Pathos II. So I'm sure you can justify or excuse almost anything discordant that he does under those circumstances, but it does require that you just accept this character for what he is and maybe even suspend some of your disbelief to make all the major story beats work. And I think for some people, the character himself still may not work well for you, in which case that can hinder the game's immersion and the overall storytelling to a certain degree.
Gameplay is unfortunately where things start to suffer. Not to the point of adversely affecting the overall experience or anything, but enough to where I find that it does leave a little something to be desired. The gameplay takes basic elements from different genres to provide a serviceable enough set of actions in terms of what you actually do in the game, with solving puzzles and finding key items to advance -- like you do in adventure games -- and having to run and hide from scary monsters that are trying to kill you -- like you do in horror games -- but neither one of these things is fleshed out particularly well.
The puzzles, for instance, mostly consist of really simple, one-step affairs that you solve in literal seconds, like "connect the dots, draw a line, find the hidden spot, push the button when the meter is in the green zone, turn the pie wedge until it intersects with the line, plug in the control panel so that you can turn all the dials until they automatically lock into the correct position, with no problem-solving on your end whatsoever." Often times, the only puzzle-y aspect is just figuring out what it actually wants you to do, and then once you understand that basic concept, you just... do it. There's no trial-and-error, or logical deduction, or complex multi-step thinking involved. You just... do it. Some puzzles are a little more involved, of course -- like I kind of enjoyed when you had to set up the configuration for an Ark test by activating or deactivating subroutines based on which ones are required due to certain dependencies on other subroutines, while also keeping the total file size under a certain threshold. Although once you understand it, even that one boils down to a simple matter of "uncheck everything, and then just click stuff on the left that highlights matching stuff on the right until there's nothing left." The game likewise has you collecting items to use as keys to progress, but this process is entirely straightforward, with each item being found and then immediately used, often with clear telegraphing like "go fetch the blue key to open the blue door." There's an inventory system where you can press a button to see what items you have, but there's hardly any reason to ever use it, because except for one sequence when you're sent to find three items in a non-linear order, you pretty much always either have the one thing you need at any given time, or you don't. So there's not really any creative problem-solving involved with carrying multiple items and figuring out which items can be used in which situations, or combining items to create new items, like you would see in other more elaborate adventure games.
Some of the puzzles where you interact with the environment are a little more enjoyable, but these ones are fairly sparse, and still don't take advantage of extra aspects like the game's physics system or actually altering the state of the environment in some clever way. I mean, for a game that lets you pick up and rotate and throw just about every object you see, it's a little surprising that there's never a point when you're expected to stack things to reach a tall ledge, or put weights on a levered pulley system to raise or lower a platform, or otherwise physically arrange objects in some kind of three-dimensional configuration to trigger some kind of mechanical function somehow. At one point you do push some stairs ever so slightly forward to reach a high maintenance shaft, but that's about the extent of the more complicated physics-based tasks you do. Likewise, there's missed opportunity to have more direct control over the environments, such as when you're on the drowned CURIE vessel that's designed to flip its orientation from horizontal to vertical; it's a little bit trippy walking around the interior and seeing ladders and walkways sticking out in odd directions, or kitchen appliances and cabinetry on the walls and ceiling or whatever, and that got me thinking "wouldn't it be cool if you had to use the ship's orientation in some clever way to get past obstacles, changing it back and forth between horizontal and vertical as necessary." But instead of doing anything fun and interesting like that, it remains completely static in following the same kind of gameplay formula as everything else where you just kind of wander around funneled paths until you inevitably get to where you need to be.
On that note, the exploration proves ironically shallow as well, where the game will tell you to go somewhere or find a particular area, but then there's no mechanical gameplay systems or thought-processing involved to deduce how to reach your destination, because the level designs are often so linear that all you can really do is follow the one and only path forward. When you have to find the sunken CURIE ship, for instance, all you know is that it's supposedly "close." You're not given any clues or direction for where to start looking, so it would seem like it's just up to you and your own wits to explore and find it on your own. And then it turns out, you just follow glowing lights along a linear path until you get there. This amounts to about six minutes of just walking forward and looking around at a very sparse, minimalistic environment, with I think just two little jumpscare moments along the way. That's where I think it might've been more fun to spruce the gameplay up with something like a homing beacon tracker that indicated the ship's general direction, but with you having to navigate through a maze of ridges, reefs, and wreckage full of twists, turns, and dead ends. That way there's more to actually do along the way, and you get to feel some satisfaction in figuring out its location on your own. In reality, you spend a lot of time in this game just walking forward until you get to the next big glowing button on a control panel that you need to push, and sometimes it's not even clear what the button actually does or why you should push it, but you interact with it anyway because know you're playing a video game and need to do SOMETHING to make the game progress, and this is where the game clearly wants you to be so just go ahead and push it. It can all get to feel a bit mindless and passive at times.
The best parts of exploration are when they actually put you in a sort of small hub area and give you the chance to explore different things in a non-linear order, because that makes it feel like you're a little more in control over what you do in the world, with more opportunity to set your own pace. I'm an avid explorer in video games, and so for me, these were the moments that actually satisfied that part of my brain in making me feel like I was actually exploring something, and not just being forcibly dragged along to the next mandatory thing. In these more non-linear moments, it almost starts to feel like an immersive-sim like System Shock 2 or Prey 2017, but of course, again, with the game not quite going all the way with really tapping into what makes immersive-sims great, by not really giving you full control over how you explore the world, since everything that you can do is so heavily scripted. Like at the beginning of the game you come across locked gates that are chained up with padlocks -- an immersive-sim would give you tools to get around that, some specifically intended for that purpose like boltcutters that you would find later, and others being things that you improvise like throwing enough heavy objects at it to break the hinges, or else with you just finding another way around it altogether such as crawling through a duct after cracking a security lock -- but SOMA instead makes progression through these locked gates a scripted part of the story, when a robot goes berserk and just conveniently busts the gates down at the exact moment it's necessary for you to go that way. That was a little disappointing for me the first time I played because I thought the game was setting up a little more of a Metroidvania style of exploration through hub areas where you would progressively unlock special items and shortcuts to get around a persistent map, only to realize that, no, it's actually extremely linear, and you're always doing the one exact thing the game expects you to do.
To be fair, it's probably for the best that these gameplay elements are as simple and subdued as they are, since the game is really supposed to be about the themes involved with the story, and so making the gameplay too complex could possibly take away from people's ability to enjoy the story. If the puzzles are too difficult, for instance, then people could get stuck and simply not be able to finish the game, or if the map design were too open or non-linear then people could get lost and have no idea what to do to advance the story. By streamlining all of the gameplay, it allows players to focus more on the story itself without getting hung up on mechanical minutia. This could also be better for the sake of the game's pacing to let it get to the story stuff more quickly without potentially getting bogged down on extended gameplay sequences that players might struggle with or otherwise not enjoy. So there's a strong case to be made that the limited gameplay is perfectly fine as it is in servicing the main focus of the story. The problem is that, if for whatever reason the story isn't really doing anything for you -- like if the subject matter just doesn't interest you at all, or if you're already so familiar with its ideas that nothing really seems new to you, or you have a hard time identifying with Simon, or you take a very nihilistic approach of "robots aren't people and none of this really matters" -- then there's not a whole lot going on with the gameplay to fall back on to hold your interest. And even if you are really engaged by the story, there are still prolonged gameplay sequences without a lot of direct storytelling going on, where you might want to see more involved mechanics to make those sequences more interesting in the absence of the story.
The monster sequences, for instance, serve to directly interrupt your ability to enjoy the story, and yet aren't fleshed out sufficiently to be wholly entertaining on their own from a pure gameplay perspective. SOMA
strips out a lot of the traditional gameplay mechanics that make
survival-horror compelling, like health and sanity meters, or ammunition
and weapon durability, or items to light the environment or create safe
spaces or literally to save your game, all of which you have to manage
through limited resources, which can instill lasting consequences even
for encounters that you ultimately survive, if it means you have to use
too many resources to do so, which makes subsequent encounters feel
harder, and thus more tense. And with no basic defensive
maneuvers or ways to fight back, there's no decision-making about when
it's worth it to use limited resources while risking a direct encounter
to try to take down an enemy that's in your way, versus when it's worth
leaving it alone and just trying to avoid it, with no opportunity for a
fight-or-flight response when you get caught since your only option is
flight. Now, being defenseless and having to hide from enemies can, in
fact, be extremely tense and scary in the right context, but in SOMA
there just aren't enough other systems built up around this gameplay
style, and so it comes off feeling very superficial -- almost like
Frictional Games didn't really want to make a survival-horror game this
time around but felt obligated to do so on account of their prior
catalog of games, and so they just kind of half-assed it in a way that
doesn't really work in terms of raw gameplay mechanics.
Without any of these extra gameplay systems, there's no mechanical consequence to a monster catching you in SOMA -- it's simply a minor inconvenience that just makes the game literally uncomfortable to play by distorting your vision and adding more headbob. Once you realize that, there's no practical reason to be scared of any of these monsters, especially since there's almost always a healing station nearby to remove these penalties. At which point it's mainly the audiovisual cues doing the heavy lifting in terms of making them scary, which will naturally vary from person to person in how effective they are, since horror is incredibly subjective. People will inherently be more or less scared of different stimuli, but I for one found the monster encounters more annoying and boring than scary -- annoying because they kept impeding my attempts to engage with optional storytelling while searching rooms for hidden journals or audio logs, which is what I was most interested in, and boring because there wasn't a lot of mechanical tension involved with actually dealing with these enemies. Sometimes it was both at the same time, like whenever I got stuck sitting around with my hands off the controls just patiently waiting for a monster to wander off so I could get back to what I was doing.
I actually found the monsters scarier when they weren't actively trying to kill me, when they weren't even aware yet that I was there, since I didn't know what they were, what they were capable of, how they worked, if they were even going to attack me at all, and so on. It was basically a fear of the unknown, and once they started attacking me and I started to understand their mechanics, they became known, and thus their scariness went away. For that reason, I almost think it might be better to play on the "Safe Mode" difficulty which basically deactivates the aggressive part of the monsters' AI to make them just droning set decorations. That way you still get some of the disturbing imagery of wondering what these things actually are but without the tedious hassle of them interrupting the story or outstaying their welcome. But on the other hand, that removes basically all of the tension if you know in advance that nothing is ever going to attack you -- even though the scariness is likely to wear off when you're attacked multiple times by the same monster, that first time usually is genuinely frightening when you don't know what's happening yet. So I'm really not convinced that the "Safe Mode" is the best solution here. It seems like there should be some middle ground like Amnesia: The Dark Descent does by default, with letting the monsters act normally until they catch you the first time, and then despawn afterward so you get that initial scare and then just don't have to deal with the diminishing returns from them repeatedly coming back again. But of course, you don't explicitly tell the player this, so that they don't know if the monster is coming back or not to maintain some degree of tension.
After all, the game is already pretty scary just through the atmosphere and environments alone, that you don't really need monsters popping up in your face for the horror to work. In the same way that a movie like The Descent is scary long before the monsters show up, just because of the real life horrors you can experience from getting lost or stuck or unable to see while spelunking an unfamiliar cave system, walking along the depths of the ocean floor in SOMA is scary all on its own when your guiding light sources start to get fewer and farther between, with no other way to orient yourself to find your way back if you lose track of them and get lost. The station itself is unnerving what with the dark and moody lighting and the thick soundscape, where weird noises could be anything at all -- from basic machinery harmlessly doing its thing, to the station about to break down and collapse all around you, or possibly even a monster lurking about somewhere off screen. Plenty of scripted scares when you aren't in any immediate danger are effective too, like when you return to a familiar area and find a dead corpse in a different position from how it was before, or when the lights suddenly flicker out for a brief jumpscare.
Coming back to SOMA for its 10th anniversary, I find that most of my original thoughts remain the same as they were initially, although I've definitely cooled on it a little bit since then. Some of that is to be expected of course, with a lot of the major story beats not being as profound as the first time through given that I already knew where it was going the second time, so some of the twists and lore reveals just didn't land as strongly. I suppose there's room to dig into the story deeper on replay, since you can pick up on certain things you didn't notice the first time, once you know later details in the chronology that you can keep in mind retrospectively while going through the earlier areas, but this would seem to require that you play the game back-to-back so that those details can be fresh in your mind -- in my case, having not played for eight-and-a-half years, I'd forgotten a lot of the specific details and thus couldn't really apply that knowledge to my second playthrough. But I still enjoyed uncovering the little sub-plots and hunting down every little piece of information I could. And it was still tough to make some of those decisions -- I can't remember if I did anything differently than the first time through, but I still had to think long and hard about some of them and still wasn't entirely comfortable doing so. Gameplay is where I come down the hardest on replay, where I found myself even more underwhelmed by the puzzles and exploration than I was originally, this time feeling noticeably bored at times and wishing they could've been beefed up at least a little more. Back then, during my first playthrough, I probably got hung up a little too much on the lack of survival mechanics, and thus couldn't see the forest for the trees in terms of appreciating the game's darker, more psychological side to its horror, so that's one area where I think my opinion actually improved with this replay. The monsters posed the same issue for me both times, however, where they felt tacked-on and actually got in the way of things that I ultimately enjoyed more -- the story and searching for hidden pieces of information. The "Safe Mode" didn't exist when I played originally, but trying it out now I'm not sure that it's necessarily better than the standard mode, though if you're on the fence it's probably better to start in Safe Mode since you can't switch in the middle of a playthrough.
So overall, I still really enjoyed my replay of SOMA, and would easily recommend it to anyone who finds the subject matter interesting, or if you're a fan of these sorts of immersive games just in general. Even if you're not normally a fan of horror games, it's manageable enough that I think most people could get through it, and it's certainly worth it for the story. Some of the hype may be overblown, since I don't consider it to be a profound life-changing experience or anything, and it has enough little blemishes and missed potential that I can't call it a flawless masterpiece, but it's definitely unique and memorable enough to be worth playing no matter what.
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