Zero Punctuation: SOMA

[Darth_Payn]

When he said "Bay Area traffic", I can't help but wonder which Bay Area. I assume it's wherever in Australia he lives, but where I live, the San Francisco Bay Area has legendarily awful traffic on Thursday and Friday afternoons.
What I don't get is why and how you're not even supposed to LOOK at the monsters you're trying to avoid.

 

[Logience]

So I'm guessing horror games only exist to pander to the Pewdiepie clones' audience?

 

[Flaery]

I'd say when he's willing to write off a game by Frictional, his favorite horror game developer ever (after maybe the team that made Silent Hill 2), as Pewdiepie bait, it's probably safe to say he's written off the whole genre.

Did you even watch the same video as everyone else? Based on your comment, it seems like you saw the title of the video then fell into some sort of coma and had a dream about it, and when you woke up, you went here to discuss your fictional dream-video.

He by no means wrote-off Soma, and even if Frictional was his favorite horror developer (which I highly doubt until I hear him say otherwise) that doesn't mean he has to blindly love every aspect of every game they make. He also never calls the game Pewdiebait.

There's no reason to say that he's written-off the whole horror genre, that statement makes literally no sense because it's just something you made up in your mind when you heard him mention overreacting streamers/lp'ers.

Overreacting YouTuber's is an inevitability, it's not indicative of the culture as a whole, but there's no denying it's prevalence.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Mark has done a shit job with his SOMA play-through. At least in the 3 videos I've seen he's missed half the audio-logs and barely interacts with the setting or characters.
He's so used to Amnesia where every character is trying to kill you and your only objective is to make it to the next part.
He's doing his whole "Oh no, no-no-no-no!" shtick but he's doing the absolute bare-minimum when it comes to the plot. He did the same thing in A Machine for Pigs where he judged the game for "Never explaining what the machine did!" when it does. He just missed half the content.

Thank God I actually played the game or I'd be just as confused as he is as to what's going on.

 

[JagerBombastic]

It looks a good game from what I can see, I personally how ever don't believe that it should score points for that as games now a days all look pretty they just seem to struggle with the whole; 'delivering on to the promised land thing'.

Still nice video and I like that there at least trying to change up there games more than Ubisoft are.

 

[Thanatos2k]

I guess Yahtzee has joined the crowd of "Some people on YouTube play scary games and overreact to them, therefore all scary games only exist to keep those people in business now".

And honestly that is the biggest pile of bullshit I've heard in a while. Come on, dude, you're smarter than that.

He never said that, but there are plenty of games like Daylight that seem to be solely for the purpose for streamers on Twitch to overreact to(like Jim Sterling said in his video "The Rise of Youtube Fodder).

I'd say when he's willing to write off a game by Frictional, his favorite horror game developer ever (after maybe the team that made Silent Hill 2), as Pewdiepie bait, it's probably safe to say he's written off the whole genre.

Did you watch the video? He says that aspect of the game which seems included for Youtube fodder detracted from the game which would have worked perfectly fine without it. And that the rest of the game was good.

 

[Biran53]

I really liked SOMA, but Yahtzee is fucking spot on when he says the monsters hardly fit into the story at all, and the premise of the games AI is barely touched upon. We don't even really get to SEE what it's done to the underwater facility. The story of SOMA definitely struggles with balancing way too many ideas for a 10-11 hour game.

That said, the writing is still really good, as is the acting, and some of the horror set pieces are very well put together (I think the final stretch on the ocean floor really kicks up the gameplay and makes it refreshing again).

But while it serves as an interesting world to set the story in, a lot of ideas come out half baked. It's almost like Frictional is actively encouraging its audience to try to make mods set in the game's world and flesh it out for themselves. Which is kinda cool if that's true.

If you like a good science fiction story with many of the similar core elements of Amnesia's gameplay, than I still recommend SOMA. It tackles the philosophical conundrums of being "alive" which a surprising intelligence and effectiveness. The ending is exceptionally fucked.

EDIT: Oh, and if I could give one piece of constructive criticism to Frictional (in agreement with Yahtzee), I really think you guys should find a better mechanic than distorting the players vision when they see something scary. Hell, A Machine for Pigs had a LOT of problems mechanically, but at least they got rid of that damn sanity meter (and I also still kinda like AMFP so judge my taste in games accordingly).

 

[Mullahgrrl]

I think it is rather unfair to lump them together with Ubisoft. Yeah they stick slavishly to a formula but they don't gouge their customers.

 

[vallorn]

SNIP

Mark has done a shit job with his SOMA play-through. At least in the 3 videos I've seen he's missed half the audio-logs and barely interacts with the setting or characters.
He's so used to Amnesia where every character is trying to kill you and your only objective is to make it to the next part.
He's doing his whole "Oh no, no-no-no-no!" shtick but he's doing the absolute bare-minimum when it comes to the plot. He did the same thing in A Machine for Pigs where he judged the game for "Never explaining what the machine did!" when it does. He just missed half the content.

Thank God I actually played the game or I'd be just as confused as he is as to what's going on.

Try ChristopherOdd, he's done a good job and his completed about a month ago. Plenty of exploring the environments looking for things like logs as well as talking about the themes of the game. The start of his first episode should give you a good idea of how he approached the game.

 

[theproductofboredom]

I played SOMA, and while it's true that the monsters struggled to find their place in the plot, the story held the experience together for me.

The game doesn't resonate as horror to me, mostly because it doesn't seem to for the characters either. Both the protagonist and Catherine are remarkably calm considering their situation. For the majority of the game they move along with contemplative detachment, which mirrored my own. The monsters only served to impede those moments.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the game would be better without monsters at all, but maybe cut down on their usage or at the very least give players a way to proactively deal with them. Being able to throw one of the various physics objects you get access to to distract monsters with the noise would've been great.

 

[Jorpho]

So... Game isn't about pineapples in sunglasses then?

I was momentarily delighted by the prospect that maybe Yahtzee had been exposed to Telefrancais.

http://telefrancaispineapple.tumblr.com/

 

[el_emmens]

getting a feeling you don't like let's players too well Yahtzee. Which is weird given the type of videos you put out on sundays through your youtube channel...

 

[RJ 17]

Sooooo basically it's more a "spiritual successor" to Machine for Pigs rather than Dark Descent, eh? Got it.

 

[QuadFish]

Glad to know I wasn't the only one who didn't find SOMA scary at all.
Also I beat the game, but I for the life of me don't know why the monsters were acting the way they did. They never fully explain why their hostile, just that they are and there's a way to stop it.

Also for a game about "Oh what does it mean to be human! Alas and Alack!" it was actually very predictable. I mean maybe I've seen one too many sci-fi movies, but I guessed the character's true nature(wink wink) while still in the starting apartment. Why? Because I knew the game was about underwater monsters and pseudo-AI/brain scan bullshit and nothing else.

So why the hell would we be in a totally fine apartment, above ground, being totally fine?!

Spoiler

We wouldn't!

Spoilering this whole thing just in case.

Spoiler

My beef with this line of though is that you're reducing it to the simplicity of the cliche "it was a dream the whole time" twist. Being totally fine in an above-ground apartment really did happen, just not to our (first) version of Simon. Our first playable Simon not being the original was never meant to be a shocking twist. It was a basic plot premise well established by the comms tower scene, that they used and built on to very good effect. Even then it wouldn't have been completely obvious if you didn't read the box blurb and already know the game was about monsters underwater.

By calling it predictable you're not doing justice to how interesting complex the plot became. By the end we know there were at least three Simons, two of which we play as, one whose memories all the Simons share and lastly any unknown number of template Simons used for research over that century. I don't think anyone could have predicted that beyond the basic plot premise of "our Simon isn't the Toronto one".

 

[FPLOON]

Apparently, I am Ubisoft when it comes to self-service buffets... Although, I think I'm more like Nintendo, given how my second and third dish are "different" than my first, but my fourth dish looks too "similar" to my first dish especially when you squint your eyes hard enough...

Other than that, now I want nipple penises that shoot breast sperm just so that I can say "I laughed so hard, I shot breast sperm out of my nipple testicles" in response to the question of nipple penises having testicles... Although, now that I think about it, if they'd had about two testicle-shaped lumps on each nipple penis, then that could just mean that it's a[nother] form of breast cancer...

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Spoiler

Here's my problem with that. All of what you just said, and indeed the entire plot, hinges on you believing what's happening to the robots is actually happening. As in its the 'real' world. But the entire plot is about how easily it is to trick the robots into believing something else.
You run into them all the time in the game, AI-whatevers in LaLa Land because they've been programmed to believe their not at the bottom of the Ocean on an Earth that was struck by a meteor.

And your goal is to basically load everyone into the Matrix and launch it into orbit.

...well how do we know you're not ALREADY in the Matrix? Inception style; false reality within a false reality?
The game tells you that A. Your a scan of some dude and B. No really, the world was tots destroyed and your in a pineapple under the sea, and C. Its insanely easy to trick brain-scans into believing whatever a programmer would want.

For all we know the entirety of the SOMA facility is just a scenarios researchers are running, within a Matrix, to see what would happen if the world ended and people put scans of themselves into robots.

That's why I think its cliche. The central premise is false-realities and tricking people into believing them.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

Did you watch the video? He says that aspect of the game which seems included for Youtube fodder detracted from the game which would have worked perfectly fine without it. And that the rest of the game was good.

Yes, he said the game, which is a horror game, shouldn't have bothered to have monsters in it, and implied that the monsters are only there so that people on YouTube could overreact to them, even though its creators have been making horror games with monsters in them since the first game they ever made and one of them is one of his favorite games ever.

Maybe he's saying that horror games with monsters in them are passé now and that a decent studio should recognize that and stop making them in order to stay ahead of the curve, like how he expected everyone to stop making modern military shooters immediately once Spec Ops came out [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/6492-Medal-of-Honor-Warfighter-Doom-3-BFG-Edition]. That's still a pretty stupid assertion.

 

[QuadFish]

SNIP

MORE SNIP

Spoiler

The same could be said of almost any game. Every plot seems incomplete if you believe that it didn't really happen and you can make that claim in almost any case. A story can easily tell you that it didn't really happen (e.g. the cliche "it was all a dream" right at the end), but it can never prove the opposite, because it's always technically possible the protagonist was just hallucinating/dreaming/whatever. Considering Soma never directly suggests its reality is fake and it doesn't have any major consistency issues that would suggest otherwise, I put it on the same level as any other standard plot as to whether it's real.

What makes me really doubt it is the game's development history. The early trailers, before it was largely rewritten, much more heavily suggested that kind of plot, where some kind of eerie third party was manipulating Simon's scan in a virtual environment to see what it would do. Frictional stated the trailers were unrelated to the game, and without reading too much into old trailers, it's not a stretch to think that that's canon, and that was the experience of a lot of unlucky Simon scans in some other part of the world parallel to the main story. Frictional basically already showed us that premise and it ultimately wasn't very interesting.

But Soma never makes the same suggestions. The experience of our protagonist Simon is very consistent and doesn't have the same issues as the trailers, and they try to cover that possibility a lot of times in the game (e.g. when Kate explains why Simon's unique body make him more mentally stable than the infected humans and robots, or when we're shown how paranoid and difficult to deceive Brandon's scan is as a pure simulation). It's entirely technically possible it's not real, but it's opening a huge can of worms to distrust everything in the plot like that. Maybe the original guy wasn't called Simon. Maybe there was no original guy and they just made up a brain scan memory to please their AI. Maybe Scout was just a simulation for the sake of researching the cognition behind racism and To Kill a Mockingbird never happened. Maybe 1984 was a simulation for social research and Winston wasn't real either. You can snowball on that kind of logic forever.

Basically you're saying the plot is cliche and predictable because you assume your interpretation that it's cliche must be correct. The central premise isn't about false realities per se, it's about whether virtual personalities still constitute a human life. The start of the game gives us one Simon, and the end gives us at least four Simons. The point of the story isn't to be deceitful about the nature of those Simons, in fact their nature is clearly stated. The point was to try to convince us that each of those Simons was equally valid as a human being and as a sci-fi story that's very cool. It only becomes cliche if you read into it too much and assume it's all fake to begin with.

Sorry if I went off-topic, but this is as much about my general dislike of "none of it was real" fan theories (like that latest Indiana Jones one) as it is about Soma.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Spoiler

But there's a difference, at least as far as I can tell, between any random game and a game with false realities and memory alterations. What you're saying seems to be its equally valid to say Left 4 Dead 2 is actually all in Steven Sigal's mind and also Nilin from Remember Me, who has both amnesia and the power to alter memories, probably altered her own memories.

One is a illogical stretch. The other fits perfectly within the confines of the game's plot and canon.

So to is it with SOMA. Its a game with human/robot/artificial intelligence/diaries hooked up to Speak N' Spells/things and the easy by which they can be tricked into believing anything. They think they're people. Literally, they think they have limbs, arms, blood, a heart, spleen, teeth and tongue. And that its totally normal to have been disemboweled by another machine and lay in a pool of what they perceive to be their own blood for nearly a year without dying. That's the level of cognitive dissonances we're dealing with when it comes to reality with these creatures.

Most other game I'd totally agree with you I'm being either unreasonable or even purposefully argumentative. But games like SOMA, Remember Me, any Matrix game, and to a lesser degree the Assassin's Creed games, you know games whose central premise is artificial realities or false memories or brainwashing or virtual worlds so real it can kill you. Games set in plots like that need to go the extra step to prove it isn't all just a dream when they so heavily rely on dreams and false realities in their plots!

SOMA could very well be about Simon, his 3-4 'clones', an underwater research facility and a destroyed world. Truly, it could be. It certainly thinks it is. But its equally likely its either all in Simon's head, or a simulator run by a 3rd party for research purposes, or that Catherine herself is an insane computer program hell-bent on destroying humanity because of abandonment issues and that the ARK isn't a savior pod of AI, but a multi-stage missile filled with experimental bio-agents because SOMA was a military research facility the entire time! And seeings how Simon's mind is so easily manipulated, Catherine used him for finish her plan.

Sorta' like Atlas from Bioshock and his "Would you kindly" line. Catherine could be controlling Simon using some code-phrase and since Simon, like every other AI/Scan thing can be lead to believe whatever his programmer's want, he could never tell the difference.
Hell, the only evidence we have that a meteor crashed is a few lines from equally easily programmed machines and I think a single computer screen that shows the Madrid facility as "Off-Line."

And actually that's a much better plot than the one we ended up with. Jeez, did I just make SOMA interesting?!

Anyway...is my now head-canon correct? 90% chance no. But any game like SOMA which relies so heavily on perception, false reality and manipulation really really needs to make sure there are no plot-holes, real or perceived.