Zero Punctuation: SOMA

[Thanatos2k]

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.

He's saying THIS GAME would have been a better horror game WITHOUT the monsters there to be Youtube overreaction fodder. I fail to see why this is a bad argument. Are you saying there can't be a horror game without monsters to fight?

 

[StoleitfromKilgore]

@Silentpony:

Spoiler

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.

I'm sure the people at Frictional were giggling insanely and whispering to each other: "In truth the storyline is completely different from what it appears to be. And they'll never know, since we won't give them any information on it."

And no, twists for the sake of twists don't make something more "interesting".

 

[RJ 17]

Snip.

Ahem...pardon me for being absurdly late to this little party, but having just finished the game myself, I just wanted to point something out.

Spoiler: You seem to be missing what SOMA was about.

In the sense that you seem quite certain of your assertion that the game was actually about false realities and how easily the mind can be tricked into accepting them. That's...not really what the game is about at all. In fact there's even two bits of the game that directly contradict that assertion: the part where you have to try and get the security cipher from the dude by running him through simulated realities. Almost every time he ends up completely rejecting the reality and figuring out that it's fake. Then there's the bit where you get grabbed by the monster and stuck up into the wall...you're treated to a scene of Simon back in his apartment with his girlfriend and Simon out-right rejects that scene and wakes up to pry himself off the wall.

The game is regarding the philosophical quandary of what it means to be alive. Are we alive because we have flesh, blood, bones, and organs in a living, breathing, functioning body? Or are we truly nothing more than the equivalent of computer data floating around in our brains? All of our memories/thoughts/experience/emotions/etc...if everything that defines an individual and creates a personality could be perfectly copied and placed into an artificial platform, would they still believe that they're alive and the same person they were before they were transferred? Well why wouldn't they? They have all the memories/thoughts/experience/emotions/etc that they had in their organic body, they still believe they are who they were in their organic body

This is why Simon flips the fuck out when Catherine copies him from the Dive Suit to the Power Suit. To Power Suit Simon: it feels as though he just teleported from the chair to the locker, but in reality she effectively cloned him. The thing is, at that moment both Simons are equally Simon. They both have all the same memories/etc as each other. If he wanted to, he could have waited around until Dive Suit Simon woke up and have a conversation with himself.

The thing is, Dive Suit Simon's existence is now absolutely meaningless since he can go no further, however Power Suit Simon can progress. This is the point of the game: weighing existence on a personal level vs existence on a cosmological level. On a cosmological scale, the entity that is known as Simon continues to move forward...from Toronto in 2015 to Pathos II a hundred years later in the form of Dive Suit Simon. From Dive Suit Simon, he progresses to Power Suit Simon. From Power Suit Simon, he progress to ARK Simon. Each previous iteration, however, effectively becomes obsolete and dies off. 2015 Simon dies due to his brain damage and thus can no longer progress. His life is over, however he gave rise to Dive Suit Simon. Dive Suit Simon is stuck because his suit can't handle the pressure of the abyss, and so his life is effectively over, however he gives rise to Power Suit Simon. Power Suit Simon is stuck because there's no way for him to get on the ARK, and so his life is effectively over, however he gives rise to ARK Simon. And so in the end ARK Simon gets to continue existing and moving forward, and thus the entity that is known as Simon gets to continue existing and moving forward as well.

I feel I have a pretty solid understanding of the plot, so if you'd like to throw any questions at me feel free to send me a PM (or we can duke it out here if you prefer ). Hell, I even fully understand why the monsters are actually in the game in the first place, something that Yahtzee apparently missed since he thinks they were shoehorned in just so the game could still wear the "Hello: I'm A Horror Game" badge. They actually do have a purpose that ties in entirely with the story.

 

[1981]

I just finished it myself. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Spoiler

In the sense that you seem quite certain of your assertion that the game was actually about false realities and how easily the mind can be tricked into accepting them. That's...not really what the game is about at all. In fact there's even two bits of the game that directly contradict that assertion: the part where you have to try and get the security cipher from the dude by running him through simulated realities. Almost every time he ends up completely rejecting the reality and figuring out that it's fake. Then there's the bit where you get grabbed by the monster and stuck up into the wall...you're treated to a scene of Simon back in his apartment with his girlfriend and Simon out-right rejects that scene and wakes up to pry himself off the wall.

I don't think it was about false realities, but they did fail to explain why the people who were trapped in broken robot bodies seemed unaware of their fate. We humans rely heavily on our senses. Simon's suit even made breathing noises. Could claim that it's the parts of our brain that process this information that need it, not our consciousness. I'd claim that they can't be separated. Thinking about it, it would've made more sense if only the minds who were basically put in potatoes would've gone insane.

So Simon stayed sane because there was a dead body inside his suit? I wouldn't use the word sound to describe a decaying human body. Just like the monster thing, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Feel free to explain.

Another thing that made no sense was that those people had developed a highly advanced AI, but didn't have matter replicators or renewable food sources. They didn't even have the good sense to bring harpoons to the bottom of the sea.

The reason they discourage looking at monsters is likely that, ironically, the AI is barely sophisticated enough to walk in a circle. A modder once said that the pathing in Amnesia: The Dark Descent is linear at best and unpredictable at worst. Luckily there weren't too many of those encounters.