Why SOMA is the Scariest Game I've Ever Played
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- Kat untangles the reasons SOMA took up residence in her mind and refuses to leave.
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Transcript: bit.ly/pixeladay_SOMAtranscript
Thank you to :
Pim of the YT channel Pim's Crypt (@pimscrypt)
Phil of the Pixel Lit podcast (pixellitpod.com/)
All game footage capped by me
Music used in this episode:
Laboratory - Mikko Tarmia
Subway 2 - Mikko Tarmia
Examination Room - Mikko Tarmia
Subway 1 - Mikko Tarmia
Ark - Mikko Tarmia
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SOMA is a game you play physically once at least, then it plays inside your mind for the rest of your life
well said
Couldn't have said it better myself
How so?
I think about it way too often lol
Rest of your life? Hyperbole much?
I love SOMA, really a terrific horror game.
The thing that I always found most sad about the woman at the bottom of the sea is that she thinks that she's in the ARC. She thinks that she's safe and sound on the ship, drifting through space with everyone else. I recall walking away from her and hearing her confused questions slowly fade into silence. Left a bad feeling in my gut.
No movie book or film touched me like SOMA, it creates a new corner in your psyche and waves out occasionaly.
What about the Movie Martyrs? That film lives in My mind rent free
no other form of media touched except my uncle harder than soma did
Pixel a Day is an underrated video essay channel
Interesting hearing your take on it. My personal darkest moment was when we had to boot up the guy in a simulation to get information from him, then just turn him off.
That said, I always felt Soma was somewhat hopeful. The AI that created Simon, and all the other robots was programmed to preserve humanity, and it started off being really bad at it (see the infected fish, and robots lying around). But as it's gone on, it's most recent attempts have been far more successful. Look at Simon! The AI took a while to get things right, but it seemed to be trending in a positive direction, and with enough time, Homo Robotus could be a full proper society. With the right people, the Robots could even enter their own virtual worlds as their senses are all robotic, and could be swapped out. We know this technology exists in the setting from the ARC.
To me, the ARC is truly the worst ending, as there is no chance to ever make it better. They are living on borrowed time. Meanwhile, it's the Simons that got left behind that can work on slowly rebuilding the world, and making a version of the ARC that all those on earth can visit or leave as a will. Wake up in luxurious comfort, head out to work in the undersea facilities (or maybe even landbased ones, because a well built robot body could survive on the surface), than after a day of work and maintenance, return to your perfect city with your friends, and have a nice meal and some games before heading to bed.
It's not a perfect life, but it isn't a bad one either. That said, in the end, this game really does make you think.
I went back to this video just today, and Talos Principle 2 feels like a lovely companion piece to Soma in some ways now. That's a game where an AI tried to make a robot humanity and *suceeded,* and now the society is trying to figure out its own place in the now nature-filled and humanless world. It's a real interesting one! ^w^
I love this take. It's exactly the reason that through most of my playthroughs, I play SOMA yearly, I leave everyone alive. When Catherine flickers out at the end and Simon is left behind on the Space Gun, he is truly only alone if you killed the other characters like Amy at the beginning or Sarah Lindwall at the end. I imagine Simon going back and working with them maybe even scan them as their natural life runs out etc.
The Simon you leave in the room can't escape it, so he will be trapped there, alone, until his battery runs out or he ends himself.
The Simon trapped after launching the ARK is also trapped alone there, doomed to the same fate.
The WAU could only clone the few scans it already has so it would simply create a tonne of duplicates who would no doubt go insane at meeting themselves over and over again.
It can't create a new species like that.
I like your optimism, but it wasn't necessarily my read on things.
Simon represents a new and better idea than just stuffing brains into whatever computers are lying around, yes, but he does *not* represent sustainable progress that can be built upon. Why? Because this methodology is dependent on human corpses, and with no more flesh-and-blood humans being born, that's a terribly finite resource. Even moreso given the WAU's unwillingness to let anyone it considers human die.
Part of the problem is also the WAU's prerogatives. The reason this whole nightmare is happening is that the WAU wants to preserve quantity of consciousness at all costs, without necessarily much regard for quality of life. It *might* decide to make more Simons, in the hopes that such dextrous beings can maintain the place to protect the structure gel'd people, or open new opportunities for life preservation; but consider what actually *happened* with Simon. Even with the most pacifistic Simon the game allows, you still *have* to kill multiple robots to progress, and cause damage to the facility along the way. The WAU could quite reasonably (within its logical framework) come to the conclusion that Simon was a *failure* because he lowered the net number of conscious minds in existence and inhibited its ability to preserve those remaining. It's just as, if not *more* likely that a WAU continuing to operate will move in the opposite direction, trying to create robots with even less ability to influence one another.
This is one of the few games that not only puts important questions in front of you, but also makes you question life itself and often you might not like the answer.
I love it.
I hate it.
I've recommended it a dozen times, everytime saying "you probably won't like how this game will make you feel, but you will appreciate this discomfort regardless".
It's the true meaning of awe.
SOMA is a really unique horror game, honestly. The writing is truly impeccable. I played it shortly after it came out (I loved Frictional's Amnesia: The Dark Descent) and it wasn't really until the very end where I got hit by the dread in SOMA. Maybe it was because I was younger (I was 15 when I played it, so some of the robots suffering in agony/living ignorantly in peace went over my head), but I'll always remember seeing the ARK in space, with the destroyed earth behind it. It made me start to cry because the juxtaposition between the fact that humanity as a whole was obliterated while only living on as a digital simulation stuck in space is so beautifully haunting. The contrast of those two things was really profound to me.
When I didn't turn off Simon 2 I didn't see it as "he's stuck with a life of terror." That's a false dichotomy. There are infinite possibilities. There is the possibility Simon 2 could do something I can't even imagine.
i remember when Markiplier decided to kill the robot at the bottom of the ocean all those years ago. i had been SO MAD at his choice. That robot was all that was left of that woman. And then she ceased to exist entirely. I had to pause his playthrough to cool off and really think it over.
And the sheer horror of hearing Simon on the other side of that door. That you were a copy. Masterful. Horrifying and terrible. No game has affected me in such a way since. SOMA is special.
Funny thing about Simon-2. He *is* you, so you don't have to guess what he would've wanted. Every earnest choice is the right one.
Robin Bass... we don't know enough to assume how she'd react once she realizes what's wrong. Or if she ever does. So it's not our decision to make for her.
He's the you from a moment prior, though. The you who's never stepped in your _current_ shoes. You're both different people, increasingly as your experiences accumulate. You know what he _thinks_ he would've done and you know what he would want as the person in the chair. What _he_ doesn't know is whether or not his mind would change if the moment came. If he was the current you, in your current shoes. 🤷🏿♂
That all being said, he likely would've made whatever decision the current you does. Each step and wander. Hesitation and decision. Problem is, what gives current you the divine right to decide for past you?
@@questioningespecialy9107 It depends on how your mind works, but I for one would always let the future me do what they want.
Since they have more informations that I do.
Years after playing this game I still, seemingly out of nowhere, remember its name and tense up, feeling something like a heartache. Then I sigh and shake it off. I never could kill off Simon, even on repeated playthroughs, even though I knew it was what he feared most, what I would fear most, being left there alone. And every time I would be reminded that I'm a piece of shit that has always ran away from his problems, even if it meant ignoring other people's suffering.
You're not a pos but thank you for sharing. This game is real and the shit it brings up is fricking real
When I was a 7 year old being instructed on the machinations of a Pentecostal Jesus by my grandmother, I quickly discovered the underlying potential horror of infinity. As a teenager I became excited by the prospects of transhumanism and my consciousness living arbitrary long amounts of time. As an adult I came up with the prospect that maybe time for a conscious being can never truly end to relative to itself, but can only continue to slow down logarithmically while never completely stopping, thereby creating an individual afterlife for every being that has ever ceased to be. And as an old man waiting to die I just try to stay drunk so I don't have to think about any of it.
Suffice it to say you are definitely not alone in playing out such thought experiments with yourself. And Soma definitely tapped that vein for me as well...
And needless to say, very much appreciated and enjoyed hearing your take and finding your content.
Thank you so much for your comment
There are actually some tangible consequences for some choices, or at least one. I read that if you choose not to electricute Karl and take the alternative rout, it lets a monster follow you into the next area and makes the game more difficult.
I love works that stay with you in that way, that make you think about your experiences with it well after you "finish" it. Thank you for sharing your personal experience, its an excellent video 💜
I played SOMA for the very first time just a year ago, shortly after my Great Grandmother passed away, well past 100 years old, after several years of failing memory and declining health...
I unplugged every copy of a person I could.
And yet... I played the game on No Hostile Monsters Mode or whatever it was called... and so when it came to the OTHER big moral dilemma of what to do with the AI... I let it live. It was THE New Dominant Lifeform on the planet... it was all that would be left of humanity. And it had shown me no ill will up to that point... it was just trying to do its job, fumbling through its first steps while humanity was on its last...
I think about these two almost contradictory gut reactions months later...
Good video. Thanks again as always.
I've juggled with that final choice a bunch of times. I think, ultimately, letting the WAU live is probably correct, since it seemed to be improving a lot at what it's doing. Simon and Catherine were more recent incarnations and they were better at living, and we need something exceedingly tenacious to live on the dust of the planet. Either we let the fish do it over the course of a couple million years, or we let the WAU do it way, way faster.
There's gonna be untold suffering either way.
This video is on point! Soma leaves you with so many questions about our existence, conciousness and what an enternity actually is. All get under your skin and you start to look at yourself in a different way. I can't think of any mainstream game studios, which have managed to execute something like this game. Fritctional Games are an underrated game studio. They made Amnesia which turned mainstream, but I think that game was met with superficial treatment for being just the "scariest" game, rather than being truly understood for the gruesome story and unique elements in it.
This game is just one of a kind. Absolute masterpiece
6:32 you say Robin could have been down there for decades in the UH, the idea is correct that the player has no idea when they first see her but shes really only been lkke that for a year of so. Since mockingbirds weren't created until telos hit ans she only got uploaded to a UH once her physical body died when she killed herself with the razor after her arc scan
So after having finished the game i was trying to think of what Simon 3 can do after the credits start rolling.
The first thing that came to my mind is that the launch dome is underwater. There's gotta be a reason for that, the most obvious being that the gun prevents a seal and so it may be possible for Simon 3 to make his way outside by forcing open some loose panels without having to reopen the pressure chamber that leads back into phi and requires an omnitool to operate.
If Simon 3 kept Sarah Lindwall alive, all he'd need to do is find a way to tell her he is alive, maybe by banging outside tau in a specific pattern to let her know it's not some sea monster. Sarah's computer has the ability to lock and unlock sections of Tau, so she could be able to let him back in through the airlock that leads to the transportation tunnel, thus avoiding having to deal with Jin Yoshida in her state. Now dont give me that crap about her having 60 seconds to live the moment she unplugs herself from the IV to feebly walk down and manually activate the airlock, I'm sure she can think of some way of doing it.
Now, once Simon 3 is back in Tau's living quarters, he could task her with repairing the omnitool (according to the SOMA wiki, Sarah Lindwall is an aerospace engineer and payload technician, so she'd have the skills) Or find a spare omnitool and transfer Catherine's cortex chip over to the new one.
With that, he could then head back to the lift, which after all is now at the bottom of the ocean and hence there's no need to notify Omicron to lower it; then ride it up, meet up with and revive Simon 2, and the 3 of them could then scrounge the other stations for enough food rations (believe me, i saw enough mess halls full of the stuff) to return to Sarah and get her off the IV and nurse her back to health. If there is a spare Haimatsu power suit in Tau or Phi, she could be brought back up to the plateau as well. Edit: The body of the original Cathering Chun in Phi is wearing a Haimatsu Suit, sans the helmet.
Once there, the - now four - of them could go back to find Amy Azzaro if Simon 2 had kept her alive. With the WAU being poisoned she might either be dead or they might be able to get her off the "life support" without killing her.
Robin Bass can be salvaged near the doors of Theta. And then there's Javid Goya who can be picked up in Delta. I'm sure he'd snap back to reality seeing so many people. And finally we have Carl Semken. He can be fixed as well.
So at the end we have a team consisting of Simon 3, Simon 2, Sarah Lindwall, Catherine Chun, Robin Bass, Amy Azzaro, Javid Goya, Carl Semken and a handful of K8 Universal Helpers to form the basis of post-launch civilization on earth. Since Sarah is mortal, she could have her mind scanned and transferred into a UH3 or a suit in a corpse with some omni gel. And nobody would need food anymore. Assuming the gel doesnt become useless with the WAU's death, they'd soon find a station without monsters they could reclaim and power up and maintain for maybe a century or two and have their own ARK at the bottom of the sea. And eventually try visiting the surface, maybe find survivors in bunkers and whatnot. Happy End.
I'm glad you wrote this. I occasionally think of Simon 3, left alone in the dark.
Jeez, that's a hell of an elaborated and smart ass plan. Yea, it'd be worth a shot to try going out to the surface and looking for any survivors, since we remember that people took bunkers right before the comet hit the Earth, so there could be survivors. And then boom, we could have a small settlement of robots and men.
@@gukiopkip SOMAch potential
@@charlesolarte7104 LMAO
Great video essay. I just started a new playthrough today and completely agree, it's not just one of the best horror games, but one of the best horror stories out there in any medium. Chilling and soul crushing.
SOMA has a similar approach to choice as Spec Ops: The Line. Or even Telltale's The Walking Dead. Those games are ridiculed for the "illusion of choice", which makes me angry as they actually confront you with the true nature of choice, the ancient Greek stoicism's insight: that the only thing you truly control is the nature of your action, not the outcome. They make it impossible for the "gamer brain logic" to kick in and turn this into just an intellectual puzzle - what to do to achieve a "good" result, how to "win" the choice.
Really good video, and yeah, the choices i done i still remember after all those years
too.
Simon 2 was going to be unconscious for a few days, so Simon 3 would have plenty of time to come back after launching the Ark and they'd figure this out together. That was actually what I was planning on - the "twist" that he was going to be copied onto the Ark was pretty obvious, I don't know why Simon 3 got his panties in a knot over it
No way. My new fav channel and my recently played new fav game/story. How serendipitous. You’re channel and writing are so amazing AND BEAUTIFUL
Soma truly is one of those games that changes you. Question is if it changes you for the better or for worse.
I'm seriously questioning myself because apart from the screaming robot, which I would hate, I would probably put them all out of their misery without a second thought.
But my empathy is seriously stunted because I'm on the spectrum and I would simply assume they would prefer death than an eternity trapped in a decaying wreck at the bottom of the sea
This game stuck with me ever since completing it on release. The story and the way it unravels is so expertly told and crafted. What a masterpiece. I’d love to see a tv or movie adaptation but I doubt they’d do it justice
Such an amazing game. Thank you for talking about it
There is a gentle way to terminate the Carl robot.
Also the room collapses and floods a few minutes after you reroute the power. Most likely destroying the Carl robot and at the very least cutting off the power.
Great video! That game stuck with me so strongly, and you absolutely nail why, how it keeps you thinking about its premise.
I often hear people mentioning how Catherine lied or mislead Simon, but I genuinely disprove of that notion.
Humans are... Soo very complicated. Nuances within their reason and actions.
People forget that Catherine is a person with a strong resolve to keep humanity's existence going. A determination to see her project through to the end; The Ark, a simulated virtual world where last of humankind can live in a world that once was, born anew with hope for what humanity is left. She's a researcher, a scientist, and someone who they show struggles with conveying her emotions and socializing with the others in her group. (she might have some form of aspergers)
Catherine never lies to you. She tells you exactly what she wants to do, you agree to help. Both her and Simon are soo caught up in this goal that they forget to really debrief what exactly each other know/understand, and (for Simon) he either can't comprehend (or refuses to accept) what key information Catherine tells him, leading him to ultimately feel betrayed by her in the end, even tho she never purposely tried to mislead him.
Soma is just wonderful, it kept me thinking about it for days. Also, really awesome essay, you put all the points together nicely.
Thank you!
SOMA gives you the same feelings that extinct animals possibly went through. I tend to think about the Kauai o'o, which went extinct in the late 1980s. In 1987, an audio recording was made of a male o'o singing a mating call, not knowing he was the last of his kind. The recording is eerie and it emanates pure loneliness, which is what characters like Simon go through
I keep coming back to SOMA by searching for videos like yours, and in particular by searching for other people's first/blind playthroughs. My own experience with this game left me very uneasy, questioning my choices, and I still seem to look for validation in how other players perceive SOMA and their respective decisions. No other video game had this impact on me, which is why I consider SOMA a masterpiece, although the "monsters" are quite silly in my opinion.
Adding to the pile of awesome discourse of Soma along with Jacob Gellar and Joseph Anderson.
i am closely following frictional games ever since penumbra: overture. the penumbra games were a bit rough on the edges, but also had some of the great ideas in them that later resurfaced in soma. i can really recommend playing them ^^
I played SOMA every single year once ever since it came out and it never fails to choke me up by the time it ends. It is an absolute masterclass from every conceivable angle. Every single playthrough for close to a decade now brings new aspects to light, something I haven't thought about before that sheds all new light on just how terrifying the entire premise and narrative of SOMA is. On my last playthrough what I noticed was this: every game you usually play, once you hit the end, there is a sort of resolution, even in world ending games like Doom Eternal etc., where you imagine the protagonist taking a breather, going home etc. In SOMA the world literally ended, there is nothing on the surface, even if Simon could mentally work through his issues we see in the game, there is nothing for him to go home to. No home, no family, no friends, nothing. A bunch of psychotic mutants and robots and even if he downloads scans into mockingbirds, he doesn't know those people, there is no connection. He is absolutely alone in the most horrifying aspect of that word. SOMA is absolutely one of a kind, I don't see anything topping it. Amnesia Rebirth and Bunker sure didn't, but those are different games. I also hope they don't ever attempt some sequel to SOMA, because there is really nowhere to go from the ending of it that wouldn't be a huge cliché. SOMA is definitive and that's the most uncomfortable aspect of it from a gameplay perspective.
I was waiting until October to watch this video. Did not disappoint
Other required reading for this video: The Machine by Philosophy Comics
I love SOMA and it feels so overlooked as a game as well.
But Simon's fate is much much worse than you've realised...
Simon 2 isn't, in the fiction of SOMA, Simon 2.
Simon only awakes on Pathos II because the copy of his consciousness is on board, but it's only on board because it's basically part of a software development kit (or more properly for the context an intelligence development kit).
Simon is like a demo project in Unity or Unreal, he's the project every highschooler has to mess about with in their computer class.
There have been thousands and thousands of short lived instances of Simon since his initial scan because of this. It's reasonable to assume everyone getting into intelligence design, benchmarking new hardware, testing new ideas, has launched and destroyed multiple instances of Simon's scan.
Simon 2 and Simon 3 are water molecules in a vast ocean of Simons.
The sequence in which you repeatedly launch and destroy instances of the security guy are there to drive it home. It's messed up beyond my wildest dreams...
You should have way, way more subscribers
9:36 This is the part i really struggle to follow, because here Simon sees and experiences first hand how the process of copying a consciousness into a new robot works in great detail so that there can be no confusion. He knows he is just a copy of this other person before him. But then at the end of the game he is upset and confused that he doesn't magically transfer into the Arc? That doesn't make any sense.
That was a good video, good analysis of the game. Good work.
"What is the worst thing you can think of? How about the idea of infinity?"
Well, that triggered the trauma of contemplating the idea of either eternal stagnation in Heaven or eternal torture in Hell as a 12 year-old.
Literally same made me relive those nights filled with panic attacks because of that thought
i was gonna listen to this in the background, but it drew me in and now i feel very disturbed, Thank you!
Sorry! XD
You're so right, soma _is_ a playable thought experiment. I imagine that Plato would make something like this if he were a game dev
The thing that disturbed me the most, is that dead is not a relief for the artificial consciousness. For organic beings it is, because the brain realises a cocktail of substances to ease the pain and give us closure, but a chip can't do that... Catherine even talked about how she percieved the time with the plug and unplug, so if an artificial conciousness dies, it would felt like an infinit pause... an anguish suspended in eternity.
I tried to go back and unplug her. But I had already gone too far, and I couldn't; the door wouldn't open. I left her there and I kept thinking about her for the rest of the play through, and based on your video, I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep thinking about her down there until our own sun goes out... I'm sorry, robot on the bottom of the ocean. I made a bad choice.
soma is an excellent, wonderful game i hope more people play in the future
Ultimately I thought and decided it was the right choice to not let anything live, not even the wau... Even if we as humans are long gone the idea of letting the wau affect or infect what's left didn't sit right with me. It's clear as day things still lived in the sea, things still lived on. The only copy of Simon that should live is the one that didn't know any better the one oblivious too it all on the ark. The weight of each decision only consumes me because I made them. Simon not knowing any better on the ark will live free and peacefully which is good, Simon "2" or even Simon "3" know too much for their own good and that is a detriment. Not because of what it might do to others but instead because of what it might do to oneself. The infinite possibilities the ark presents are as real as anything, but it still isint right because I know it isint real, I know they aren't ever coming back. That doesn't matter though because "Simon" on the ark accepts and enjoys how the "real" the ark is and how it's better than what anything on earth could ever acomplish. SOMA is game that starts at a wrong turn, this initial wrong turn subsequently makes everything else after also wrong. The humans should have never went so deep to go so high. They should have tried to survived old school, all natural. But even then it makes me think maybe "ignorance is bliss".
One correction to be made is that the game I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream is not a video game adaptation of the story. It is a sequel to the story. There are actually humans still alive, other than the five main characters. They're in stasis on the moon. One of the games endings has them woken up.
Sorry, I won't finish the video for now. Because you made me want to play the game !
PLAY IT NOW DON'T WATCH THE VIDEO YET
the worst way to die, indescribable here on YT but the one I written into a story I work on, each time I came up with a death for a character, most of the times it is brutal that even I am terrified of myself.
The consequences of Soma are something else are the choices that shows us who we really are
Thank you.
Always love seeing videos on soma!
This game stuck with me. It is amazing from start to finish.
Well... thanks to you I now started thinking how impossible that would be to make a great sequel to Soma. But a window for a tie-in about Carthage is still sure open. Awesome video btw,
I found your channel through a recommendation from the Adam Millard architect of games and your most recent video is about one of my favorite games! And if that wasn’t already good enough it’s also a great video with a perspective I hadn’t heard quite like this in the many videos about Soma I’ve watched. Good stuff! Liked, subscribed and commented 😊
Great to have you!
it touches everybody who have played it.
Ever since I was told at 5 that i could die at any moment because of my heart's birth defect and I went through and came out of a strong existential crisis and grappling with my mortality and the fragility of life and how we can just -poof- not exist anymore in an instant I've found a kind of catharsis in imagining my death every day.
I've tried to imagine new and different ones daily or even nightly before bed. My favorite ones are the slower deaths like cancer.
I've also found over the past four decades of living a kind of certain bent enjoyment in seeing people go through an existential crisis. Or even inducing a crisis in someone.
I don't particularly find existentialism horrifying anymore.
Your story reminds me of katawa shoujo's mc
Oh god yes, I *love* SOMA. It really changes you as a person. How many other games can say that. A flawed masterpiece.
For me, the reason I can't stop thinking of this beautifully terrifying game is a question that it made me ask. That simple question is, "What does it mean to be human?" I know there many answers to this singular question, but thats why it agitates me. I would rather just have one answer. One person may answer with "Oh its the flesh and bone." Another will answer with "Oh its the soul." But in turn comes another question. What if we humans found a way to do what they did in SOMA and be able to plant an exact replica of someone's memories and transfer their consciousness to a body thats not quite, well, human? Does that in turn make us less human? Does it make us less of a mortal? So many questions can stem from just one, and yet so many unsatisfying answers. So now, I ask anyone who comes across this comment. What does it truly mean to be human?
It’s black mirror episode in a game format
You make me think my dark twisted fantasy dear lady. Perfectly done video. Thx a lot
Excellent philosophical SOMA vid :)
The ending was crazy 😢
This game honestly is one of those things that just sticks with you as mentioned, but it’s on the same level as The Langoliers for me. I’m always questioning stuff in that movie, I made 3 stories one sucks but it could’ve been worse and I’m always reminded of it daily. Whilst Soma isn’t quiet daily it’s pretty damned close. Also the only Omicron I know is near the abyss and it’s a very beautiful place.
I wished the game had been more fleshed out and longer. But I suppose the issue was they had plenty of ideas and than dumped them all and than we got what we have. But in doing so we missed a lot of opportunities for more creature variations like the shark and more creepy bottom of the sea locations.
I feel way more could of been added. Maybe even as DLC parts, too bad that never happened.
Anything their working on will be similar but it won’t be Soma, unless it is. But than would it still hold the same feelings even if it was? most 2nd games don’t feel anything like the 1st ones and often tend to ruin the 1st games, for me anyways.
Debug mode allows you to really explore some extra stuff, look at how detailed the monsters really are and going out of bounds and taking the viper fish with you like I did in my videos lol extends the game even further. So I suppose there’s always that.
Great video! Thanks for the content.
Thank you for watching :)
Players don't play SOMA. SOMA plays players.
Gurl I haven't even made it through Soma and I think about it once a month at least
Oooh, first jacob gellers video, now yours, I'm being spoiled!
I find your conclusion fascinating...
By being alive, we intrinsically see our own mortality. The moment we gain self-awareness, we are guaranteed to one day acknowledge our end is inevitable.
Personally, i'd rather know the day and time. We all see death coming, we just don't know when she'll be here.
Most of the time something tragic happens, we aren't lucky enough to prepare ahead of time. I'd like to be ready for my life's last big event
Not for nothing this is my all time favorite sci-fi story.
Wonderful essay for a wonderful game
The concept of infinite torture is the only thing that really scares me. I think it is the one thing humanity can never allow to happen. If there's ever the choice between someone suffering indefinitely and the life of everyone on earth I would choose the latter without any question. To not do so would be the ultimate evil.
You don’t actually have to let Carl suffer like that to proceed. There’s another switch that turns off the main power and it causes him to shut down instead. You release another robot monster into the room by doing so however.
Soma is a game that i couldn't play to the end. For me it was too brutal and final. It's a great story about certain things you may also encounter in real life.
Sth I noticed here is that we take for granted that what happens is in fact a person getting copied - which is what's going on. Idk if people remember this, but back when this game came out there were all kinds of people actively misinterpreting what happens in the game in order to feel better about what happens in the plot.
'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' is definitely *thematically* an interesting game, but if you do play it, save often, and use a walkthrough. It is, in my experience, very poorly put together, and you can softlock yourself not only by doing the incorrect steps, but doing the (otherwise unordered) steps in the wrong order. Definitely something I'd recommend watching a Let's Play for.
Oh goodness yes. I remember soft locking myself on my first playthrough
I'm playing SOMA. I've played for four or five days and haven't finished it, it's harder than I thought (I hate puzzles, they steal hours and hours from my life and in the end I almost every time have to find guide). I must be 70% through but I really want to watch your video, and so I will (and so I did). At least I have a good understanding of what's going on.
Anyway, what's the worst thing I can think of? My first thought was the same Harlan Ellison story (a story I have had in mind while playing SOMA), eternal suffering. But when I met Robin, the robot, I thought eternal loneliness might be just as bad. But I though of that a little too late, once I had proceeded to the next area and was unable to go back and unplug her.
I think the worst part about this game is the fact the WAU could always put their brain scans back into other mockingbirds, an infinity for other copies outside the ARK.
Excellent essay.
Excellent game.
I like the sentiments in this video but the only thing that bothers me is that its only been about year since the comet hit, there for only about 6 months at the most since that copy of robin was loaded into that machine, and only about 4 or 5 months since Catherine 1 died
Well, I doubt this will make you feel better, but if you chose to kill the WAU at the end, then Robyn the Robot would have probably died sooner than later anyway, without the continued maintainance the master AI provided. In fact, *everyone* you left alive will die without the WAU, for better or worse. And on the other hand, keep the WAU alive, and anybody who got scanned and then killed will just be able to be brought back, again and again and again...which will probably be unending horror for most of them, but hey, the WAU is getting better at the whole 'mentally stable constructs' thing, so maybe it will make a livable (robot) world at the end of it all. We just don't know.
7:07 oh I never noticed you could unplug her 0_0
Soma is really good
Love your analyzes
The apocalypse only happened a year before the events of the game, so the robot couldn't have been there for longer than that.
Nice
Grabbed this based on your vid.
Nice to hear a fellow female Aussie gamer.
Hello fellow Aussie! 👋👋👋
The way I justified it was that as Simon, you have the same exact traits and thought process, you are the exact same as that being. If anyone should decide whether or not Simon 2 gets to live, it should be Simon 3, since he is literally the same being. The way I see it, Simon is terrified of isolation and dreads being alone, so the most sane course of action would be to just make sure he doesn't get the opportunity to wake up and see what kind of a hell he's been abandoned in.
Amazing video!!!
"Why SOMA is the Scariest Game I've Ever Played" Terry.
Isn’t SOMA the name of the drug those People took in the Movie called A Brave New World hmm Interesting 🤔
Gonna have to watch in the am but leaving a comment for engagement!
Thank you for the engagement
Most of your "fears" are based on ignorance, you fear things which you don't understand.
Infinity is a "curse" but also a "blessing" because with "infinite time" you could solve ANY physically solvable problem.
And if "there is no right thing" it automatically means that there's NO WRONG THING also.
12:30 SOMA has better choices that games that claim player choice.
I must've been too spoiled by the decades of modern literary SF that considers consiouness transfer a solved problem. Whether a synthetic being in Blame!, a sobornost branch in Quantum Thief, or a prtial in Greg Bear's The Way, consciousness is tooled to travel bodies seamlessly, empowered to interface with tech beyond biological abilities, and even managed as a resourse, creating versions and reconciling them. All this without unnecessarily torturing the person in question.
When a XXI game shoehorns you into the concept of 'consiousness copy = trolley problem' ,this just feels so immensely... *archic*. Disturbing? No, just incredibly out of touch. It's like looking at sexy photos of your grandma. This whole concept of juxtaposing VR/AI/mind upload/simulation with Suffering™ is so last century. Probably culminating in Iain Banks's treatise on virtual hell, all the while thinking games were rulesets like chess or tic tac toe or physical exercises and milsim. He seemingly had no idea games were Stories and Virtual realities now, isomorphic to heaven rather than hell.
Soma arguably underplays its best idea. The story places us the at the moment in time where we create a virtual heaven and mind upload tech from scratch, and then DOES NOTHING WITH IT. Having to decide "what should go into the simulation" was arguably the most disturbing moment of the whole game. It's also the only time we interact with the concept in any way :(
P.S. if it's any consolation, anything built with the current CMOS processor tech will fail in a timeframe of *decades* due to diffusion and electromigration. No eternal torture.. yet.
Who are you playing as in SOMA? It can't be the Simon that had his brain scanned because he died before Pathos-II was built. It can't be the Simon that woke up in the future because he went into a coma during the transfer. It certainly isn't the Simon that braved the ocean floor. The only person it makes sense to be playing as is the Simon riding the ARK. He remembers doing all of those things. Once the game ends and the credits roll, so will you...