Comment by justin66
9 days ago
Soma was really good, and certainly worth playing if someone likes sci-fi and single-player FPSes and this subject matter, but there are some fundamentally frustrating things about it. Number one for me: in contrast with something like Half Life, you play a protagonist who speaks and has conversations about the world, and is also a dumbass. The in-game protagonist pretty much ends the game still seemingly not understanding what the hell is going on, when the player figured it out hours or days before. It's a bit frustrating.
This was certainly the most annoying aspect of the game for me. The logic of mind uploading has been explained to the protagonist several times during the playthrough, yet he couldn’t understand or accept it until the very end.
It’s been a while so I just viewed a video of the ending of the game. I don’t know that he ever really “got” it (either version of him, at the end). It would have been a more emotionally complex game if he’d made his peace with the reality of the situation mid-game (as almost any player would have done by that point) and had a choice about whether he uploaded himself to the Ark, or alternatively perhaps just helped Catherine finish her project and then stayed behind, by choice. Just a thought.
Revisited the game in greater depth (I made an earlier comment below). I'd forgotten entirely that Simon leaves behind a copy of himself at one point while proceeding on his journey, and gets pretty spazzy about it. If you were going to do this game as a proper immersive sim instead of an "on a rail" story, the decisions a player had freedom to make could involve the player's beliefs and predisposition when it comes to creating copies of themselves.
There are definitely different ways of viewing having copies of oneself in the world, but they pretty broadly divide into the angsty Simon's "If there’s an afterlife, is my place taken?" or a more fun sort of "hey look, there's two of us." [0] And I suppose a particularly interesting scenario might involve having the player make peace with the situation after making a copy, at which point you'd have the angsty version and one or more cool versions wandering around the same environment. But that would be a very different game.
[0] https://youtu.be/egjNuZahFq0?t=144
One of SOMA's more subtle, and much more effective, narrative choices was to make its protagonist and its player character two entirely different people.
That’s an interesting interpretation, but I’m not so sure how much of it was international, and how much it was a result of the developers calibrating the narrative flow for people who aren’t that familiar with sci-fi mind uploading tropes. I do agree that the protagonist had some perceptual blocks due to his “condition”.
If you recall, the difficulty of the gameplay focused portions of Soma has also received a radically different perception by more experienced gamers, and people who were in just for the story. Leading to the eventual release of a story mode patch.
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