SOMA i🌞s one of those delicious games that have you thinking and re-thinking about it for hours after the credits roll. Or in my case, for years thereafter.
While that's not to say that I've been doing literally nothing besides mull over the themes and ideas of SOMA for 5 straight years, it's certainly a game I've spent a considerably long time pondering about. To this day, fans are still dissecting the game and exploring their own stances towards its particularly thought-provoking events. It's a sure sign of a good game, or at the very least, an important one.
Spoilers for SOMA lie ahead, so if you're yet to play it yourself, I'll forgive you for clicking away at this point. Go play it first.
so
BioShock, But With Extra Creeps
Well, it's probably way too reductionistic to call it BioShock but creepier, but it's a good starting point. The magic of SOMA definitely lies largely in the atmosphere which a sprawling, abandoned underwater megalopolis like BioShock's Rapt💛ure radiates. Of course, here we have PATHOS-II instead, a large𒁏 research base situated , near the Portuguese archipelago Azores.
Unlike BioShock's Rapture, though, PATHOS-II feels immensely more threatening. Obviously SOMA is a horror game (some consider BioShock to be one too, which I think is a bit of a stretch, but anyway), so that's expected. But the particularly striking aspect of SOMA is the ability it has to play on one's primal fear of being so utterly alone.
Loneliness Is Next To Godliness
Along with a fear of the unknown, the deeply human fear of being alone is one that hits real hard. I'm obviously not implying that we can't be content with being alone, that's not the kind of "alone" I'm talking about. Rather, I'm referring to the kind of loneliness entailed in the hypothetical situation I'm sure most of us would utterly detest finding ourselves in: being the only human left alive on Earth. Basically, being SOMA's Simon Jarrett. Of course, the extent to which Simon can be considered stricꦇtly "human" is itself up for debate.
Those segments in SOMA wherein you must wander around the ocean floor on foot are just terrifying, simply because they make you feel so dang alone. While sometimes you're sharing the space with mutant angler fish, other times there is nothing but infinite pitch-blackness weighed down by crushing silence (and the actual pressure from being 4000 meters below sea level). It's a thalassophobe's worst nightmare - and a horror-loving thalassophile's nightmare, too. The latter just gets a high out of it.
The Coin Toss
The other aspect of SOMA's brilliance lies in its tendency to provoke a whole lotta thought. , "it is an unsettling story about identity, consciousness, and what it means to be human." You know, nothing big. But one theme dealt wit📖h in the game is particularly enthralli✨ng to me: the concept of chance.
Catherine and Simon frequently talk about "the coin toss," which refers to the chance-driven mechanism that determines which of each subsequent "copy" of your consciousness you happen to end up inhabiting. Of course, that's exactly how it doesn't work. Each brain scan Simon undergoes in the game works precisely like a photocopier, with all previous Simon Co🧔nscio𝓡usnesses continuing to live on in whatever vessel they happen to be occupying.
So the൲re is no single "primary" Simon or Catherine Consciousness that does or does not ultimately get transported onto the ARK at the end of the game. Although the Simon and Catherine who get left behind on Earth say they "lost the coin toss," there was no coin toss to lose or win in the first place; they were ꦰalways going to be left behind anyway.
One commenter of suggests that this concept of the coin toss was added by developers to make the game feel that much more dramatic. But I disagree. It actually fits into the game perfectly as a futile effort on the part of the game's “humans” to cope with the awful, blunt truth behind what they're doing.
Illusory Chance
SOMA is a game of illusory chance. Even the &ldq🌱uo;chance” that seems to come into play when we just so happen to end up inhabiting the shoes of each new Simon in the particular sequence that we do, is illusory. The developers set it up in that way; it’s not like you - the player - by chance ended up in the shoes of the Simon left behind at the end of the game, even though that’s how it might feel.
On that note, I’d always thought SOMA’s ending could've been that much more powerful if the devs had made it so each playthrough randomly generates the order in which the two ending sequences are shown. So either the one depicting Unlucky Simon left behind is shown first, then the other showing Lucky Simon’s new life on the ARK, or vice versa. It would have really driven the whole coin toss analogy home. Also, whichever sequence showed last would massively impact the feelings you’d be left with upon finishing the game - more optimistic, or more totally devoid of hope?
But then again, as cool as that would be, that whole coin toss thing is a lie anyway. So why entertain the idea any more than 💝necessary?
Either way, SOMA has to be amongst the most thought-provoking and unsettling games out there. If you have the courage (or even if you don't), check it out for yourself.