It’s rare that a game forces me to stop and stare. So taken aback by the scenes unfolding before me that I need to pause my journey, take a seat on the nearest bench and watch as the world I once called home is brought to its knees. Monolithic alien invaders erase all beings from existence in a haze of blinding purple light, permeating the English countryside with a permanent state of quiet unease that in itself is oddly beautiful. All I can do is stumble on, piecing together a narrative through abandoned hom🎶es and overturned cars after waking up in a place that is nothing like I used to know. Somerville is a disconcerting masterpiece.
From Playdead co-founder Dino Patti, the studio that brought us Limbo and Inside, Somerville is a similarly constrained narrative adventure all about the desire to keep pushing forward in search of answers. It begins with a young family travelling home, pulling into their driveway as sombre piano music plays over the opening credits. We watch them settle into a routine of malaise before finally falling asleep opposite a blaring television. Suddenly I’m up, awoken by an emergency broadcast on the television as I take control of a toddler and start in🍰vestigating strange lights flickering outside. My only tutorial is my own curiosity as I fiddle with objects and begin to understand exactly what makes Somerville tick.
After climbing atop the kitchen cabinets to open a window I end up falling into the rubbish bin, waking my parents with a panicked scream as control shifts over to the father. This is when the game really starts, even if the next few minutes involve me stepping outside to feed the dog as I notice a strange object floatiꦅng in the sky. Shrugging it off, I pop into the basement to grab the dog food and return to the kitchen. It’s all comfortably constrained for the first few minutes, but there’s a constant fear that something is about to go very wrong.
My anxiety wasn’t unfounded, as seconds later, strange spaceships are crashing through the ceiling and laying waste to our home, leaving us in a panic as we pick up whatever we can before🤡 rushing to the car. In a hail of purple destruction our only means of escape is torn to pieces, so we retreat to the basement and hope it can sustain us in the ruthless onslaught to come. We await death, then suddenly, a blue humanoid being bursts through the ceiling. On the edge of death, I reach out and receive my own in a burst of blinding liඣght. I’m dead, my wife clinging to my lifeless body as the screen fades to black and all seems lost.
I awaken weeks or months later, the family home in ruins as I realise I’ve been blessed with a strange power that allows me to influence energy to clear obstacles and communicate with spherical alien beings that now roam the surface. Whatever this power is, I know it’s keeping me alive, so all I can do is embrace its presence and start searching for my family. The hours that follow are a🅷 harrowing pilgrimage into the apocalypse, where the only living things come from another world or are little more than charred remains loitering on the sides of the road.
Somerville is undeniably morbid, but the beauty of nature and human perseverance shines through a world that is being re🐷shaped into something entirely different. There is no spoken or written dialogue, with the entire story being told through body language and piecing clues together from the places you explore💮. An abandoned festival heavily reminiscent of Glasto is filled with damaged tents and stages in the throes of performance, while farmlands were left behind in the middle of harvest like all of humanity was wiped out in an instant. It reminds me of 28 Days Later, like I was stepping out into a world I knew so well but felt so unwelcome in.
I overcame this trepidation and kept digging deeper, and Somerville is built to perfectly accommodate this level of agency. Much like Limbo and Inside before it, all of its puzzles are driven by simple physics and gameplay systems gradually taught to the player through expertly crafted level design. There’s a huge focus on light sources which are used to tear away alien structures that have bled into the scenery, opening ways forward or unveiling previously hidden secrets. You’ll pull wired objects around environ𒈔ments in ways that reminded me of Half-Life 2 in their ingenuity, solutions revealing themselves through natural cadence instead of trial and error like so many games of this ilk. I never felt truly stuck, merely confounded by a solution that was staring me right in ꦉthe face.
Story moments and new locales are introduced at an ideal pace, and the drive of ensuring my family’s safety was an omnipresent motivation, since there was no way I was going to stop until I found them. Yet this fairly traditional tale of reuniting with loved ones is ripe with twists and turns, with our main character coming to play a subversively integral role in the coming conflict and what exactly these alien forces are fighting for. The themes of place, family, abandonment, trauma, and our place in the universe are touched upon with ample fragility, and by the time it all came to an end I was left wondering if I had made all the right decisions. It is stunning, and unapologetic of its narrative ambition in spite of often bordering on the pretentious.𝄹 It never holds your hand, and small details across the game will be recontextualised as you dive in for repeat playthroughs and try in vain to figure out exactly what it all means. It’s been so long since the medium has floored me this much.
There’s a watercolour detail in the world’s unrivalled sca🐎le, with the countryside stretching on for miles as I pick out landmarks that will eventually become intimate places for me to pilfer about in. One chase sequence has a pack of supernatural dogs chasing after me and my family, and we rush away as metallic spears fire into the piles of vehicles surrounding us on the packed English streets. All of a sudden a cosmic saviour appears from above, firing off a flurry of lasers as we seek shelter in a nearby chapel. The camera work is masterful in how it is somehow both intimate and grandiose, depicting our experience from a constantly shifting perspective that evolves upon everything Limbo and Inside managed to achieve. You need to see it for yourself t🌸o understand all of my hamstrung hyperbole, but it’s quite special.
Somerville is one of the yea▨r’s biggest surprises, and I’m still shocked to see it fly under the radar. Its portrayal of an alien invasion raging across the British countryside hit close to home, while the story of a father searching for his family and being tied up in a dilemma so much bigger than he ever imagined is both nothing like I expected and everything I wanted. I can’t wait to see players far smarter than I piece its most devious puzzles together, since there are still so many questions waiting to be answered.
