Jump to content
passwords have all been force reset. please recover password to reset ×
MFGamers

Soma


Duck
 Share

Recommended Posts

Amnesia suffers from that problem of the challenge undermining the horror. Once you die a couple of times or get stuck or run out of fucking candles it becomes gamey. Same with their earlier game Penumbra, really tense and unsettling until you get stuck. I actually found Amnesia A Machine for Pigs scarier that the first game simply because it's just the horror stuff, very little in the way of puzzles or combat (in the part I played anyway).

I haven't played Amnesia but SOMA isn't really a 'challenge'.

There's a sort of strike system if you're caught by a monster. If you get caught, you'll wake up, the monster will be near but some where else but your character will have a heavy limp, unable to run and be breathing heavily. If you caught again it's game over. You can reset it tho.

The puzzles are simple too and will only take a few minutes to finish. I'm struggling to actually remember any of them. I think they're mainly used to just slow down the pace abit. This is a lot closer to a Gone Home type game than say a Resident Evil type action one.

As I've said and I think Hendo did to. The real horror isn't in the monsters in this but in the questions it asks and the actions you have to take through out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...

I started this the other day. I don't tend to play stuff because its Halloween, I'm not American, but I saw this still on my ps4 so thought it was a good excuse. 

 

I kind of agree with Blakey about the first few hours. It does some stuff early on but doesn't follow it up, so you build up some tension then just shrug it off. It possibly wasn't helped by me having no issues dodging the first enemy. There's a bit after a crash that is cool as fuck though. 

 

I've also not really had any guilt for my actions yet, I'm waiting to see if there's a rug pull or if I've just made too many hard choices in games before ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

when I posted yesterday I was enjoying this, now I just want it to end. It's still lacking in scares so far, or at least they're just not having the effect. I posted earlier in the thread, that the problem with horror games sometimes is having to repeat yourself. If you've faced an enemy before a few times it loses the terror and just becomes a gameplay thing, there's rules, you just have to 'solve' it. Maybe that's what's happening here for me but there also isn't a lot of enemies, you can sprint through large sections if you want. 

 

Still, the moments that have tension can be pretty cool, and it's certainly not that that's stunting my enjoyment, more it's the other problem with most horror games, the puzzles. It's not even the actual puzzles sometimes, it's the vagaries around them "go in to the other room and use the computer", not that 'other room' it turns out, even though it's got 2 computers in it, the other other room... nope, not that one, yep that one. 

"go ahead and run the simulation" on what? Where is it? "this isn't working, we should try something else" cool, any ideas, you seemed to fucking work here after all, want to point me in the right direction?

 

I turned it off just because, after solving the puzzle, which was already, and familiarly, protracted, I'd found the chip, done the thing to let me get to the chip, found out I had to do something to the chip, did the thing to the chip, took it back to where I started to find out "something isn't working right". Then I turned around and was killed. It's not the death that bothers me, death fixes my limp, it's the eye-rolling bullshit. I played a game called The Starship Damrey on 3DS, it's so much better than Soma (from what I've played) simply because it's shorter, more to the point, less full of needless unseen hurdles 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I finished this earlier. I'm a lot less down on it than I was when I last posted, not that I hated it then I just didn't like the structure of the puzzles. It still felt like an empty game in terms of enemies, it's not what I was expecting, they were more an inconvenience than a real threat. Not that I didn't take damage or die, but it just meant moving slower or redoing stuff, rather than add to the atmosphere the enemies started to erode it.

 

The story is decent though, its the reason I stuck with it. It's not amazing, and it has been done before, plus I'm not sure the main character's reaction quite sat right. I guess you don't know how you'd react, something the questionnaire does a good job of highlighting, but they certainly didn't run parallel with mine 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...