Imagine waking up on a deep sea station, somewhere in the complete darkness and the only thing you know is your name – Simon. There’s this mechanical creature that is walking around and there’s no other humans that you can see.
Making your way through a dark reactor area, you find what looks to be an assembly line of some sort and there is a crushed machine, but it has a human voice and it’s even telling you that it’s human. Would you accept this as truth or would you think the machine is malfunctioning? In either case, it’s been damaged and tells you it’s in pain. Will you help the human like machine and restore what you believe is real or will you curl up behind some crates and await for that mysterious scary machine to return for you? The choice is yours.
SOMA is a science fiction game that takes place in a deep sea research station called PATHOS-2. Machines are taking on human traits and the alien constructions are interfering with the routine. The world around them is starting to become a living nightmare and the only way to end it is to do something unimaginable.
SOMA was created by Frictional Games – whom also brought the games Amnesia and the Penumbra Series. Although the story line is linear [having a clear goal as an outcome], the environment is not and the story will adapt to the players choosing to interact with certain things or not interacting with them. It has taken Frictional Games five years to create this game for all to enjoy.
“Initially what we explored were ‘boo’ types of scares,”Thomas Grip, Creative Director of Frictional Games said. “There are monsters roaming, and you’ve got to hide, barricade doors, that sort of stuff. What’s so cool about the thing we managed to do there is when people play the game, they’re constantly listening for sounds and they’re thinking, is there something behind the door? Is it safe? Should I hide?
“They’re imagining a world that’s bigger than what’s really there. That’s what makes it spooky because it’s kind of personal. What we want to do here is ‘Could you have that thing, but go into deeper thematics?'”
There are a lot of things that will make the player think about the game – such as they don’t have weapons, the dead bodies of the crew, the clues left behind – where will this lead? What does it all mean? What really happened and what can I do about it?
Coming in September 2015, players can experience this nightmare on PC and Playstation 4.
To read more about SOMA and to watch its trailer, you can look at it’s website. To read about Frictional Game and it’s blurb about SOMA, go here. To read the full interview with Thomas Grip and Polygon go here.