3 minute read
Soma
When you’re moving from Upslion to Lambda, you can find a sub called Pequod, a reference to Moby Dick… or MGSV
Publisher FrictiOnAl GAmes / DeVeloPer FrictiOnAl GAmes / forMat XbOX One / release Date Out nOw / Cost £23.99
think BiOShOck viA BlAck MiRROR And FRAnz kAFkA leon hurley
It might have taken a couple of years to reach Xbox One, but this may be the best version of Soma to date, thanks to a new ‘safe mode’. One criticism previously had been its slightly inconsistent stealth-based monster encounters – lots of creeping, waiting and unpredictable deaths sucked some life out of its techno horror. This is something the new mode does away with, letting one of the most disturbing games in recent history really get its fingers under your skin.
Removing the threat might seem like an odd idea, but it works. The creatures are still terrifying – monstrously warped, decaying machines clotted with organic growths, and gibbering from equally rotting minds – it’s just that now all they can really do is hurt you a bit, not send you reeling back to some distant checkpoint. There’s no less terror to seeing a shape shamble from the dark, moaning or howling.
And this is all about atmosphere and story. Your character, dying from an unspecified brain condition, undergoes a scan to map his neurons and immediately wakes up on a decrepit undersea base called PATHOS-II, full of robots who think they’re human. This isn’t Bioshock’s Rapture though. It’s more industrial, and has apparently been rusting to nothing for god knows how many years. You’re the only person there, attempting to discover what’s going on and escape.
Right Something very bad has happened on the undersea base of PAthOS-ii, and you’re trapped, trying to uncover what, and how to escape from it.
short cut
What is it?
A dark, technological and psychological horror game set in a scary undersea research station.
What’s it like?
An episode of Black Mirror, questioning humanity and self when technology renders that concept moot. Who’s it for?
Horror fans who like scares to think about and jump from.
Everything in PATHOS-II will give you nightmares, from the environment to the enemy encounters. It feels heavy and oppressively claustrophobic. There are strange biomechanical growths erupting from walls and clogging vents. In places, the original hard lines are obscured by rubbery innards and unidentifiable... organs? In others, these tendrils merge and fuse with machines, like weeds reclaiming then. You don’t need to be attacked to feel terrified.
Rusty robots
Then there are the robots: broken and ruptured like mechanical road kill. Their design is clunkily practical, rather than gleaming sci-fi perfection – think car production line welding arms on legs. Worse, they seem... human? Or think they are. Some are lucid and furious you won’t help them; others are fractured and broken; isolated loops of consciousness, trapped and repeating a moment. Rarely a good one. If you’re thinking, ‘Hmm, experimental brain scans? Robots that think they’re people? I know what’s going on here!’ you’ve scratched the surface, but barely touched the true horror of the situation. It sets up its key premise in the opening 10 minutes, then spends hours torturing you with it.
Early on you’re forced to pull a power line to reboot a computer. “Don’t. I... needed that” a tiny, female voice pleads, as the lights on a broken machine lying on the floor fade. “I was oka...”. I’ve played a lot of horror games but I’ve never been so upset as Soma managed to make me. Its ideas develop like rot, with more than a few I-just-can’t-handle-this twists along the way, to deliver one of the most distressing endings I’ve experienced. It does things that are up there with the best horror books and films and, as a result, benefits from the safe mode leaving you free to experience that undistracted. n
oXM VerDiCt
One of the best and most disturbing horror stories you’ll play on Xbox One.
8
