Ludonarrative in SOMA
SOMA has spent an awful lot of time rattling around in my head since I finished it. Various moments in the narratively driven horror title were created to stick with the player, whether its contents are something you enjoyed or not. It’s in those moments where boundaries that would have normally separated me from the protagonist cease to exist altogether. While SOMA forgets itself at times, there’s never been a game that so firmly has its thumb on existential horror and what it means to be a human. Between the game’s entrapping narrative and immersive controls, it’s easy to get lost in the dystopian nightmare that is SOMA.
Everything that SOMA does seems to have storytelling at the forefront of its mind. Your first interaction with the game is to find a bottle of well-hidden medicine. It isn’t overly complicated, but you’re left to look for it in a messy room – one that is a result of a depressed man named Simon who has undescribed brain damage as the result of a car crash – so there’s quite a bit to look through. The game treats your control like a vessel between you and Simon, with each click of the mouse and subsequent drag or twist resulting in movement on Simon’s part. It’s neither clunky nor notably smooth, but, within minutes, your control seems to be one with Simon’s arm. That’s when the first barrier crumbles.
It isn’t long after that we find out that Simon is part of some kind of brain experiment, where he’s set to go in for a scan. After a conversation with an appropriately creepy doctor, Simon wakes up into a nightmare. Nearly 100 years later, a massive comet has struck Earth and left the planet an underwater dystopia. Simon, who witnesses none of this, is left to explore the abandoned research facility.
SOMA lets the player decide whether or not it wants to contextualize what happens, which reinforces the weight of its various reveals as they take place throughout the game. If the game lets itself ease into any tropes, it’s in the form of its exposition. Much of the game, for me, was spent listening to old audio logs or digging up old emails between research members. This was frustrating, at least early on, because they felt less like puzzle pieces and more like pieces of shattered glass from a window I’d never get to look out of. The logs and memos are disjointed, despite being exceptionally well written, requiring patience that doesn’t seem deserved in the first half.
SOMA isn’t an archetypical linear narrative, and that often strains what is otherwise a near-perfect storytelling experience. The game functions as a horror game – much in the same vein as Frictional Games (the developers) predecessors in the Penumbra series – with chase sequences from disturbing monsters, sharp audio spikes and a Rapture-esque underwater setting. Because so much of its exposition is optional, it puts an awful lot of trust in its players to care. What makes this a little easier is the aforementioned writing, which ranges from perfectly realistic office-level emails to cryptic and frightening spots of audio.
The game’s antagonist takes form as a robotic network called the “WAU”, which has taken a hold of the facility’s infrastructure. Many of the humans that are still alive have had their brains scanned onto robots, without many of them understanding exactly what has happened. Most of the game’s non-playable characters are harmless, if a little unsettling, but a few seem to have glitched into something violent and dangerous. These are the monsters that roam the halls of the facility, providing more of an inconvenience for Simon than anything else.
These sequences bog SOMA down more often than not, but they are used sparingly enough that it’s less of a complaint and more just portions of the game that don’t live up to everything else. If you’ve played Outlast or, more importantly, Amnesia, you’ll understand understand how this game mechanic functions. The player sees a monster and runs from said monster while you try and progress forward. This passivity and lack of agency is part of what makes the genre what it is, but it clashes with the blend of gameplay and storytelling that SOMA fights so hard to achieve. Instead of feeling like you are Simon, you spend this time running around asking yourself “why doesn’t he just pick up a shard of glass and stab the thing?”
Beyond these chase sequences, SOMA has a variety of small puzzles at its disposal. Some are more interactive, like when the game asks Simon to find a way to turn the power back on in an empty facility, while others are a little more forced, requiring the player to interact with a short “hacking” game that dominates the screen. There are several of these, and most of them are finely tuned (including an excellent sequence where Simon is tasked to match three frequency in unison), but it’s rarely anything that hasn’t been done before.
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Once the game begins to provide answers, it hurtles forward with such force that it’s very tough to put the game aside. I found that the longer I played it, the more Simon’s decisions and movements became my own. SOMA doesn’t necessarily benefit from “binge” playing, especially because of its dark concepts that can be difficult to internalize, but it functions an awful lot like quicksand might: stand in it for too long and you’ll find yourself consumed by it.
By the time SOMA is over, an intricately developed connection between Simon and myself existed. All of the questions that he had about existence and what it actually means to be a human penetrated my own thoughts. Through its use of an immersive control scheme and a carefully doled out narrative, SOMA becomes a prominent example of games working as a storytelling medium. It isn’t a perfect adventure, but it’s a meaningful one.
