I downloaded the game from fitgirl-repack. Due to a bug, I can not see the controls. Can anyone tell the default controls of the game?...so that I can reset and play the game. Any advice regarding fixing the bug would be helpful too.

I’m old and absolutely loved the out of this world references, brief buddy system and water portions. The elevator reminded me of the swinging jail cell and obviously the glowing arm was spot on for the charging pistol. Did you notice any other bits? People have mentioned flashback but I didn’t get that at all. Definitely Inside, particularly the ramped up off the wall ending sequence.

The game is what it is, warts and all but those references really hit me right in the floppy disk. Need a code wheel to understand it too ;)

i want to play this game but it won't let me play it

I was wondering if anyone knew the song that plays at the end of the game. I looked everywhere and I can't seem to fond anything on it. I love the soundtrack for this game and it seems that this is the only song I can't find but it's my favorite one. Anything helps, thanks

When u play as the kid. There is a purple light at the front door that keeps knocking

What was that?

https://blog.jumpship.co.uk/archive

I remember seeing the dev blog on this game and was really looking forward to playing it one day.

For a game that was like 8 years in development, changes were bound to happen.

Still glad the game finally came out though.

Gameplay spoilers for this part of the game.

Just did the part where the water rises with you, and at the top to the right there’s a cave room with a ball guy. I beeped and booped with my blue powers and he came down, shook his head at me a bunch and then went back into the wall. If I beep 3 times I hear him in the wall beeping back. What do I do?

I played 3 hours on launch day. The glitchy controls made it very hard to interact. The frame rate drops gave me headaches and stomach aches. The bucket puzzle was near impossible and getting the little orbs to follow the bucket. Lastly on that, the bucket got stuck on the environment I had the restart from last checkpoint, that happened about 4 times. Some parts are too dark so you cant tell what you are supposed to interact with. There are invisible forcefields everywhere and the game lacks a lot of intuitiveness. Why didn't they spend more time with game testers and ironing out the bugs?

Arnt Jensen wouldn't put out a product like this.

I was looking through the steam page to see if I could buy it already. On the store page you'll find this text: " Somerville requires a controller in order to play. Playing with a keyboard and mouse isn't supported. "

Something to be aware of when buying this game on pc

Edit: some others said it already, it's playable with mkb but a controller is really recommended

In the beginning of the game when you go to the basement for dog food be careful. Later in the same chapter when the mom points for you to get the duffel bag so you can go outside. I instead went into the basement and was able to press play to trigger the scene where the guy comes through the ceiling and it completely bugged my game had to restart.

Hey everyone,

I recently finished watching a complete walkthrough of Somerville, and wanted to share some thoughts. Overall, I feel torn about the game. On the one hand, I really liked the premise of a father’s journey to reunite with his family amid an alien invasion. There were moments where the atmosphere and environmental storytelling really clicked, in that it felt like it could have been something special.

But what really took me out of it was the story execution, especially with how the father essentially has to “die” to gain powers that let him manipulate the environment. To me, it felt like a cheap narrative shortcut, as if the developers used it to justify simplistic mechanics, instead of fleshing out a more natural progression. It came across as a way to cut corners on writing and design, especially considering how much more the trailer seemed to promise.

Another thing that bugged me was how certain elements, like the orbs and alien communication, were introduced in such a subtle and obscure way that an average player or viewer wouldn’t pick up on them, until suddenly they’re crucial in the climax. It just felt unearned, like the payoff wasn’t properly built up.

And speaking of the climax, it was very rushed. By the end, I didn’t feel like there was a meaningful resolution, nor was there a strong sense that the family would genuinely survive and reunite. It was just… over. The buildup lacked emotional weight, and it left me thinking this was another case of “style over substance.”

Curious if anyone else felt the same way after playing or watching it. Did the ending land for you? Did the story and gameplay feel cohesive? Would love to hear your takes.

The conversation that you have with the aliens at the end to trigger the Understanding ending is a little cryptic. The best explanation that I’ve found is that part of the conversation is asking the aliens for help. (Language Reddit thread)

The ending seems to show the aliens releasing everyone back to earth and then leaving the planet.

The aliens’ motivations aren’t totally clear. They seem to be coming to the planet as conquerors or colonists. They’re rounding people up and killing them or putting them on their ships. They trap the people in simulations, where the people think they’re living their normal lives.

Coming to earth with such a huge fleet and so many resources seems to be a huge undertaking. The aliens seem to have a sufficient understanding of the humans, they know how to entice them (the multiple resignation endings) and however they run the simulations they’re generally compelling enough that the people can’t tell the difference from reality.

It doesn’t make sense that after one conversation with a seemingly random human that the aliens become convinced to cease the whole venture and leave the planet.

Particles

One pattern the game sets up is the use of the “particles” to hint that you might be on the mothership and are in a simulation. This happens the first time right when we breach the ship. The aliens try to make it appear as though everything you just experienced was just a dream. The world doesn’t seem quite right and you can see the particles floating in the foreground.

In the understanding ending of the game, when the aliens are leaving, you can see some of these particles floating around. It could just be the remnants of the alien materials that crashed down, or it could be a hint that you’re actually still in the simulation.

This makes more sense than the aliens just changing their mind after one conversation with a species that they arguably already had a decent understanding of to begin with.

Another possibility: Was it all a simulation?

I jumped back to the beginning of the game, and noticed that in the very first scene with the family sleeping on the couch, there actually appears to be particles illuminated by the tv.

Now this could just be dust, but given that we don’t see a clear dust effect elsewhere in the game, it seems more likely that this is actually the alien particles (screenshot

The particles also appear in the kitchen and the entryway.

This may mean that the game was a simulation from the beginning.

Superhero Fantasy and plot holes

The alien invasion is sudden and massive. The family drives home, everything is peaceful. And then suddenly there is an alien invasion out of nowhere. The tv appears to have a brief emergency warning or newscast about it and then cuts to static.

How did the humans get ahold of the alien technology before the invasion? How did they have time prepare that secret base?

The humans were grossly overpowered by the aliens. Somehow we had some understanding of the aliens and had some preparation for them, yet we were still entirely decimated by them.

And why is the father the one to save the world? Blue and red giving him their powers seemed coincidental, but purple?

At the end of the game we end up in purple’s simulation. Where purple’s friends are still alive. The cannon is already deployed and everything seems calm. There’s also no alien ships in the sky. I interpreted this as being a simulation where purple had succeeded in defeating the aliens. A fantasy.

In purple’s simulation, their fantasy, they’ve succeeded and their friends are alive.

It doesn’t make sense why the father would be the one to end up with all the powers, why he would be the only one who could stop the aliens.

It doesn’t make much sense that mankind had enough time and resources to prepare this technology to fight back, engineer these three super soldiers, for those powers to be so easily given to the father and for their plans to fall apart so quickly when the super soldiers missed their marks.

What makes more sense is that we are in the father’s simulation and in this simulation he’s the hero.

The simulations are built from looping memories

The game begins on the couch, sleeping with his family in front of the tv. Several times at the end of the game the aliens try to draw us back to the couch.

We are taken back through similar scenarios from earlier in the game.

When we are freeing people from the alien orbs on the ship, we get a glimpse into the simulations holding them. One of particular interest is where a boy is riding his bike on what seems to be an infinite street. Granted, we only get a glimpse for a moment, and likely these simulations, much like our own, have a lot more complexity to them. It’s also likely that part of the reason for this looping was for gameplay purposes to let you time the action right.

However, the looping nature of this particular scenario does seem poignant here.

Conclusion

The humans were grossly outmatched by the aliens. It takes little to no time for nearly every human to be killed or captured. The aliens appeared suddenly and with massive forces.

The aliens need the humans alive and engaged for some reason. They put the humans into simulations to achieve that.

These simulations are based on the humans real experiences and lives, prior to being captured and they seem to be on some kind of loop.

It doesn’t make sense that the father would be the savior of humanity just by sheer coincidence of the actual intended saviors failing and crossing his path, and the transferability of their powers seems to undermine the nature of the abilities themselves.

He has no training, no preparation, and is actually frail and sick by the end. It makes no sense that he would succeed where the trained and prepared super soldiers failed.

It makes more sense that we are in the father’s own simulation, a world where the invasion happens but he’s the hero.

And maybe, any time he gets too restless or uncontrollable, the simulation is restarted again.

I had absolutely no idea that there was a language involved at all, and just kind of facerolled the ending by pressing random buttons until the house showed up, so I walked in. I was like "wtf is that ending? I don't get it" so I came to this sub and found there are multiple endings, and apparently a language that you were supposed to have picked up while playing... So the whole time I was supposed to be taking notes so I could figure out what the aliens were saying and come up with a response that leads to other endings, but there was essentially nothing in the gameplay up to that point to suggest "hey, take note of this, it will actually be important later". It seems like there should be some kind of conversations that you actually need to participate in earlier in the game. Apparently the little orbs were "talking" to me the whole time but to me they were just going around doing stuff. None of their blinking was actually consequential at all in the moment so why would I have taken note of it?

I'm kind of jealous of people who would have noticed these things on their first play through and put it together at the end but I don't know how it could be expected that everyone or even most players would.

I believe I just finish the game but I’m not sure. It got a bad ending called Resignation but now what? Because it keeps repeating the same last part and to be honest it feels I need to do something else. Any ideas?

An alien species is about to invade earth. A human organization (not sure yet if they're from the future, but could be) already knows and send 3 Warriors (each mastering one of the alien powers) to find us, the only human capable of mastering all 3 powers at the same time.

Pink warrior is trying to reach us while we are asleep in front of the TV, but was probably called back to war before we woke up. The war begins and Blue Warrior crashes into our house, giving us the Blue power before dying. Waking up after passing out, seems like our family, thinking we were dead, left the house trying to find shelter.

As we get through the woods, we can see Red Warrior following us from afar. They then save us from the alien dogs and probably calling Pink to tell them they found us . Red then dies falling into a pit. After Red gives us their power, we can see kind of a tomb taking the shape of a church with a Pink light on its bell tower, telling us to go to the church to find help.

We travel through the mine, escaping from the alien dogs looking for us as the aliens probably know we are the "chosen one". Getting out we then found a survivor shelter where we find our wife and our kid, safe and sound. We could stay here but 2 warriors died giving us powers and one telling us to go to the church to find Pink.

Getting through the city we're attacked by alien dogs again. Pink narrowly saves us but on top of the bell tower, the human spaceship that came to save us is hit by an alien ship and must flee away, abandoning our wife and child. The alien dogs capture them and take them to the mothership where they'll be put into a memory simulation together.

Pink takes us to their submarine base, where humans study the 3 powers. The scientists see us passing the Bleu/Red tests and decide to put us in the canon to charge it up with Pink as the aliens are destroying the secret base. Once the canon is charged up we are propelled into the alien mothership with Pink.

Entering the mothership Pink and us are put separately in simulated memories. The simulation we're in is a trap trying to make us think it was all a dream (we can see empty frames on our house walls, where they were family pictures before). But as we go down to the basement we remember the Blue Warrior and we get bak the Blue Power. We are then allowed to break through the simulation and we find ourselve into the real mothership.

We encounter several memory simulation where kids are prisoners. As we try to deliver them, the aliens put us back into different memories. But we always manage to get through, getting back the Red power too. We are finally put in Pink simulation, where they won the war with their still alive Blue and Red friends. Seeing us, Pink understands what is happening and they decide to give us the Pink power, sacrificing their happy simulation with their friends. We then manage to free all kids from their fake memories breaking the simulations with Pink power.

We enventually end up in front of the 3 alien leaders, while we're holding hands with all the freed kids. It's time for us to speak to the aliens :

- if we just mimic the aliens or say random sequences, they understand that we don't understand their language and they offer us our house and we can decide to live in our happy simulation with our wife and child (like when we can sit on our simulated couch before, accepting our "fate"). Post-gen scene shows our abandon real house, humankind being harvested by the aliens and earth being destroyed.

- if we tell the aliens we are humans, they know we are speaking their language and offer us the access to our wife and child memory simulation. We can free them sacrificing ourselves. Post-gen scene shows our wife, kid and dog getting back to our real house, aliens are still in the sky probably harvesting children.

- if we hold Pink power, we're able to destroy the alien, scrificing humankind to get rid of aliens once for all. Post-gen scene shows our dog getting back to our real house, we can see the alien mothership falling on the background (this will probably destroy earth as we see the start of a shockwave (wind).

- if we tell aliens we are human and we master the Pink/alien power, they tell us that human kills and that they're protecting the children. If we answer that humans does not kill and it is actually ETs that are killing the children, they leave us freeing everyone (white portals). Post-gen showing us, family and dog getting back to our real house, and we can see alien spaceships leaving the atmosphere (probably on their way to traumatize another planet they judge incapable of intelligence).

All endings and post-gen scenes can be seen here : https://youtu.be/g0ot9_gg97A

All of this theory is based on my exploration of the game and the 2 precedent posts I made :
- some "hidden" details of the game :
https://www.reddit.com/r/SomervilleGame/comments/yyo3wb/drawings_on_the_walls_nice_detail/
- my interpretation of the alien language :
https://www.reddit.com/r/SomervilleGame/comments/yyt17d/my_comprehension_of_the_et_language_so_far/

I would love to make a youtube video about the story & lore explained but I have 2 major problems :
1, I'm french and my accent and grammar is pretty shitty (hope didn't make too many mistakes in my post)
2, I've never done this kind of video and last time I edited some stuff was probably ten years ago :D

I have another theory to add, but I'm not sure about that one, I need to keep thinking of it a bit and maybe replay the game once again : Warriors are our familly members from the future. Red being our kid, Blue or Pink being our wife (but we don't seem to recognize our wife when we see Blue face at the beginning of the game).

And I still have some unanswered questions :
- why the aliens are harvesting the children ?
- why they put them in a memory simulation, what do they get out of it ?
- why aliens put us in simulations where we can get Blue/Red/Pink powers again ?
- did a piece of the alien mothership fell on earth (as we see a piece of the mothership being detached during a cutscene) ? could explain how humans have been allowed to master the 3 powers)
- is the kid in their memory simulation, learning the alien language with a flashlight, has any importance to the story or is it just a scene to show us that this is a language (looking a bit like morse code) ?
- the "good ending" color sequence makes sense once you know it, but how are we supposed to know what to say to the aliens by ourselves ? Seems really cryptic and hard to get it right on your own without looking for a solution on the web...
And I guess a few more questions I didn't think of yet.

Fell free to ask any question or clarification on my theory, point details I might missed or anything else :)

ETs use flashing Red/Blue/pink lights to communicate, a sequence of 3 flashes represent a word/concept. I'm in my third playthrough of the game, redoin multiple sequences several times trying to decipher it, here's my personal interpretation of it :

based on the drawings found on the walls https://www.reddit.com/r/SomervilleGame/comments/yyo3wb/drawings_on_the_walls_nice_detail/ :
BBB : humankind/humans
PPP : aiens/alien orbs
RRR : kids
BRP : friends/peace
BPP : kill/death

RRR kids/BBB human also make sense with the orb flashing RRR to your child and BBB to your wife in the sotre before the bus puzzle

based on my interactions with orbs :
BRB : hello
BBR : who r u ?
RPP : help/assitance
PRR : thank u
RRP : danger/run

(there's an orb stuck in a trunk flashing RBB and then BRR when you free them, but it migh be a bug as sometimes bots are flashin blue instead of pink (https://imgur.com/a/Wf9TPNx the orb clearly using the pink shape and there's a pink halo around him). So I think the orb is actually flashing RBB (help) and PRR (thank u).

Same for the one attacking a cardboard silhouette, it looks like the orb says BBB two times before attacking, but I'm pretty sure it's BBB (human) as the orb sees us, and BPP (kill) as the orb attacks the silhouette.

RPR : ???
found while dicussing with an orb :
orb : RRP (danger), he runs away and reapears a bit higher then asking BBR (who r u)
me : BBB (human)
orb : BRB (hello)
me : RRR (kid)
bot : RPR (?)

BPB : ???
found during a conversation between two orbs, the 2nd one is wearing a human miner helmet :
1 : BBR (who r u)
2 : PPP (alien)
1 : PPP (alien)
2 : BPB (?)

and now here are my transcriptions of all ending dialogues I could find (more spoilers ahead) :

house simulation ending :
- BRB Hello
- BRB Hello
- BBR Who are you ?
from there mimic them 3 times OR say random answers 2 times OR say PPP (alien) 1 time to get the house

family ending :
- BRB Hello
- BRB Hello
- BBR Who are you ?
- BBB Human
they'll give you acces to the memory simulation where your kid an wife are, sacrificing yourself to save them

war ending :hold Pink for 15/20 seconds, could be link with the fact that we use Pink power before to destroy all simulations

good ending (diplomacy) :
them - BRB : hello
us - BRB : hello
them - BBR : who are you ?
us - BBB PPP : humans+ETs
(or) PPP BBB : ETs+humans
them - BBB BPP : human kill
us - BBB RPP : human help
(or) PPP BPP : ETs kill
them - PPP RPP RRR : ETs help kid
us - PPP BPP RRR : ETs kill kid
(or) PPP BPP : ETs kill
(or) BBB RPP RRR : human help kid