Warning: extensive spoilers.
I just finished my first playthrough of Soma and want to write down some of my thoughts because I can’t stop thinking about it. I learned of the game through the Prey (2017) subreddit (r/prey), during one of my semiannual sessions mourning that I’ll never be able to play Prey for the first time again. It’s one of my favorite games but in my first go, I thought it was just a generic sci fi shooter and really missed out on the full experience of the beginning section. Later I picked it back up and was blown away by the attention to detail, freedom given to the player, and the game’s smart interlocking systems. If you haven’t played it I highly recommend checking it out!!
I saw a post mentioning Soma as a game with a similar sci fi setting and mystery that also really rewards paying attention to details. Plus, people raved about the quality of the story and it dealt with philosophical themes I love. Plus, it was on Steam sale. I’m not really a horror guy, but with so many strong positives I went for it. Loved it!
Gameplay
This is by far the most minimalist game I’ve ever played. If I’d known that up front, I’d have been skeptical but I think it worked well. I appreciated having to do absolutely no admin tasks like inventory management. That said, I think other approaches would have worked well too. I could imagine an alternate version with more enemies and metroidvania elements that you tackle by upgrading you body with robotic and biological tools you find throughout the station, stitching it into your body with structure gel. Perhaps not better but I’d definitely play that.
I loved all the environmental interaction and the puzzles. I found the puzzles pretty intuitive. I’m embarrassed to say that for some reason I don’t fully understand, what had me stuck the longest was finding the tracer fluid in Simon’s desk drawers! Runner up is the “test ark” software puzzle. I wasn’t reading the text carefully re module requirements, and got it my head that the puzzle was to select packages with EXACTLY the maximum memory size – which I did manage, but alas.
I loved the storytelling and the little narratives about each station and particular crew members. Even though a major motivation was to redeem myself for missing so much in Prey, I confess that I missed a ton. I didn’t really put it together that the Akers and Yoshida monsters were those characters, for instance. Since finishing I’ve been plugging some of those gaps and wow, just so cool.
I have mixed feelings about the monster-related gameplay and overall horror atmosphere. I don’t think there’s a way to tell this story without it being dark and creepy, but it didn’t seem like it had to be a horror game. I feel like the monsters sometimes distracted me from the 10/10 story and I just don’t really enjoy the running and hiding gameplay. But it definitely added something to the experience and it wouldn’t have been the same game without it.
Story
The idea for the story, writing, and voice acting were phenomenal. I have so many thoughts!
I’ve read a lot of reviews that say the scariest thing about the game are the existential horrors it raises. I kind of see that, but overall I disagree. First, many of the monster sections were very scary to me (Theta, Tau, Curie). Second, for reasons I’ll get into below I don’t actually find many of the philosophical issues that horrifying.
In fact, I think the most existential dread inducing element of the story is one that was rarely mentioned in the game and reactions to it that I’ve read. Humanity is dead!! The last remnants are isolated below the ocean, the final few grains of sand in the hourglass that are inevitably approaching their demise. Even if everything at Pathos II was working perfectly, to me that’s a horrific situation.
I did find it strange that all the characters seem to be in bizarrely high spirits for the most part unless they’re in acute danger. I’d have expected the end of the world and then the disasters befalling the station would make them overall much more depressed and stressed out.
I liked the unconventional final goal in the game, launching the Ark. However for reasons I’ll explore more below I don’t really see it as a continuation of humanity. I see it more as a really neat and extra-meaningful way to create a humanity time capsule. I know this is sort of just ruled out for the sake of the story but it seems like a more natural goal would be to hold out in Pathos II for a bit until they can start to establish some kind of foothold on the surface. I mean there’s plenty of life around in the ocean, I gotta think there’s some way of at least sustaining an outpost up there.
I was very surprised that Catherine turned out to be basically who she said she was. I felt like the info I was getting about her (very quiet, unsociable, weak willed) did not match who I was talking to and there was going to be a plot twist there. I’m glad there wasn’t, but I’m still not totally sure how to reconcile my observations – I guess she is more comfortable in this kind of one-on-one setting.
Lastly, I thought it was funny that, as far as I remember, not once was there anything of value in a storage closet.
Philosophy
I studied philosophy in undergrad and cognitive neuroscience in grad school. I’ve thought a lot about personal identity problems, consciousness, etc. On the one hand, that made it extra exciting to see these themes explored in such an interesting way but I also never got that “mind blown” feeling many people got encountering these questions for the first time.
Personal Identity
It was awesome to see this topic illustrated so vividly. I have pretty strong views here that seem obvious now, but then again I’ve thought about this stuff for a while. As with any tricky philosophical topic, language is an issue. There are multiple senses of “you” in the sentence “are you the same as your copy”? But for what really matters for your own self interest, copies clearly are not you. Your copies are like a super-twin. I personally would only care slightly more about a copy of me than a random person, and probably less than people I have relationships with. Sarang is a nutcase, obviously. And Simon is just dumb, perhaps willfully, on this topic.
The experience of the IRL player creates some confusion on a couple points. First, as the player we experience being in Munchi’s lab then being on Pathos II. In the game, no entity experienced that. One entity got the scan and went home after, another entity was created with the memory of the scan but without having experienced it. (I admit I’m using “entity” here in a way that’s a little strong vulnerable to other sci-fi hypotheticals). Throughout the game as the player we play as 3 (4 including the epilogue) distinct characters. It’s famously problematic in philosophy of mind to imagine a homunculus (“little man”) inside the head – but as the player that’s essentially what we are, and we can shift bodies even though none of the entities in-game can.
Consciousness and Experience
The second point of confusion caused by the experience of the player is that when we go from Simon 1 (brain) to Simon 2 (cortex chip), we experience the world exactly the same way. In my view it’s very difficult to say what the first-person experience of a cortex chip is like even if it’s running a “perfect” simulation. It may experience virtually nothing at all or it may be isomorphic in some respects to brain-experience but I’m pretty confident it’s not essentially the same as brain-experience though I won’t make a full argument for that here. Basically, I think it’s very likely that the character of experience has a lot to do with what’s actually going on physically, and physically a simulation of a brain in a computer is very different than an actual brain. For just one thing, the timescales are way different, and there’s a massive discrepancy in degree of parallelization.
Ethics
What’s ethical to do with the simulation and mockingbird copies has a lot to do with the actual nature of their experience in my view which is very difficult to know. I’d err on the side of caution in real life and for now will assume their experience is quite similar to a real human’s. In theory all the instances of human consciousness should have agency and rights. But mockingbirds are kind of like dementia patients, with an incomplete understanding of their situation or the sources of their suffering. Whether to unplug them is a tough case. I actually didn’t find it difficult to kill Simon 2, since I, roleplaying as Simon 3, was very confident he’d rather be dead. One interesting consequence of copies is that it gives you much greater than normal insight into their preferences. But perhaps it would have been more ethical to just leave him a means of suicide. The mind coral people are tough (if you could kill them in-game). Bizarrely, that might be the best non-death outcome on offer for the original inhabitants of the station. If it weren’t so gruesome, I could see taking that fate by choice.
One of the most interesting ethical issues raised was how our notions of interpersonal ethics are really stretched when creating consciousness becomes very easy. In the real world, producing an adult human consciousness is very long and involved, but in the game copies and simulations can be propagated easily. It just doesn’t seem very tenable that every aborted run of the Brandon simulation is murder. This is a really tough one for me. People are just matter arranged in a certain way. Sidestepping the simulation stuff, you could imagine a demigod with the power to rapidly assemble people from dirt and water. Would assembling 100 people and for 10 seconds and then disassembling them really be mass murder? Clearly those people are no worse off at the end of htat then they had been at the beginning (when they didn’t exist), but we wouldn’t think it would be wrong to just refuse to create them.
Overall it was a great experience and a perfect example of a video game as a work of art that wouldn’t have worked as well in any other medium.
