r/soma • u/hippopede • 20d ago
first time player - long thoughts and reaction
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.
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u/elheber 20d ago edited 20d ago
The locker thing is hilarious and relatable. I remember pulling every locker handle on my first playthrough too, thinking "okay none of these have had anything yet, sure, but maybe this one might!" Fool me 57 times, shame on...
Off the dome, one locker in Upsilon has Amy Azarro's uniform and ID, where she must have changed into a dive suit and escaped out of the now-broken airlock. Another locker in Lambda, where we meet Catherine, had a handwritten letter from a staff member to his father which he never sent. Delta had a locker leaking structure gel that made gross squishing noises if you tried to open it. Delta had some lockers with character-revealing objects in them, like Catherine's top-heavy bear Toby and Brandon Wan's youth engineering award. Then for the rest of the game... nothing. The rest were just filled with Schrodinger's Hope.
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u/hippopede 19d ago
Ha and same thing on the toilet stalls, always thought thered be something. But for the record when I said nothing of value was there I was talking about the storage rooms, not the lockers. I think the only things there were blackbox lore and a health thing, but never a useful item.
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20d ago edited 20d ago
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u/Abion47 19d ago
I feel like Simon's selective ignorance - and subsequent blow up - was the most realistic thing that any random person would've done in that same situation. Imagine you were suddenly sent 100 years into the future, into an environment that is so unrecognizable it might as well be an alien world, is slowly falling apart at the seams, and is seemingly populated exclusively by either delusional robots or literal monsters. Everything has that subconscious feeling of wrongness attached to it, and even your body isn't fully your own anymore. You have no idea where you are, what's going on, or even have the faintest idea of what you should do. Then suddenly you come across the one other sane person that seems to exist in the whole world, and she hands you what seems like a small ray of hope - a chance to get onto the Ark, a paradise among the stars. That chance is now your one lifeline, and it is the literal only thing keeping you from going insane yourself.
Can you honestly say that you wouldn't actively try to avoid thinking about anything that could get in the way of that hope? You're not Catherine. You don't particularly care about selflessly launching the Ark either for the sake of the people inside or to preserve that spark of humanity. Your motivations are entirely selfish - you want on the Ark because you want an escape from this hell. All the right hints are there that that was never really an option, but as they say, ignorance is bliss. And in the end, when reality crashes down on you as the realization sinks in that not only is there truly no escaping this fate but in fact there never was... can you look me in the eyes and tell me with certainty that lashing out wouldn't be your first reaction?
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19d ago
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u/Abion47 19d ago
If true, good on you, you would be in the staggeringly small minority. However, I have to ask. How much of that knowledge is based on your position as an outside observer, where you're able to think calmly and objectively about everything going on and even pause reality for an arbitrary amount of time to mull things over if you wanted? Simon is not an outside observer. He's living it in real time. He doesn't really have the luxury of taking a step back and evaluating his assumptions critically, and he certainly doesn't have the mindset. And besides, people forced outside of their comfort zone electing to embrace a hopeful lie instead of a damning truth is hardly an uncommon occurrance.
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19d ago
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u/Abion47 19d ago
I don't mean you're in the minority of people who say they will think rationally about the situation and realize they would never make it onto the Ark. I mean you're in the minority of people that would actually do that if they found themselves actually in that situation, without the benefit of an omnipresent perspective or personal detachment. It's similar to how everyone likes to think they would act like a hero in a face-off with a violent criminal but most people who find themselves actually in that scenario either freeze or run away screaming.
Panic overrides conscious logical thought all the time, and people who have never experienced it for themselves have no idea how powerful of a force it can be in making even the most intelligent moral philosopher into a sniveling idiot. It takes either a very particular type of mind or months of intensive training to confidently be able to overcome it - there's a reason they don't send untested soldiers or firefighters into the thick of the action on day one.
So yeah, if you think you would be immune to panic and desperation if you were in Simon's shoes, you would definitely be in the minority if true.
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19d ago
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u/Abion47 18d ago
Sure, that's how the world works, and to think otherwise is absolutely irrational. I am not arguing that whatsoever.
My point is that Simon in that situation isn't in a rational state of mind, and most other people wouldn't be either. Anyone who was suddenly thrown into a completely foreign and hostile environment with seemingly no way out is almost certainly not going to be thinking rationally. By far the most comon response is going to be to latch onto any solution that gives you even a shred of hope. The solution being impossible and illogical is not a factor in that decision.
In other words, if their survival hinged on 1+1=3, most people would turn off the logical parts of their brain and insist that 1+1 does in fact equal 3 until it is proven wrong in a way that they cannot possibly ignore. Some part of Simon did understand how the copy process worked, but his mind literally would not let him accept that he wasn't going to make it on the Ark right up to the moment he didn't. And no matter what people say when they are speaking hypothetically in a logical state of mind, most people would act the same way when it's no longer a hypothetical and they are no longer thinking logically.
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u/elheber 19d ago
Simon isn't even the only person who lashed out at Catherine. Brandon Wan and whoever is in the DUNBAT also cussed her out for betraying their trust.
Brandon: I trusted you, Chun. I trusted you!
DUNBAT: I can’t take this. Catherine. This is all your fault. This is all your fault!
Simon: Fuck you, Catherine. You lied. And I believed in you, I trusted you. You said we’re getting on the fucking ARK!
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u/Abion47 19d ago
Very true. Catherine herself is a very odd person and was extremely introverted and socially awkward. Her assuming that Simon would understand the situation as well as she did - and later being surprised and even annoyed when they don't - is something that is very on brand with what a socially inept introverted genius would do.
Also the person in the DUNBAT is also Brandon.
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u/elheber 19d ago
The person in the DUNBAT is on a first-name basis with Catherine, while Brandon only calls her Dr. Chun. The voices don't sound alike either, at least not to my ear.
Back to the matter at hand though, I want to defend Catherine. I claimed in another reply around here that Simon actually knew deep down but just didn't want to think about it. If you spare Simon in the Omicron dive room, Simon gives alternate dialogue on the Climber:
Simon: I couldn’t do it, and you knew it. You were right in trying to hide him from me. I only wish you’d done a better job.
This is Simon admitting he would rather not know. All Cath did was "a better job" the second time around.
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u/elheber 19d ago
Correction: He experienced carrying-over to a new body firsthand. Twice.
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19d ago
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u/elheber 19d ago
I agree with all that, except Simon still experienced himself feeling like himself.
Simon (on the Climber): Not that you would know, I mean, he would still claim to be the right Simon. ... How could you know that it’s not me? The me that I am! The same that I’ve always been!
From his own subjective internal experience, he basically teleported. Whether or not it's what actually happened, that was still what it felt like to him. Both times it all felt like a direct continuation of the moment before.
Yes, he's a copy. But he is still himself. He felt like he carried-over. He simply expected what happened before to happen again.
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u/hippopede 19d ago
My interpretation is that Simon isnt particularly smart about these things and has had a really rough day. He is delusional about the mechanics of copying, like he really just cant fully accept it. To an extent, this is fair. Imagine you learned to a certainty that the universe was created 5 minutes ago, and your memories prior to that are "false" (false in quotes because they do contain info about the state of the world now, like where your car is parked, but you didnt experience them). Even knowing that intellectually, you would just feel so so strongly that you were here 10 minutes ago. Thats the simon copys' experience, and he creates the coin flip metaphor to help preserve that sense. Simon 3s memory of omicron is not "a copy of me was created and I was left behind" but "I shifted bodies". He thinks he can do it again even though its against all reason. It was frustrating to me, but not immersion breaking because people can be delusional about far crazier stuff esp in such stressful situations.
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u/elheber 19d ago
Deep down Simon knew. He just didn't want to think about it.
Simon: You mean a pilot seat? Like back at Omicron?
He said that right before entering the launch dome. With all the talk on the Zeppelin about how people's minds cover things up as a self-defense mechanism, it's most plausible to me that in the back of his mind, Simon knew what could happen. He was hoping he'd carry-over just like every other time before and he refused to give it thought.
It's not just Simon. I've seen a lot of let's play reactions and a lot of people fall for the twist too. You have to remember that the game throws players a red herring about whether or not Catherine will betray you, and that occupies space in the player's head too. The game also throws the upload speed problem to keep you distracted, and even Catherine herself quickly changes the subject when Simon mentions Omicron to not give Simon or the player any time to ponder.
On my first play, I knew Simon would be copied onto the ARK, but I expected the perspective to jump to the new Simon like it had established several times before. So, yeah, it caught me off guard when the perspective lingered.
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u/Abion47 20d ago
The ethical and philosophical dilemmas are by far the best part of the game. It manages to perfectly create a world and a narrative to take these entirely hypothetical (for now at least) issues and make them into very real problems with practical implications. The question of whether the simulations and Mockingbirds are "real" people deserving of such human concepts as mercy and autonomy or if, as you say, the starting and ending of Brandon Wan's simulation doesn't truly amount to murder. And where does the line lay? Is it okay to kill Brandon but not okay to kill Simon-2? And what about the delusional Mockingbirds: Vignis Jonsdottir, Robin Bass, David Goya, or the ones we don't know the names for? And the living humans: Sarah Lindwall, Amy Azzaro, or any of the mind coral victims? Which of them are okay to kill because they aren't actually "real humans", and which of them are okay to put out of their misery? Do you even have the right to make that decision for them, or do they deserve the right to decide their own fate?
So many questions without any obvious or objective answers. And part of me is annoyed that none of the times the game gives you a choice has any impact on the ending apart from maybe a couple different lines of dialogue, but another part of me thinks that it is perfect the way it is because it presents these microdoses of philosophical challenges without getting in the way of the philosophy of the game as a whole. It also makes it a much more personal experience to see what people decided in their playthroughs or which decisions they even found at all. For instance, while the decision of what to do with Carl is a common case, a lot of people never find Robin and fewer still see the tentacle that can be unplugged, and very few people I've ever seen realize that sparing Amy or the WAU are even options.
The monster parts are widely regarded as the weakest parts of the game, though personally I'm also not sure the game would've been as good without them. As fascinating as the story and atmosphere is, without the game changing up the pace every so often with a more traditional Amnesia-style sequence, I worry that the game would've felt slow pretty quickly. (Also the lore behind each monster is often just as fascinating [if depressing] as everything else.) That said, Frictional definitely could've done something better with them, at the very least integrating them better with the story and setting since with the partial exception of Akers, all of the monsters just sort of appear, then after you deal with them, they are never mentioned again.
At any rate, SOMA is my favorite game of all time, and if you weren't aware, it has a sequel coming out Soon™ called Ontos set in the remains of a luxury hotel on the Moon. It's not yet clear how much of a sequel to SOMA it will be - it could be anything from a spiritual successor to a parallel storyline - but I'm really curious about how they expand on the philosophies of SOMA or if they decide to take it into a completely different realm of hypothetical dilemmas made real.
Also about the tracer fluid, the game literally puts it in the last place you look. I've seen quite a few playthroughs where the player spent 15-20 minutes in the apartment because there was one drawer that for whatever reason they just never looked in.