The Ultimate SOMA Discussion Thread

[Paddy™]

A few days ago, Paddy and I were browsing The Dark Swarm (only the visible directories, we didn't hack into the website XD), and I came across three pieces of concept art that we had never seen before, along with two other concept art images which had already been published in this Game Informer article. We assumed they weren't secret, so Paddy posted the links here and we added the images to the Info Portal.

Sorry, FG. Please don't sue us.

In my defence (and I take full responsibility for posting them!), they were uploaded to The Dark Swarm in March, and everyone and their dog knows about that site, so I thought the pics were fair game. But now I'm wondering if they were being held back a little to help "beef up" the exposure they gained at Gamescom, or something along those lines. Hope Thomas isn't mad at me.

[jens]

No worries guys, you actually made us notice that media had not made use of these. What you did made us decide to start posting them ourselves as well

[Paddy™]

Awesome! Of course Ash and I are motivated purely by FG-love, so that's great to hear

[Ashtoreth]

I believe there is a "the" after the "to". That is to say, not sure if there is a separate subject word or a longer word.

Welcome to station LAMBDA
The gateway to the [something]

Thanks Rom, it kinda looks like "the" to me as well. I definitely can't figure out the rest of the phrase.
Below it, it seems to say "This station houses", and then a list of things...

Does anyone have any idea about the possible purposes of Lambda and Omicron?

The only thing I could find is that Omicron is the station where Vivarium and Mockingbird were recorded.

Oh, I actually assumed it was at Theta, because of some of the information in the Mockingbird file:

Quarantined in T260 Machine Rep [CORRUPT DATA] during the night it had taken itself apart.

I think that the T in "T260" comes from Theta. I noticed that in the casting call for "Depth", each character's designation starts with the letter that corresponds to the first letter of the station they're assigned to.

[CORRUPT DATA] appears there is a real Adam Golaski working at Omicron. Invited Chief Engineer Golaski to talk to the impostor construct.

I interpreted this as Golaski working at Omicron and being invited to come to Theta to talk to the robot.

No worries guys, you actually made us notice that media had not made use of these. What you did made us decide to start posting them ourselves as well

Phew! Thanks for clearing that up for us, Jens

[GrAVit]

Great to see something new! Looks like the environment's going to be pretty eerie with all those bodies lying about, judging by the new concept art.

[Paddy™]

I'm having trouble understanding two pieces of dialogue from the Theta trailer, and was hoping someone could help me out. They are indicated by ??? in the following transcript:

Transcript:

Spoiler below!

Catherine: Strasky, come in; I need help in the lab.

Strasky: What is it?

Catherine: Conrad executed himself after the [corruption]

Strasky: Jesus! How?

Catherine: Jailbroken ??? tool. What should I do?

Strasky: I'm gonna need to call Strohmaier.

Catherine: No, no! I'm so close. Strohmaier's gonna close down the ??? project. It's not my fault people keep killing themselves.

Strasky: Catherine, what are you gonna do? It's not like you can sneak a 300 pound body out of the lab.

Catherine: Yeah, I know.

Strasky: Catherine, are you ok?

Catherine: No. Not even close.

Here are audio clips of the dialogue I'm having trouble with (hosted on SoundCloud):

Jailbroken [something] tool

The [something] project

It's possible that these pieces of information aren't terribly important, but they might be. The jailbroken tool might tell us something about the kind of work that goes on in Theta (especially when you consider how Ashtoreth discovered that deep-sea oil drilling is at least one of the activities going on in PATHOS-2, almost entirely from the description of one of the characters' jobs!), and the name of the "project" could be pretty important, too.

I also just wanna know what the hell they're saying

[Newsman Waterpaper]

The second one sounds like

Spoiler below!

"Strohmaier's gonna close down the ark(?) project"

[Potato]

I'm hearing "mincer tool" and "the old project", but I also do hear semblance of 'ark project' after reading Waterpaper's post.

[Paddy™]

My first thought was "macer tool", but I don't think such a thing exists haha.

"Ark Project" feels like it makes sense, though. It puts several ideas into my mind. For instance, usually when the term "ark" is used (as in Noah's ark), it means a rescue/preservation mission of some kind. I can think of a few ways in which this could apply to SOMA (a global catastrophe, in this case caused by an asteroid; a select few people remaining; the need to survive and rebuild; etc.).

[plutomaniac]

It clearly says the "Arm Project". At least that's what I heard all 4 times with headphones. It's probably something game-related, a name given to something. Maybe a military defense system? Who knows as of yet...