Official Poll Regarding SOMA's Monsters

[felixmole]

The woman monster behavior is simple. It gets attracted to movement. So you need to move very slowly. If you start moving, she still won't charge at you unless you keep movoing. Until she calms down, you can move again.

Basically it takes some time. You move a bit forward ---> she gets angry -----> calms down ----> you move forward again ---->.......

Correct me if I am wrong.

Indeed, that's how I played the part. It took quite some time, and when I picked up the battery I was less than a meter away from her.

As to Yoshida, indeed it does stalk you and you can hear the appropriate music ("stalk") when it patrols your zone. The logic is strange, the monster seems to rush to the player up to a certain distance and then wait for the player to look somewhere else before continuing its rush.

[GhylTarvoke]

I can't understand Yoshida either. To the best of my knowledge, no one does. He seems completely random.

[Romulator]

Yoshida is like the weeping angel. If he is following you, you look at him and he will stop momentarily, but will eventually start walking towards you again. As long as you maintain some form of sight, then look away, then look back, you're good.

Keep in mind, he still has to find you if he does not see you or you avoid him entirely. You can run and hide in a room behind an obstacle of some sort after you close the door and he will change from "stalk" to "hunt" if you're out of his line of sight.

[DenifClock]

Actually interesting thing to note, it's hard to make Yoshida chase you. I never heard his "chase" theme in most walktroughs.
15% of people heard his theme, I am totally sure.

Even if it's starts to chase you, you'll die in a second.

[Koopa Rs07]

What I think you did wrong is that you put effort into modeling the monsters, but in the game you can't look at them without getting seen. And the distortions are more annoying than scary. Also, there seems to be almost nowhere to hide from them and I always get cornered. You should've made lockers a bit bigger so we could've hide in them and made it to where we could hid under desks. And if you think that's too easy then make the monsters open a locker to look for you. Cause that would be scary!! I'm not trying to sound like I'm ranting, these are just all the bad aspects of the monsters.

[Newsman Waterpaper]

I originally posted this in the Discussion: Monster Behavior in SOMA (Mild Spoilers) thread awhile ago and I stick by it.

Spoiler below!

TBH I don't find the monsters scary at all. Their designs were cool and disturbing but that's just it, gameplay-wise they were actually weaker enemies than AMFP's(Not joking.) The behaviours of the enemies as just as predictable as Grunts and Brutes etc and you can usually figure out each monsters gimmicks pretty easily. "Don't look at this one" for Disco Grunts and "Don't make noise at this guy" for the flesh thing in the server rooms, so they basically split up 2 things you had to with the original enemies in TDD but somehow made it less interesting.

The first monster type you encounter was just a plain old grunt type enemy but just slower and simply not scary. I know FG wanted the monsters to be more unpredictable and more interesting than any gatherers/manpigs you encountered but I just simply preferred the raw terror of being chased of a guy with messed up body armour,hasn't washed in months and has an Uruk-Hai sword for an arm down a hallway. I admit I did find the Disco Grunt sequence in the wrecked ship tense atleast.

[hollowleviathan]

3. Yoshida, the Tau monster. I hated that thing. I haven't looked at the script but I'm certain it was cheating. Whenever you got some meters away from it, it would just appear close to you even though there was absolutely no sound, visible clues from my part.

I managed to completely lose him somehow. Fair warning, if he truly is random this is just dumb luck:

I prepped all the doors in the area before the gate open, then I opened the gate and ran into the room across from it. Peeking around, as soon as I saw him moving towards me, I closed the door, and retreated into the other room, closing the two doors in tube between them as I went. As soon as I heard him open the first one, I exited into the hallway, closed that door behind me, and rushed to the other gate you have to open, started the process and hid in the corner staring at the wall until it opened. Not seeing him anywhere, I strolled to the ladder and got out.

[plutomaniac]

I managed to completely lose him somehow. Fair warning, if he truly is random this is just dumb luck:

I'm not saying that it teleports or something but I noticed that whenever you get away from it, it will start coming towards your current area no matter the absence of audio or visual clues. And yes, you could play such games with it and run for your life but that doesn't allow exploration of the area. There are some rooms near the stairs you have to ascend including a computer with text etc which you will miss with such a strategy. I was trying to read those things and that's why Yoshida frustrated me.

For me, the scariest monster is the curie one. This teleportation sound that it makes is just chilly. Not that it wasn't annoying after some time. That's another example of a monster that follows you around intentionally. The thing with curie though is that it's not obvious (at least at first gameplay) that it's doing that. I wasn't certain. I thought that maybe even a slight movement caused it to come close to my location and that's why it was behind me often. So the curie one was just fine on that regard, but Yoshida on the other hand was obvious.

Generally, I think that the monsters should be patrolling an area of the map, not the whole map. So once you successfully sneak past them, it's done. Isn't it repetitive to have to sneak past a monster 10 times in a single map? In my case, I mainly disliked the fact that I missed a part of the map due to frustration. Akers at Theta was ok in my opinion as long as you used the main office to lock doors and find all the needed stuff before going to the elevator which triggers him to come. In the end though, I guess it all comes down to perspective as I read some earlier posts and some people seem to really like the Tau/Yoshida monster.

[Dundle]

What I think you did wrong is that you put effort into modeling the monsters, but in the game you can't look at them without getting seen.

Guess you didn't actually pay attention at all or try to experiment during the game. You can look at all of the monsters except one. Probably would've been better if you COULDN'T look at most of them, actually. Only getting short glimpses of creatures makes them much creepier in my opinion.

[Koopa Rs07]

What I think you did wrong is that you put effort into modeling the monsters, but in the game you can't look at them without getting seen.

Guess you didn't actually pay attention at all or try to experiment during the game. You can look at all of the monsters except one. Probably would've been better if you COULDN'T look at most of them, actually. Only getting short glimpses of creatures makes them much creepier in my opinion.

Let me rephrase that "them" to an "it", the "disco ball head monster" as some call it. I didn't exactly mean all the monsters.