Official Poll Regarding SOMA's Monsters

[DannySwish]

I selected "Very scary, but also a bit annoying."

They were fantastic all-around, but that long stretch of proxies did push it just a little. The Tau monster was the one that seriously freaked me out. The way it wobbled after me uncomfortably quickly. It was perfect. Induced true, raw fear in me in a way that nothing else has thus far.

[GhylTarvoke]

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.

I do believe you're right. It's nice to have that mystery solved!

[sasaluvsamnesia7]

Selected Very Scary, but also Annoying.

Actually, in truth the bit of the game that terrified me the most was the Abyss. I have a major fear of the deep ocean and the whole 'stay in the lights' thing really freaked me out.

I got tricked by the anglerfish and it scared me so bad that when I got back inside, I had to pause my game and had to take a moment to breathe.

Honestly, the Diving Suit creation was a refreshing breeze in comparison.

The WAU creations that scared me most, however, was the Proxy though they got annoying pretty fast, and the crying robotic female in Omicron.

[Macgyverthehero]

I think the monsters themselves are really cool and can be scary, but I feel like you don't spend enough time with the monsters to really start to fear them. Usually you only meet a monster a maximum of twice in the entire game per chapter before it switches to a completely new creature. After going through the monsters in their appropriate sections I always felt like I wanted to see them again after, and it felt a little unsatisfying after that.

What made me fear the monsters in your previous game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, was the fact that the monsters were usually one step behind you all the time, and that you never knew when they would come back again, and of course, they were around for longer.

In SOMA, the monsters don't really get a proper introduction aside from hints to what they are before you meet them. Which is where Amnesia excelled at by making you fear their presence once you saw how atrocious they looked, and how horrifying you sounded.

A small point of mine is that there isn't a proper way of hiding from the monsters, which is understandable since most of the enemies don't immediately chase you once they see you, but for some enemies like the Construct, and the Deep Suit Diver, it would have been nice to have some kind of closet to hide in some rooms.

Last thing I want to say, is that the cyborg lady in Omicron seems exploitable, all you would have to do to pass it is just take a step, wait for it to calm down, take a step, wait for it to calm down, repeat until you get battery and leave her vicinity.

There is potential for these monsters cause they're really cool, but I wish they were implemented into the game better by making them around more often.

[GhylTarvoke]

For me, TDD's monsters and SOMA's monsters were always scariest the first time I met them, so SOMA's one-off approach was very effective.

I do agree that TDD had better build-ups. The Grunt build-up was particularly masterful: first sounds, then glimpses, then full-fledged encounters.

[PathOS]

I think in any situation in any game. The more you are around a monster, the less scary it becomes. I've always said that Horror works best when the quantities are unknown, and you as the player are faced with something that you cannot understand or see that well.

I think everyone or most people agreed - whether it was the grunts/brute's in TDD, the pigs in AMFP, or even the inmates of Outlast and the Alien in Isolation - that the longer you saw an enemy the less scary they become. Their only capability to scare is then relegated to what they do to the player when they "catch" them (death or some state) and keeping the user tense that way.

I also agree that good build-up's to monsters are more effective, and someone mentioned the grunts of TDD being done well. In SOMA, since we have a variety of different monsters populating the world it was likely very difficult to give satisfactory build up to so many.

Akers probably had the best build-up since you started hearing of him in Delta and his insanity and how he headed to Theta, and then arriving at Theta to find the main level deserted and all the "black boxes" congregated to the sub-levels, not to mention the screams emanating from below and then dealing with that Proxy in the Server room.

Robo-Girl and Yoshida didn't have much build-up sadly and I think they could have used some more.

[felixmole]

Robo-Girl and Yoshida didn't have much build-up sadly and I think they could have used some more.

I don't think the Robot-Girl needed anything like that. Clearly, it's not an enemy you have to avoid but, on the contrary, confront, and therefore understand the logics (It took me a while to understand it was very much like Left 4 Dead's witch).

As to Yoshida, remember the clues left in the dive room ("Suit 3 - active (Tau)"). Every LPer that I have watched quickly understood what was ahead of them. But perhaps there could have been more than that. Too bad that the encounter with Yoshida may have come across as very brief - for some players like myself, it lasted an eternity, and I think that's what made this moment the most intense of the game; but for some other players, it lasted less than 2 minutes. One of the most likely reasons is that Yoshida seems to easily get stuck in the dive room or in the room with the broken construct.

[Peeling]

I really enjoyed the game, and I thought it was a lot more interesting than A:TDD - although not as scary, I think because for much of the game you get to keep touching base with a pretty up-beat companion who seems at home in that environment.

I thought the monsters were well-conceived, especially the one people are calling the disco-ball head. I thought that had a genuinely nightmarish quality. I personally find it much scarier when creatures don't telegraph the threat they pose - you know: no big teeth or claws, no snarling face.

I did have one big problem with all the monsters, though: their movement and animation.

This isn't Assassin's Creed. You don't have hundreds of people wandering around, and a zillion idle anims to worry about. You have one, maybe two creatures per level to devote 100% of your attention and CPU to animating and controlling its behaviour.

Those creatures certainly get 100% of the players' attention, and I don't think the game does it justice. In particular, there's a lot riding on the first monster the player encounters (after all the initial build up), and the way it moves and patrols was, for me, a huge let-down.

It marched around in an entirely robotic fashion, exhibiting no sign of inquisitiveness or awareness of its surroundings. If you're trying to convince someone that something mechanical is alive (and let's face it, that's kind of the whole point with SOMA) the golden rule is that it should behave more lifelike than it moves, and move more lifelike than it looks. Best example of this is WALL-E. Remember that bit at the end where he looks like his mind has been wiped? All that changed was the way he moved.

[Gingerman]

Scary and a bit annoying. Cuz I think the story and the science philosophy and the gameplay were so immersive i actually didn't care about the monsters. Throughout the game i was just thinking about the brain scan and copying technology structure gel and the Arc project and what the heck just happened to a normal guy like Simon. And I think this game would be as cool and awesome without those monsters. The actual terrifying thing was possibility of different Simons, and WAU of course.

[PathOS]

Bringing this back to the fore since I just found Zero Punctuations (Yahtzee's) Review: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/v...OMA-Review

And he touches upon (in his trademark witty way) that it felt that there were two games going at eachother within SOMA. The exploration/ambiance/puzzle parts of the game, and the "evil monsters" part of the game. Like many, he's not a big fan of how the latter half ended up gameplay-wise, and he also takes issue with it story-wise as well, though I don't agree with him too strongly there.

But yeah, I wonder if there's a way to make a Horror game rely more upon environmental and danger hazards than sneaking past monsters. There definitely is a large amount of the players of SOMA who felt that the monster sections almost distracted too much from the actual game itself and they felt like another game on their own.

Of course, as he wittily points out, without scary monsters what would the armies of "Let's Play Youtubers" do to entertain themselves.