Official Poll Regarding SOMA's Monsters

[ToomuchFluffy]

I voted for "A bit scary and interesting to encounter", but my experience could be described more accurately, as "Moderately scary, interesting to encounter and sometimes annoying".

The only monster I had any significant trouble with, was the Jiangshi in the Curie. At least in the section before the tentacles he really seemed to just be in the way. The fact that I was trying to explore the room behind the patrol route - with it coming in to kill me a few times - and me completely overlooking the other door didn't help. The chase sequence at the end didn't work for me, because I didn't remember the way back very well, which led to me repeating it 5-6 times.

In most cases I was a little surprised about how often we got a good look at the monsters, considering that seems to go against Frictionals design philosophies (judging from the blog). In Theta it made sense, since they were blind, but in the Curie a monster which we were not supposed to look at was far too tangible and far too "in the way" for that aspect of it to work very well.

On the other hand the Upsilon-robot never seemed like it was intended to scare us, so it worked for me as a pretty simple patrolling monster. In the Theta-labs there is simply enough space to accomodate for a patrolling monster, even if it is always somewhere in the area. And the others didn't seem to have any particular problems while adding to the variety of monster behaviour. I really liked how Omikron had such oddly different pacing for a change.

My expectations for monster behaviour might have been off a little. In the end, no matter how similar SOMA could sometimes seem to A:TDD, the way the monsters were implemented did not. I don't really remember ever getting a good look at the monsters in Amnesia, especially as far as the first half is concerned. But to be sure, the only time I feel that it was a game design problem and not just me overlooking something obvious was the last section of the Curie. So, overall I'm quite positive about the implementation of the creatures in SOMA :-)