[SPOILERS] So many unanswered questions and so little payoff...

[SlackerinDeNile]

As I was playing through what I did not yet realise was the last level of SOMA I was stirring in anticipation for the final lore and exposition dumps that would possibly answer most the questions I had about the latest brilliant, fascinating and disturbing world that Frictional Games had created. I understand that in horror it's best to keep certain aspects of malevolent entities unknown and mysterious but at the time I was really hoping for a big twist or two, maybe a fore-shadowed change in Catherine or Simon's character (i'll get back to that in a bit) or one last climactic action\horror event. Instead I got a rather dull fetch quest and machine manipulation mission and an out-of-nowhere tantrum from Simon-3 over an aspect of SOMA's science he REALLY should have known better about by now. I don't give a damn if becoming Simon-3 set him up with potential expectations on 'soul transfer', Catherine really did tell him that they would be copies no matter what, perhaps they should have had an option for him to kill himself during the copy like Sarang did...When the credits rolled I literally raised both hands next to each side of my head, clenched my hands and let out a near-silent (i've got neighbours to worry about) "WHAT THE HELL!? THAT'S IT!? I CHEATED MY WAY PAST THAT BLOODY TAU SUIT-SQUID FOR THIS!?" Then, of course, the ARK scene came on and I was like "Wait, did Frictional just joss me?" and I ran around the cute virtual environment looking for that clever plot twist or possible sequel\DLC bait I was hoping for, but NOPE, all Simon does is meet Catherine and possibly spend the next thousand years making 1920x1280 pixels of virtual love to her under the FXAA, dynamic lit shade of adv_tree.mdl or whatever.

Look, for the most part, I loved this game, I love almost all of Frictional's stuff, they're so good at survival-horror adventure games and this was almost no exception. This was setting up to be one of the best video games i'd ever played and possibly even one of the best works of science-fiction i've ever checked out, but it lacks several good pay-offs in the story and overall game design that it badly needed in my opinion.

For example:

- The WAU, the developers have set this thing up as a man-made malevolent, powerful eldritch abomination with a bizarre sense of morality that seems to conflict with what many of the staff of PATHOS-II claim it was supposed to be and do. We never really get any hints to its motivations beyond its paranoia, sense of self-preservation and apparent hypocrisy in preserving the human race, by any means necessary. Why did it create Simon in the first place and why were its creations happy to butcher Simon or try to trap 'him'? Granted, its unknowable mind and intelligence may add to our fear of it and its creations whilst playing the game but wouldn't having it play a larger role in the last part of the story add to a more satisfying conclusion? (I'll also get back to this in a bit.)

- Catherine, I liked this character but despite providing some cute humour and interesting philisophical and existential dialogue, she does come across as very disconnected from the rest of SOMA's world. I was hoping for an interesting plot twist near or at the end, involving her using the ARK for possibly more sinister uses or even being some sort of proxy of WAU and manipulating Simon to fulfill some of its 'ambitions', if it had any, something I would have liked to have had the chance to understand better. Given the way she talks about WAU throughout the game and the structure gel infesting her cortex chip, i'm surprised more people didn't pick up on this...

- Johann Ross, was he still a fully sentient being? What was his deal? Why was he seperate from the rest of the WAU and how did he end up the way he is? The game just tosses him aside as soon as the writers decide that he's inconvenient to the story and the quest to shoot the ARK into space.

- Shouldn't the player and Simon have had more choice regarding the ARK and the ending? Given what happens at the end of the Omicron level wouldn't giving the player a choice over whether or not they want to create another copy of Simon or even bother launching the ARK, given that its a rather futile endeavour and doomed to fail eventually, lead to a more satisfying and intelligent ending?

- Terry Akers and the rest of the proxy, cancer, zombie things. Did Terry become a psychopathic cultist on his own, without WAU's help, or not? How does structure gel affect humans like that? How did it create that red 'mind coral' stuff and why did all this only occur in the Theta structure? Also, were they under the control of WAU or not? I don't understand why it was creating a 'mini-matrix' there but nowhere else.

- The cyborg, lobster, zombie woman in Omicron, again, what was her deal? Why was she so pissed off at Simon and why did the WAU only create one of her?

- The theme of human perception of reality, I get a strong impression that this was supposed to feature more heavily in the story due to various things that happen over the course of the game, like Simon realising that he is a robot (cyborg, but we don't know that yet) when he's 'breathing' underwater and the quick dream sequence in the Theta 'mind coral' maze. Other than this and the whole ARK quest, not much comes of it in the second half of the game or by the end it.

Sorry if i've come across as an aggressive, geeky nitpicker with all of this, but I guess I kind of came to expect a bit more from SOMA, given how ambitious and high-quality it is throughout most of the game.