Official Poll Regarding SOMA's Monsters

[SlackerinDeNile]

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.

I like Yahtzee's reviews (most of the time, his sense of humour can get a bit grating) but I don't think i've ever agreed with him this much in the case of a good game like this. Although, didn't he praise Frictional games for sticking to what they do best a few years ago? Never mind.

He's right that Simon's story, Catherine's ARK quest and the WAU monstrosity don't mix together all that well. Simon does occasionally show some slight disgust and horror towards the WAU and it's creations but he and Catherine seem to absurdly treat it as more of an annoying hinderance than anything else, I didn't quite understand that during the game and I still don't now. Judging by the work in progress material in the secret archive I get a strong impression that SOMA was originally intended to be an epic science-fiction adventure like the Half Life games or Mass Effect, but with, more psychological horror, no guns and lots of sneaking, exploration and puzzle-solving, instead of the philisophical sci-fi and man-made quasi-lovecraftian horror mash-up that was the final product.

Don't get me wrong, I love the monsters in SOMA, they're appropriately scary and well-designed, but they often feel rather out of place. I don't feel that Aker and the proxies make any sense in the context of the world and style of SOMA, they're clearly inspired by the System Shock games and would fit much better in the cyber\bio punk style of that franchise. Also, the Tau monster feels 'shoved-in' to that level to increase the length of the game and give the player another obstacle, in my opinion, that backfired. If I had been in charge of designing the game I would have made more monsters like the Omikron cyber lobster woman, the Constructor in Upsilon and the Jiangshi disco-ball head, the crazy robots and cyber zombies seem closer to the nature and design of the WAU.