Official Poll Regarding SOMA's Monsters

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A similar issue happened to me with Akers actually. I locked myself in Strohmeier's Security Office and just waited in there while Akers patrolled outside. After a while of watching him go back and forth I began to lose some fear of him and I realized he was just a programmable object on a designated patrolling path. That's how tricky these things can be.

But I would argue that it has little to do with the fact that he is a script with a finite number of functions. Clever, responsive AI is certainly not detrimental to the horror aspect, as Alien: Isolation has amply proved; but the horror is still largely self-induced. Why isn't Splinter Cell for example considered a scary game but Thief is (ignoring the monster levels which have an obvious horror focus)? In my opinion it is because Thief teaches you to love darkness while also having probably the most disturbing lighting design in existence, the game teaches you to be deathly afraid of noise and makes sure that the sparse ambient music and various sound effects are as eerie as possible and all of the levels are designed in such a way that the enemies always appear in an unsettling context. However, sneaking past enemies in Thief is no more difficult than it is in Splinter Cell, and there are many Thief fan maps (and some original missions) that prove that it isn't only the "engine" that gives it that extra creepiness.

Both of these games have better patrol route design than SOMA, which admittedly was not excellent. Still, I don't think that means it magically loses its effectiveness because everything else is so extraordinarily well done. The lighting is great - even if you dare to look at Akers for more than a second or two it is unlikely you will ever be able to make out much more than the general contours of his character model. The sound is also of course among the best in any game ever, but in my opinion the real horror comes from the level and task design, which gives the monsters context. Akers was easy enough to avoid on a mechanical level, but the fact that he teleported around and you didn't really trust any location apart from the security station to feel safe and just the dread of knowing you have to go to certain places and do certain things with him stalking around made the sequence particularly effective.

I don't know - in SOMA it never reached the point where I felt that the monsters were disconnected from the game world in an inorganic way, and even when I understood their patrol routes it didn't necessarily make them less scary. In fact, it probably made certain sections more tense because it became about timing your movements. Just my two cents.