The Ultimate SOMA Discussion Thread

[Paddy™]

There's a write-up about SOMA in the January 2015 edition of EDGE Magazine. It doesn't really shed any new light on the game, but it does have 4 new screenshots (one of which is a very small thumbnail, hardly worth mentioning really). I'm not sure if posting them here is allowed, given that EDGE is a paid magazine, but if a mod gives me permission I'll share them. Hopefully we'll get high quality versions directly from FG anyway.

Here's the one part of the interview with Thomas which might be of interest to those of us who've heard everything else 100 times before:

Spoiler below!

There are other staff trapped down here with you, too, and you’ll happen across ocean life, but also face something entirely unexpected: humour.

“It really comes naturally from the world we have created,” Grip explains when we ask him about an encounter with a robot that acts like an injured human, and is frustrated at your apparent lack of motivation to help. “Some of the things you encounter are so bizarre at first that it’s hard to not also find them a bit comical. We’ve tried to keep it at a reasonable level throughout the game – we don’t want the characters to crack jokes all of the time – and make it arise naturally from the creepy nature of the subjects. We found that if everybody was just super-serious, it removed some of the authenticity to it all.”

Ensuring that you never know whether to laugh or scream introduces a fitting wave of discomfort for a game that deals in themes of identity and body horror, but Frictional’s attempt to go beyond traditional videogame horror tropes has made explaining exactly what Soma is a bit of a headache for Grip.