The Ultimate SOMA Discussion Thread

[Nycticorax]

I would really enjoy playing a sequel for Amnesia (or a stand-alone game) including some of the following features (don't get mad at me if some are unfeasible, or if they are not cosatisfiable -- it's just some thoughts I jotted down after playing Amnesia):

- like every episodes so far, makes the discovering of a story the main goal of the game -- the mark of F®ictional, god bless you guys;
- takes place in an old, desert sanatorium in Northern US or Canada, with grey, dark grey, blue, and green colours (just type "sanatorium" on google images and you'll see what I mean);
- explores further the "playable" flashbacks of Amnesia, that is, the scenes where you discover the/your past (they could be in a full black and white palette, be more interactive, and last a bit longer than in Amnesia);
- balances logic puzzles ("I need time....") with very stressing atmosphere ("...but I can't think with this monster behind!");
- develops against a realistic background (i.e.: traumatized soldiers in cure after some war, psychotics, nevropaths, treated by some mad scentist convincing them he can extract their evil side, but in fact use them to achieve some very insane experimentations for which he recruits them as a secret task force invested with the duty of "curing" sane people);
- plays along the frontier between rational, scientific explanations, and paranormal phenomena, so that fear and strangeness distill more finely in the player's veins than if it is taken for granted that there is some magic behind the curtains (Amnesia);
- has the "I am getting crazy" function include the actual mouse/joypad motion vectors as parameters, so that the game take the bone and flesh reactions really seriously;
- supplements the blindness caused by darkness with a blindness caused by brightness (you know, when creeping in an obscure tunnels, a small source of light can momentaneously blind you like hell);
- invents a way of minimally interacting with characters with handwriting recognition (better spare your words if you have to draw letters with a mouse)
- makes running dependent on occurrent sanity and normal physical capacity;
- to have the narrative linearity required without reducing the game to an endless track-read-and-run loop:
a) includes randomness in map implementation (when you go crazy, you start forgetting about your path sometimes);
b) provides the playable character with a camera recorder (with limited battery) so that he can keep track of some details useful later and, if well, used, can provide shortcuts to next "levels"/rooms;
c) makes the story branch a little bit several times before the end according to your choices.

By the way, congratulations for Amnesia, it is a great game!