SOMA Vertical Slice (early beta from 2013) - inside SuperSecret folder

[1eyedking]

I had a big déjà vu about Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Amnesia, what with the whole trapped-inside-a-shell thing Catherine Chun mutters about. Maybe that was the idea that started it all.

It seems as if the original SOMA was more about a copy of Simon's consciousness trapped inside a simulation rather than being copied into the future inside a robot. Somebody at Frictional thankfully thought this really didn't invest the player emotionally, so they went for the crash and brain-scan, and back into reality, which I believe is much better. From that video, it also seems like the game was going to have stronger Cthulu vibes...

I'm glad they went with the new direction. Not that Vertical Slice's was bad, but it had already been done, so to speak.
Somewhere along the way they got their bearings sorted out, and directed the game towards uncharted territory. By the time they started thinking about or making the live-action videos they had it all figured out.

Dialogue lines and voice-acting were a bit better... Both were the weakest parts of current SOMA, in my opinion. Too much use of the word "fuck", for instance - a really cheap and vulgar way of trying to make dialogues sound "real".

Ahh...I really miss Penumbra's descriptions, like those in the beginning about isolation and fear; some of those deeper insights about human nature got lost in SOMA in a sea of dead-end Kantian conundrums.