Official Poll Regarding SOMA's Monsters

[PathOS]

Yeah, the environmental storytelling of this game is pretty much unmatched and phenomenal. All the lore and details that you can find exploring each room and reading each console just added to the chilling setting and in some cases helped strengthen the enemy encounters for which there was lore to read upon like Akers.

It's definitely difficult to imagine how to make enemy encounters different than they were without introducing what I feel would be undesirable elements. Someone mentioned hiding in lockers or under furniture and I really don't like that kind of gameplay. I think it wore out its welcome in Outlast/Alien and after a while you get desensitized to it having any sort of effectiveness aside from just pure tension without actually being scary.

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.

I do agree that Yoshida in Tau was both scary and kind of annoying, because I wanted to explore a bit more of the Lore in TAU but that's hard to do with him stalking you. But that said, the tricky thing is if you make it so he cannot stalk you everywhere, then he will lose some of his fear potential. And if you were to, say, put all the Lore in locked rooms that he cannot reach you in, then you'd come to expect those places to be "Safe" areas and suddenly a predictable pattern begins to form.

Horror is such a tricky genre to do, it's no wonder the larger developers stay away from it unfortunately.