Official Poll Regarding SOMA's Monsters

[GrAVit]

Went with "Very scary, but also a bit annoying". Note, contains monster spoilers.

I was scared as hell of them and took me sometimes even an hour or so for a section that normally would take maybe like 15 minutes because of them, a lot of time was spent moving slowly and observing the monster patrol routes and whatnot (especially with the Lambda proxies, those were the scariest by far). Panic struck many times and being chased by them was absolutely horrifying! Especially the elevator part, when trying to fix it and wondering what was wrong with it, while the monster closed in on me right behind my back...

However, there were a few parts where I got a bit frustrated with the monsters, primarily with the disco ball head monster / jiangshi, where I just couldn't find the valve to lower the ladder down and I didn't have much time to look for it in the first place because the monster kept coming to the hallway, so I felt like I was stuck for a good 15-30 minutes at least.
It wasn't clear to me that not looking at it was its *weakness*. I knew I wasn't supposed to look at it, but I didn't know it couldn't do much to me if I looked elsewhere. I think this could've been presented better at Lambda, as for me, the moment I heard that monster appear, I just ran behind a corner and sat there till it was over, so I didn't get to really experience the mechanics of it so that I could take advantage of its weakness.

The second time I got frustrated with a monster was with the proxy at Omicron. It took me a good while to figure out how it worked. At first I tried throwing an item to get it to move, but it didn't, so I kept throwing stuff and it kept staying still. I thought the monster's waypoints were glitched or something, since that kind of stuff happened to me in Amnesia occasionally. I even tried to repeatedly smack a metal pipe against the wall right next to the monster but it still didn't care, so then I start to get frustrated and just throw an object at it and what do you know, it starts shrieking and chasing me while I scream my ass off. lol
Eventually I just managed to juke it by throwing something at it and quickly looping around the structures next to it, grabbed the battery pack and jumped past its shoulder. That sure felt good afterwards!

So after figuring out how the monsters work, they stopped being frustrating for the most part. Their special features could've been presented a bit better perhaps, they were confusing at first to say the least, but hey, I really liked their features, and they sure as hell scared me, so it's really not a big deal for me in the end!