Official Poll Regarding SOMA's Monsters

[dhollmusik]

He can't actually 'do' anything, which goes completely against the grain of games giving the player more and more things they can do, more choices they can make. I'm afraid to say it, but when you strip every possible ability away from the player and put him in a maze running away from monsters, you don't have an open ended, complex, strategic game - you have 21st century PAC-MAN. And even he had power pills once in a while...

haha, nice analogy


I can see where you're generally coming from, tho' I guess in real-life most of us would act like Simon rather than a Gordon Freeman who just found a crowbar.

I'd say the monsters' behaviour was more the gameplay problem - limiting Simon's agency was more the gameplay problem regarding puzzles. The monsters were less crucial to the experience than Penumbra/Amnesia was, so they could've acted differently: been less hostile. Hostile monsters are naturally a horror trope but FG are ambitious enough to want to begin rewriting the rules. So instead you could have monsters more quietly, and abstractly, sinister, perhaps being part of puzzles, or dangerous in other ways which didn't involve running after you and hitting you.

This trademark aggression didn't always make sense in terms of the WAU angle, tho' it would work if using this trope more sparingly, and having other monster encounters go a different way. This would add to the gameplay mechanik as you'd have to deal with them in varied ways.