It's Official, Polygon Is Full Of Crap!

[Kreekakon]

where did they talk about this?

Mainly right here:
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.tw/2014/...orror.html

These are just small things though, and the big problem is to have it work on a larger scale in a smooth, coherent manner. I think the first step is to see if you could remove the penalty of death from standard sneaking gameplay, but still retain the same sense of tension. There are three big things to gain if this can be achieved. First, to remove a lot of the inherent frustration connected to the "fear of progress loss"-design, and have less risk of breaking immersion. Second, it will allow for more integration of exploration and more complicated objectives, as you remove the forced repetition coming a design based on difficulty. Third, it will give us a glimpse of how we expand the horror simulator and have it cover things beyond sneaking by and hiding from monsters. My hope is that we then could take a stab at making a proper horror simulation, a recreation of experiences like in the original Alien movie.

This is what we are currently experimenting with in our upcoming game SOMA. Since I do not want to spoil the system I cannot go too in-depth on our approach, but I can give a basic outline. The idea is that by having choices inserted directly into the game world and have the way you chose to handle these change how the narrative unravels. These choices can simply be whether you interact with a certain object or not, or it can be more vague things, like how you behave around a certain creature. The narrative effects will not be any sort of heavy branching, but smaller things things like making upcoming sections scarier (eg by removing lights), killing people you encounter, changing the way you perceive a character or even how you feel about yourself. Our hope is that by having these sort of decisions as an integral part of the game world, that the player internalizes them and makes it part of their mind model. Then, just like the tension you feel by wondering where the next save station is in Alien: Isolation, you will feel tension by pondering what ramifications a certain set of actions might have.

They do not say outright that you will not be able to die in the game (Which is possibly maybe an exaggeration by ArioDargeto), but from the way the article was written, it is definitely heavily implied.

Also another reason why this shouldn't be considered too important of a "spoiler" is that FG themselves have said before they talked about the system in SOMA that they "do not want to spoil the system I cannot go too in-depth on our approach" before they actually start talking about it.

[Damascus Rose]

Yeah, so it's not 'official' or anything so OP is just making claims.
Case closed, I guess.

Also, in the Polygon article he writes "Some kind of death must happen sooner or later, though, or the player will quickly realize that the monster is harmless — and that's no good at all."

In that blog post he doesn't seem to be talking about death in soma at all, mostly at how choices affect gameplay and narrative in an interactive way.

[PathOS]

OP is a troll who is posting this stuff on the Steam forums too. There is nothing there that explicitly states there is no death in the game, he pulled it completely out of his ass.

[TiManGames]

You can actually die in the game, I've seen it in one of the preview videos.

[MrSteve]

Hehe. You probably know more about the game than anyone else here.

You could walk me through the Preview copies of the game by now

[Radiance]

Frictional is also experimenting with "a fate worse than death" in its next game, SOMA, in which the "basic idea is that 'death' is not final but takes the player closer and closer to a very disturbing state of being."

We acctually didn't see what happend with the player when the creature gets near. He looses focus and camera goes black. "A fate worse than death" adds additional terror if it's based on some addtional negative side effect after the death.
In Dark souls, character doesn't acctualy die but he goes "hollow" which is connected by the state of soul (->tied with the lore). He can loose health after that.
In many human religions death is only a transition or a cycle and not the final switch.
For now we can only speculate about this but I'm glad FG is tackling profound mankind's question.

[Ashtoreth]

From the latest PlayStation blog post by Thomas Grip:

Sometimes an attack will barely make a scratch, sometimes it will knock you down and force you to crawl out of danger, and other times you will die on the first hit.

Also, for clarification:

Finally, they explain how there really is no way to die in SOMA, but rather; "The game takes the player closer and closer to a more disturbing state of being".

They never said that there is no way to die in SOMA. This is the exact quote from the Polygon article you used as source:

Frictional is also experimenting with "a fate worse than death" in its next game, SOMA, in which the "basic idea is that 'death' is not final but takes the player closer and closer to a very disturbing state of being."

[Koopa Rs07]

I disagree that death loosens tension. That feeling knowing you could lose a lot of progress to a monster can make the monster a lot more terrifying. I think Soma should have checkpoints. Not dying at all would be very boring in my opinion.

[Kein]

It's Official, Polygon Is Full Of Crap!

Took you tears to come to this realization but congrats anyway.