4.5/5 ★ – eatpotatochip's review of SOMA.

​I usually don’t play horror games - I don’t really get affected by horror movies or books, but games are a medium where you’re literally put in the shoes of a doomed protagonist, so all the threats feel real and personal. This is a game from the developers of Penumbra and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which are both games I like but have never completed, so it took me some extra time and effort to complete this game. Luckily, there’s a "Safe Mode" presented to you when you start the game, which makes all the monsters passive to your presence. Unluckily, I decided to go ahead with the normal mode anyway. But the inclusion of a "Safe Mode" is interesting for Soma. It was added in a patch, two years after the game’s release - and in the interim, the most popular mod for this game was called "Wuss Mode", which provided a similar non-hostile mode to go through and experience the story. Why would so many people play a horror game after removing the danger? What would they get from it? As it turns out, Soma’s main horror doesn’t come from the monsters - it’s completely existential in origin. Sometime after the first ten minutes of the game, you awaken in some ruined futuristic station, with robotic monsters roaming the corridors. Scarier than those, though, are the non-monstrous robots - at various points through the game, you meet machines that talk like human beings, can’t see their own bodies, and are convinced they’re completely human. Any attempt to convince them otherwise fails, and the only way you can progress, some of the time, is to hurt or kill the robots. And they react with pain EXTREMELY convincingly. The central question of the game revolves around identity - what does it mean to be human? If your consciousness could be copied perfectly to any machine, even, say, a toaster, is the toaster as human as you? If it feels, thinks, loves, hates, what makes you more human than it? And what does it mean for identity if it can be duplicated? The ending of this game is fantastic, too, fitting in perfectly with the themes and the tone of the whole piece. It’s a worthwhile ride, and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the concepts mentioned above.