@carrollstreetstation / carrollstreetstation.tumblr.com
every so often i’ll revisit stuff i hated when i was younger to see if i still hate it 10 years later or if i just needed to grow up a bit, it worked for halo and ghost in the shell but i’m about 2 hours into amnesia and it still fuckin’ sucks
admittedly i might be approaching it with some hostility
The radio is dead, food is running out, and the machines have started to think they are people. Underwater facility PATHOS-II has suffered an intolerable isolation and we’re going to have to make some tough decisions. What can be done? What makes sense? What is left to fight for?
and here’s this year’s classic.
i’ll be honest: i don’t like frictional. i thought penumbra was meh. i thought amnesia was creatively stagnant. i generally can’t stand the “i have no hands and i must scream” style of horror, and i’ve long resented the influence frictional have wielded on horror gaming. (i liked it better when everyone was ripping off resident evil 4.)
but that doesn’t mean i wasn’t going to give SOMA a chance. it’s mostly my own fault, really: i love sci-horror, having been a fan of the alien franchise since the mid-90s. so when i saw that frictional seemed to be moving away from the lovecraft-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off themes they’d, er, “explored” in penumbra and amnesia, my interest was piqued. this was new territory for them, after years of just ripping off a long-dead xenophobe for ideas, and i figured that an attempt at a sci-horror setting, while not original on its face, would, if nothing else, give me some more of a setting and theme i really enjoy.
well, i wasn’t wrong!
they went further than that, though. oh, so much further. they crafted a story that was like if system shock was written by philip k. dick. somehow they managed to wrap a core concept of underwater sci-fi base populated by monster robots and weird biomechanical constructs in a study of identity, consciousness, humanity, and a little bit of denial and regret.
gameplay is basically very much like amnesia -- you have no hands and cannot defend yourself, so you’re stuck hiding like a ninny a lot. ordinarily, this would irritate me, but the monster encounters are pretty spread out; most of the game is puzzle-solving and the occasional talk with an NPC who you essentially “escort” (read: she lives on an electronic tool you carry with you) throughout the game. and really, the big reason to play the game is because of the story, which is some good old-fashioned high-concept sci-fi the likes of which is nearly absent from video games. this is the kind of story the better sci-fi writers used to get rich off of in the 60s and 70s -- exactly the way i like my sci-fi.
if you like amnesia, you’ll like SOMA. if you hate amnesia, you’ll probably like SOMA too.
