Simply put, I find SOMA a masterpiece. The game has a beautifully crafted envirnoment. Each room, each object, "tells" you something, it makes Pathos-II look like a living place, not just a sterile repetitive envirnoment like in all games nowdays but a real, inhabited place. You can go anywhere, acces any computer terminal, pick up any object and turn it on all sides to inspect it. It feels like you, the player, are walking those corridors, hiding from the dangers and looking for answers. A big 10 / 10 for graphics and visual design.
The soundtrack is brilliant, oscar-movie grade sound works! The moment when you power up the geothermal plant, with the music perfectly blending with the envirnomental sound effects...it should get written in the textbooks for any hollywood sound artist! A definite 10 / 10 for the sound.
Level design is brilliant, the maps are intelligently crafted so that you don't walk the same corridors over and over back and fourth for hours. In Alien Isolation for example the level design was used to abusively make the game longer in a repetitive, boring way - don't get me wrong, the game was great overall, at least a 9 - 9.5 / 10, but there was an excessive amount of backtracking, each level had to be walked back and fourth like 5 times, and then revisited again after 2 hours of further gameplay. In SOMA, on the other hand, the level transition is smooth, there is just the right amount of backtracking, each time you discover something interesting. 10 / 10 for level design.
Many people complained that there are not enough enemies, etc. The game has just ENOUGH enemies and could do great with even less! More monsters would just spoil the atmosphere, as the player would be too busy running around aimlessly and hiding from them to properly explore Pathos-II, read all notes and acces all terminals. I would have liked the possibility to permanently lock some of the monsters in a room or section of the base, or use the stun gun on it so I can just go on patiently exploring the rest of that level (that would have come in very handy in the Theta sublevel or at Tau!). The AI is also always homing in on the player position, like it would be playing in noclip mode, seeing through walls, having a GPS detector for Simon and infrared goggles (simply put it's cheating!). It can hear / detect you from 2 kilometres away, from one side of a base to the other, from level 4 to the basment, it can operate complicate door opening mechanisms even when it has no hands and can run like the Road Runner even when they are bulky like a walking refrigirator (are they using a trainer or cheat console??). On the other hand, the monsters are very well designed, genuinly scary and come in all shapes and sizes (I counted over 12 different models), each hinting on its origin. Their visual design and backstory deserves a 10, but AI implementation, the scripted "homing in on the player position" preventing you to properly explore the great envirnoment hardly deserves a 5 unfortunately. Enemy deployment gets an overall 7 / 10 (the AI behaviour could however be corrected by a patch, so it could easily get a full 10!).
Overall gameplay experience was awesome, everything is just as it needed to be, gameplay honestly earns a 10 / 10.
The story is a masterpiece, truly original in every single way and always interesting and surprising with a new turn of events. It definetly deserves a 10 (actually a 12 / 10 it it was possible) The only thing it lacks is more backstory on specific aspects (the WAU, the Ark, the enemies, certain characters like Imogen Reed), and the fact that the story is not impacted at all by player decisions. Hopefully a DLC or movie will come along explaining the "plot holes"...
So my overall score for SOMA is a well deserved 9.9 / 10. It definetly deserves to be the Game of the Year 2015!
The things I think the game needed to be perfect are:
1. Non-cheating AI, or at least the possibility to lock certain enemies in a room or temporarily disable them (using the stun gun on them or laying EMP traps).
2. A classic inventory like in Penumbra and Amnesia, with descriptions for the items and a notebook (could have been something modern like a PDA or tablet) on which Simon could store the text files and audio logs found in the game for further reference and take notes on. Also combining inventory items to create other items or to provide a solution to a problem, like in the previous games, would have been a great idea.
3. Physical puzzles like in Penumbra Black Plague.
4. Making the game a little longer, with more backstory elements to clear everything up.
5. The player choices actually haveing an effect on the plot, multiple endings based on these choices.
I think SOMA was great overall an it certainly is in my top games of all times, along with the Half - Life, Mass Effect, Star Wars KOTOR, Starcraft, Deus Ex, System Shock and Penumbra series! What made all this games so great, what do they have in common? It's simple, STORY! They are story-driven, you play to find out what happened, to uncover the mistery, not just for the sake of frantically shooting and clicking aimlessly (like all the utter crap IOS / Android games and multiplayer FPS / MOBA) without any sort of narrative drive. Arcade games are arcade games, meant for simple interaction and pure fun, while story, immersive games are pieces of visual art equal to any great book or movie.
For me a good story - driven game is just like a good book or movie. It is a way to tell a story, you can tell the story by writing it down as a novel / book, making a comic, making it a theatre play with actors, decors and ligts, making it a movie or making it a game. Videogames like this, that actually tell you a story, make you think about something, arrise some moral and phylosophical questions ARE art, just like any other form of art! The content is the same as in any literature college studied novel or book, it just comes in a multimedia, interactive form to ease immersion in the setting depicted by it.
That is why I love SOMA and Frictional Games, they really know how to tell a story in the form of a videogame. They are simply the best at doing it
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