Player choice and The End.

[Bek]

So I just finished SOMA.

I should probably begin by saying I really enjoyed the game, though it does feel oddly disconnected from my expectations of the game from the early "brain in a vessel/machine hooked up to a body" trailers. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; the game just felt different to that perhaps heavy-handed and morbid atmosphere we saw in Penumbra and Amnesia. I might go and watch those early trailers again.

One thing I'm curious about is the choices throughout the game, specifically the significant ones at the end. The simple ones first though: Does it matter whether you answer your phone at the start? Can you leave without drinking the tracer fluid? Does it matter if you send the messages on the computers? Probably not, right? It's just some environmental interactivity.

But, the big ones, and I'm going to remind you here this is a spoiler thread... Initially I tried to leave without "destroying" WAU; though on my mysterious apparitions insistence I went back and lost my hand to corrupting the WAU. After the end game sequence I came back and tried leaving WAU alone. Nothing seemed to change at the end of the game. Is there only the one final ending? What was with that apparition that supplied you with codes anyway? Was is the character who seemingly went crazy wanting to fullfil WAU's design or what?

edit2: It occurs to me that perhaps choices not really making any difference might be intentional to drive home the futility of simons situation and the escape ARK provides. Not sure I like that "mechanically" though; on future runs I'd be less inclined to think about my actions.

Also, was I reading too much into the story if I found Catherine to be somewhat unreliable? I believe there was some log somewhere that mentioned she altered the ARK just before sending it off to PHI; adding scans at the last minute perhaps? Nothing malicious was ever made apparent so I guess I'm just looking too hard for an unreliable narrator.

I'm also curious what would make people think they have to kill themselves once they have been scanned. Why can they not coexist? No convincing argument (certainly not one that would convince an otherwise intelligent person to kill themselves) is presented. Is two versions of yourself concurrently existing so wrong/hard to grasp? If I were a digital scan that had the ability to asexually reproduce myself over a network you bet I'd be trying to spread copies of myself everywhere to guarantee my survival (perhaps continuation is a better word here). At least to the logical point; I'd recognise the usefulness of allowing others "space"; so it wouldn't end up as a resource-war between competing scans. It's an interesting idea anyway.

Something else I've just remembered — when you allocate data to be loaded onto the DUMMY simulation, is this what ends up in the final ARK? I cannot remember if this is the case, but if so, it'd be interesting to see if the optional extras you can include (for there's some extra available space left for some minor additions) appear at the after-credits ARK sequence. You know, like if you included and extra foliage pack and there's a difference or not. But now that I think about it the DUMMY sim was probably just a test run that had no bearing on the actual ARK.

Also, it'd be funny if our in-game "surveys" had their data collected and sent back to frictional. Anyway I'm a bit tired and this is getting rambly; I might add more as I think of it. But I'd like to hear others thoughts on the above + the overall experience.

edit: Almost forgot: The WAU err.. "human interaction devices" — they're comparable to the latern-things from Penumbra, right? Except the don't save the game, though they do clear up the blur/chromatic aberration. Was there some significance beyond this? Has anyone tried using them maximally/minimally? I began with the former but decided halfway through the was a bad idea; should've stuck to my guns, WAU be damned.