Discussion: Monster Behavior in SOMA (Mild Spoilers)

[doctorferdinand]

Spoiler below!

TBH I don't find the monsters scary at all. Their designs were cool and disturbing but that's just it, gameplay-wise they were actually weaker enemies than AMFP's(Not joking.) The behaviours of the enemies as just as predictable as Grunts and Brutes etc and you can usually figure out each monsters gimmicks pretty easily. "Don't look at this one" for Disco Grunts and "Don't make noise at this guy" for the flesh thing in the server rooms, so they basically split up 2 things you had to with the original enemies in TDD but somehow made it less interesting.

The first monster type you encounter was just a plain old grunt type enemy but just slower and simply not scary. I know FG wanted the monsters to be more unpredictable and more interesting than any gatherers/manpigs you encountered but I just simply preferred the raw terror of being chased of a guy with messed up body armour,hasn't washed in months and has an Uruk-Hai sword for an arm down a hallway. I admit I did find the Disco Grunt sequence in the wrecked ship tense atleast.

Idk, I gotta disagree. The fear for me came in not knowing at first how to react to each new monster, whereas in both Amnesia games, the same monsters were used throughout and it got really repetitive. To me, AMFP had the weakest ones for sure - I literally chased one through the area underneath the church and got right up to it and it did nothing. I had more sympathy for those things than anything else. I think the charm in SOMA's monsters was in their gimmicks tbh.

I think the reason the Upsilon proxy was slow and not super interesting was just to introduce people who haven't played other Frictional games to the whole process and to build some tension. I agree with you tho on the designs of TDD monsters being really scary, at least the Brute. That thing fucked with me. Other than that, monsters like the Theta proxies reminded me of Black Plague's Tuurngaits, which weren't super scary to me appearance-wise.