SOMA

Frictional Games followed up Amnesia: The Dark Descent with something nobody expected. SOMA, released in September 2015, traded gothic castles for an underwater research facility and swapped supernatural dread for existential science fiction. The result is a horror game that scares you less with what’s chasing you and more with what it asks you to think about. Questions of consciousness, identity, and what it means to be human run through every hour of the experience.

Community reception settled into a pattern that has held steady for over a decade: near-universal praise for the story, atmosphere, and themes, alongside persistent criticism of the monster encounters. SOMA is the kind of game people finish and then spend weeks processing. Forum discussions and analysis videos continue to surface years after release, with players picking apart its philosophical implications in ways that few games inspire. It’s also one of the few horror games where the developers later added an option to remove the horror entirely, and many players think that made it better.

Where SOMA Excels

Story is SOMA’s crown jewel, and it’s the reason people still talk about the game. Simon Jarrett wakes up in an underwater facility called PATHOS-II under circumstances he doesn’t understand, and what follows is a slow unraveling of reality that raises questions most games never touch. The relationship between Simon and Catherine, an AI companion who guides him through the facility, grounds the philosophical weight in something personal and human. Their conversations about consciousness, continuity of self, and the nature of existence give the narrative an emotional core that elevates it above standard horror fare.

Atmosphere and environmental design deserve equal billing with the writing. PATHOS-II feels like a place that was lived in before everything went wrong. Crew quarters, research labs, and maintenance corridors tell stories through environmental details, personal logs, and the remnants of a community that fell apart. The underwater sections carry a particular weight, with the vast emptiness of the ocean floor creating a sense of isolation that no amount of monster encounters could match.

Sound design pulls everything together. The ambient audio creates a constant undercurrent of unease, with mechanical groans, distant echoes, and the omnipresent pressure of water surrounding the facility. Music is used sparingly and effectively, letting the silence do most of the heavy lifting. Players consistently cite the audio as one of the game’s most effective tools for building tension.

Safe Mode, added in a December 2017 update, deserves special mention. By making monsters passive and removing the threat of death, it allowed players who found the stealth sections frustrating to experience the story uninterrupted. The community response was largely positive, with many arguing that the narrative was always the real draw and that removing the gameplay friction let it breathe. It’s a rare case where a post-launch change was widely seen as improving the experience rather than diluting it.

SOMA’s Pacing Shortcomings

Monster encounters are SOMA’s most consistent criticism, and they were a problem from day one. The creatures that patrol PATHOS-II lack the menace the game needs to make its stealth sections work. They follow predictable patterns, pose limited threat once you learn them, and break the pacing of an otherwise carefully constructed experience. Several players describe the monster sections as speed bumps between the parts of the game they actually care about. The fact that Safe Mode became one of the game’s most praised additions says everything about how the community views these encounters.

Pacing stumbles in the opening hours. The game takes its time establishing the setting and introducing its themes, and while that slow build pays off for patient players, it’s a barrier for those who want the experience to hook them quickly. Early environments are less visually distinctive than later ones, and the gameplay loop of exploring, solving simple environmental puzzles, and reading logs doesn’t fully reveal its purpose until the story’s bigger ideas start clicking into place.

The protagonist’s reactions to the extraordinary circumstances around him occasionally feel jarring. Simon sometimes pivots from moments of real horror to calm philosophical discussion in ways that strain believability. It’s a small thing, but in a game that works so hard to maintain immersion, these tonal shifts stand out. The writing around these moments is strong enough that most players forgive the inconsistency, but it’s been noted often enough to count as a pattern in community feedback.

Thinking Your Way Through Horror

SOMA’s greatest achievement is making its ideas feel personal. Plenty of science fiction explores consciousness and identity in abstract terms. This game makes you live through the consequences of those ideas, presenting situations where there are no good answers and forcing you to sit with the discomfort. The choices the game asks you to make aren’t about combat or resource management. They’re about what you believe makes a person real. That’s a different kind of horror than anything Frictional had made before, and for many players, it’s more lasting.

Should You Play SOMA?

Players who value narrative and atmosphere above all else will find one of the strongest examples in gaming. Science fiction fans drawn to questions about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and identity should consider this required playing. If you’ve been meaning to try a horror game but the genre’s reliance on jump scares has kept you away, SOMA (especially in Safe Mode) offers something entirely different.

Skip it if you want your horror games to deliver constant tension through gameplay threats, or if slow pacing in the early hours is likely to push you away before the story reveals its hand. Players looking for complex puzzle mechanics or survival systems won’t find them here either.

The Verdict on SOMA

SOMA is Frictional Games at the height of their storytelling powers. The underwater setting, the philosophical questions about identity and consciousness, and the relationship between its two lead characters create a narrative that sticks with you long after the credits roll. The monster encounters are the weakest link, and the Safe Mode update essentially acknowledged that by letting players bypass them, but the story they’re wrapped around is one of the best the genre has produced. Horror games that make you think this hard about what it means to be human don’t come along often. This one is worth the dive.