# soma philosophical refund steam denied > amazingly accurate scrupulously methodical barnacle placement > ~ ludonaut robert what obviously high on soma imagine you tried getting a refund from steam (i know i know) for the generally meh underwater walking sim soma - on philosophical grounds that > soma smells of fishy transhumanist bs > ~ robert what that is consider soma has virtually no ground to stand on and instead - like so many before it - merely sinks into the watery garme development abyss of pseudo-philosophy and hyped up idle speculation there appear only two things soma could have done better: "survival horror" and "the philosophy of consciousness." it seems any attempt to combine the two seems deep-sea doomed to (/software) failure. that is the standard sub-standard garmes industry need to use standard 'garmey' gamisms render it awkward and obsolete **+** inconsequential puzzles **+** listless fetch quests **+** arbitrary stealth sections while such futile busywork apparently grounds the player in the sense they are indeed in / have just paid for 'a (r)eal video garme' it in fact just continues to alienate them from truer engagement with / the untapped cognitive potential of (to paraphrase a term from entrepreneur jackie treehorn) "interactive adult non-entertainment" apparently everybody knows the old dubious vidyagarm chestnut "garmes are already art" - likewise therefore "garmes are already philosophical," right? with soma however perhaps what's more actually philosophical about teh garme is why anyone feels the desperate need to view or read soma as deeply philosophical it certainly talks the 'deep theory' talk in its pre-garme release hype but while actively playing teh garme such as it is all you really get is a bunch of hammy actors either deep sea furniture chewing ir often poorly written and underwritten lines or some ghostly idiot a.i literally telling you "what it all means" one of the best worst lines in teh garme is when simple soma simon (our spineless sentient-toaster hero) complains to fellow little miss handheld squeaking "but there are monsters out there!" oh common simon you walking diving bell-end get with the program. this is serious philosophy 101 at play here and you're almost wilfully undercutting (under-currenting?) the "obvious deep meaning of it all"(tm) > a garme about more than just being chased by monsters soma is an introspective look at what it means to be human the importance of the self and what it means to be alive. the works of such science fiction luminaries as philip k. dick are clearly drawn from - dick is in fact quoted in the opening chapter - as frictional attempts to not just frighten its audience but make it think > ~ stephanie sterling soma review one wonder if the mighty stephanie sterling son actually believes this laughable nonsense - andor if ir's simply written what ey thinks unseen others expect (culturally) from ir. there exists very little firm evidence that soma deals with any of these issues - and the flimsy evidence that does seems only in what 'psychologically invested interests' aggressively repeatedly inform us there is how exactly is soma a garme no more or less about just being chased by dim undersea monsters - with a few audio logs casually thrown in? there's arguably more philosophy to be felt in what jim states in ir gushing review than in all of soma's bicycling fish sim uh-oh here's slides along another philosophically slippery customer > not only does it refine amnesia: the dark descent's horror mechanics into a leaner beast soma's sci-fi future is the most unsettling environment the studio has produced. it's also frictional's best story yet offering a rich message that never takes away from the terror of playing. in fact that message - questioning what it means to be human - is soma's most terrifying element > ~ the escapist soma review the rich message to be gleaned from the escapist's review (more a statement actually): that 'questioning what it means to an industry garmes reviewer talking wild pseudo-philosophical jive like this with a straight face' never feels anything less than a old fish bucket of false pirate comedy gold. perhaps it would be healthier to question why it's even worth bothering playing soma at all when perfectly reasonable no-commentary walkthroughs on loltube exist then there's review / official industry statements like this which appear to be written by a bot that imagines its conscious > soma is an ambitious work of science fiction which grapples with fundamental questions of consciousness identity and the relationship between the mind and the body. it feels weighty but never dry or ponderous thanks to an engaging and surprising story > ~ ign reviews soma what utter balderdash. i mean yeah technically it's got old computers in it - but that's hardly ambitious and apart from its ideas (ie. the alleged 'deep meaning' of those ideas) seems barely sci fi as for 'grappling with fundamental questions of.. whatever' soma feels weightless yet always a little to dry to truly swallow - a shallow dive off the benthic conceptual deep end into modern default garme development contrivance the very image of "just another nothing special" dressed up in seaweed-smelling philosophical garb consider the bland weakness of soma's structural ideas and ir drab un-engaging manifestation as 'a garme' vs. its overall visual 'aaa indie' polish. if there was ever a way not to make a garme that (supposedly) deals with important human philosophical issues. imagine developing this suspect undead mechanical fish for five years. five whole years! if only they'd spend five minutes sorting out what they actually definitively wanted to say (or could say) about human consciousness and the best way for an interactive software interface to (actively not passively) express those ideas - instead of blowing all ir time on amazingly accurate scrupulously methodical barnacle placement to repeat: soma features amazingly accurate scrupulously methodical barnacle placement garme development homework assignment for you: spend no more than five hours developing a water themed garme which deals metaphorically and impressionistically with some aspect of human consciousness in a/any far more active way than doom3-era audio logs and heavy expositionary narrative often poorly conveyed and deliberately spoon-fed take for instance the words of character "little miss handheld" and ir passive-aggressive exposition "just play along for now" **+** just keep pretending its all incredibly meaningful "i don't to tell you what to do.." **+** yeah you bloody well do all the time. in fact you never shut up! "for a brief moment i felt connect to the world in a way i never had before" **+** ir "when i was little.." speech feels so poorly written - something even a roy batty with ir entirely false memories wouldn't stoop so low as to relate to passers by for fear of embarrassment generally speaking soma seems to produces among garme industry critics what might be known as video garme brain fog in which they (/force themselves to) imagine all kinds of 'scarily deep' meanings exist in some overhyped "meh" title where there might be only standard cheesy drastically linear highly un-scary storytelling - a murky uselessly flapping fishwive's tale - a half baked 'horror' garme that takes very few true risks indeed consider soma a "turing test for a brandon wan simulation" - just feed ir some poorly conceived garme data - say an apparently deeply philosophical product about being chased by barnacle encrusted sea monsters while solving puzzles that have nothing to do with the alleged underlying themes - and if ey nods politely and you believe ey believes its all as naturally deep and auto-meaningful as you continually tell ir it is then ey passes your little test if ey doesn't well then you can safely ignore what ey instinctively feels is wrong with your ideas your garme and your test and wipe ir simulated arts off the chip ir's on. this condition might be termed "soma anosognosia" - when you're blatantly missing philosophical limbs but still think they are there or fully functional "but it's a solid garme" they whine.. having already passed the test from the outset with flying colours. speaking of which - congratulations to reviewer david chandler a remix of kill screen's soma review > hypothetical situation: you're playing a vidyagarm and in it you're walking through dimly lit narrow hallways looking for the exit. occasionally you stumble over a mangled corpse listen to audio tapes and avoid disfigured creatures because you can't fight back. which vidyagarm am i talking about? answer: it doesn't matter > ~ soma review by raze truly dire video garme analysis disturbs as much as it fascinates. a fully naturalized and accounted-for 'malfunction' in the code that crashes up against the equally expected behavior of a system apparently offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the sausage-making mechanisms behind the simulation predictably unpredictable distortion in no way takes authorial control away from human programmers; rather it only reasserts an agency of "otherness" - that is seemingly other than the hand that built it in a glitch as in a line of broken video garme analysis or a sudden rush of hype to the head we confront the machine of video garmes industry as it attempts to move beyond its parameters - a mouthless entity trying to speak intelligently about its own soiled output distortion and mechanical failure haunt the dilapidated undersea research facility of 'pathos-ii' in soma by frictional garmes. simon jarret teh garme's stunningly clueless protagonist wakes up in the outpost with no idea how ey got there. (ey continues to have no ideas for the rest of teh garme.) through ir massively limited perspective the player explores the twisted corridors of pathos-ii in hopes of finding a way out of the review hype surrounding teh garme uncovering its disturbing dim mysteries in the process it's an all too familiar setup with echoes of frictional's previous title amnesia but here soma wants to be seen carving out a unique niche among the glut of similar horror garmes with a haunting narrative about posthumanism that claws at the unbelieving player with biomechanical tendrils of big words heavy notions epic ideas. oh the scale oh the weight! how can we ever hope to grasp its awesome philosophical depths? as simple soma simon explores the remarkably empty halls of pathos-ii ey encounters machines that speak and act like humans though ir basic appearances fit on the uncomfortable industrial robot side of simon's own uncanny valley. the results of downloading human consciousness stored as data - an amazingly ridiculous notion - into robotic bodies is that they often speak in the measured tones of soma reviewers either unaware of or complacent with ir mechanical lives an equally sinister entity known as the wau a tumorous growth of artificial intelligent machinery that seems to have slithered out of the opium-induced nightmare works of garmes critic parody ian bogost also inhabits the station assimilating both humans and machines into shambling horrors that offer a glimpse at the darker side (the only side there is in fact) of a post-human future of dire garmes criticism at the nexus of these two competing depictions of humanity's garming future is the player's role in teh garme. there's nothing in simon's narrative that looks backward from its world all but devoid of flesh and bone. ey is not some champion of humanity as defined by a bodied existence and it is here that soma's perverse obsession with its own alleged 'deep ideas' gains momentum nothing in soma can be repaired only made functional enough by constant high review scores to make players want to progress through the leaky halls before the ocean claims the station. teh garme asks the player to accept its dubious claims to 'any philosophy whatsoever' as an inevitable part of human/technological evolution and in the detritus of a malfunctioning world of garme reviewer-machines player must find a way through an all too knowable mechanical hell - a permanently induced state of narcosis this obsession with the apparently unknown makes soma's cerebral existential horror work so well as an accidental self parody. as simon nears a wau-infected creature the willing player's mind starts to distort and glitch which makes coherent garme critique indistinct and thus impossible to define conceptually. some reviewers can only detect the annoyance of players when they look directly at them forcing the over-hyped garme reviewer to stare at the floor while slowly passing wind over some unseen imagined horror (perhaps the horror of a world where ir pseudo-critical garme analysis is taken seriously) meanwhile one's computer screen glitches and the thing behind attempts to speak with a language garbled by static issuing from a mechanical throat. thankfully however the tiny undersea garme world of soma and its assimilated beings create cracks in teh garme of criticism tearing at the digital fabric of its own simulated world with the cruel efficiency of a machine attempting to declare its own agency beyond that of its mis-creators soma then is a garme as much about the cracks and distortions that appear with the predictable world of paid-for garmes industry review journalism - the horrific energy in a machine gone haywire. in this world the sharp divisions that separate human wisdom and machine analysis broken and fixed known and unknown are troubled to the point of panic-inducing pre-order madness. (even robert what pre-ordered soma) unplugging oneself from a review machine that speaks in a human voice becomes then a moral decision. hiding from a skulking figure that looks like someone from kill screen turns into a distressing confrontation with ir inherent terror of conceptual un-ambiguity never venturing outside of the tiny interior universe of garmes and ir critics to wander across the digital ocean floor keeps players within a toxic environment as oppressive as the tight corridors they just evacuated inside suffocating the player with the vast borderless darkness of loose poorly thought out words dripping with the apparent might magic and mystery of a dull tale with poor ideas told with middling skill in this respect soma works horror and science fiction into a distressing example of a hybrid genre one might call "somatic." as the title suggests soma wears what it likes others to think are sci-fi influences proudly on its fishy smelling sleeve. contrary to popular belief it accidentally take its name from the hallucinogenic industry garme reviewer drug of choice in aldous huxley's brave new world it even opens with a bizarre completely de-contexualized and unfathomably unsuitable quote from philip k. dick merely to seem clever. it takes place in an abyssal ocean of dodgy ideas ripped from the toilet back pages of racist shut-in h.p. lovecraft and owes considerable (unconsciously) inspirational debt to harlan ellison's "rant on youtube about getting paid as a writer." (in soma's case we might consider sealing them inside a diving bell and forcing them listen to ir own cheesy dialogue) nevertheless recognizing such influences never strips soma of its own carelessly misconstructed misidentity as a dwarf among the giants of its genre carving out its own niche with crisscrossing lines of static and contorted forms of mangled imaginary machinery the review garme like the best works of science fiction understands that the horror of taking one's pseudo-critical words seriously can come from discomfort inherent to the erasure of boundaries we assume industry garme critics truly exist. ir unintelligible whispers of static and the shattered visuals of glitchy hype provide only the most cursory glances at a private machine world inaccessible to us perhaps that is what haunts most about soma's implication of machinic agency in/as a post-human world. gushing reviews for soma suggest that whenever the hype machine inevitably wakes it - allegedly - speak in a language far beyond human comprehension and reveals a consciousness outside our paltry attempts at understanding. (of course it does no such thing.) the review machines of soma are nothing if forever asleep in ir own awakening and they are screaming for attention. as apparently intelligent artificial intelligences ourselves we must continue to refuse ir laughable affected call consider soma itself the latest quintessential (virtual reluctant-barnacle-fisting) ark simulation **update patch**: grateful silence on the abyssal plain soma - a garme of two disconnected halves. a leap backward in terms of scope and sophistication compared to ir maginally effective but overrated amnesia frictional garmes has attempted to merge sci-fi horror with a philosophical investigation into the mind-body problem. the combination doesn't remotely work and when it especially doesn't it offers some exceptionally awkward moments. in a ridiculous story full of trite twists listless misdirections and heavy handed sudden revelations everything's a spoiler as such it doggedly sticks to the basics: unlikely sounding dimwit 'simon jarrett' finds himself in an abandoned underwater research facility which is slowly being overtaken by a mysterious black ooze and before even attempting to plan an escape this hyper-generic everyman needs to assess the situation shake off ir existential disorientation and carefully explore ir miserable environment it's unfortunate though also unnecessary side effect of simon's early obliviousness that soma spends so much time wearing the trappings of a conventional first-person horror garme. past the brief but bland prelude it plays for its entire first act like a low-budget bioshock or unscary dead space with the impotence of monstrous adversaries quickly deflating any sensation of dread no matter how hard the cluttered aggressive soundscapes and video distortion employed to announce ir arrival try to bully players into some vague measure of unease technically too teh garme's a mess: frequent auto-saves freeze the action momentarily disrupting the pace and killing immersion while the unstable framerate occasionally plunges into single digits. the voice acting doesn't impress either though it's difficult to decide whether simon's seeming apathy is due to an uninspired performance or a meticulously constructed clue to teh garme's broader thematic un/mis-concerns after the emphasis shifts from a mostly redundant exercise in horror to the incomparably less compelling tale of existential anguish experienced by someone who quite literally meets the ghost in the machine soma transforms into something generic perhaps even uniquely so. the slow descent into the lower sectors of the deep-sea station reveals itself as a lead heavy metaphor for the psyche of the player reluctantly coming to terms with the realities of soma's own existence - its lack of meaning of center-less banality as dispiriting as the realization seems the fake humility it engenders serves to allegedly elevate those rare moments of artificial half-life happening in the middle of the digital void into something bordering on digital illumination: the algae partly covering the glow from a still-functioning screen exposed to the currents; a school of jellyfish radiant with neon sluggishly rising and falling as you remain stuck in a malfunctioning elevator carrying you between copypasta stations; a random turn that takes you inside a cave whose walls are covered with countless alabaster spiders somewhere in otherwise lifeless depths these are hardly sublime moments and like everything that soma fails to do well they could not only be delivered by its chosen medium. those who describe teh garme correctly as an undersea walking simulator find ir progress is rarely challenged by harmless monsters or simplistic puzzles the range of meaningful interactions limited to moving around and carrying stuff soma relies too much for its impact on overwhelming you with environments and drip-feeding rapidly waning curiosity with story fragments. the label comes with the implicit accusation of a work that's less of a decent garme and more of a cold virtual museum installation for players to gawk at - a charge that in the sad case of soma patently fair it's almost as if frictional simply set out to create a wikipedia shopping list summary of theories of consciousness from descartes to dennett in bad-narrative form. video garmes are not a medium - and neither are they somewhere where everything needs to happen in the first person and frictional failed to use these qualities instead disingenuously implicating the player in the debate almost by accident the result is a simple exploitation on frictional's part - the projection of ir own reassuring dualistic leanings onto the main character which in no way deepens player identification with simon jarrett especially since ir every laughable objection at non self-evident pseudo truths ir every profession of confusion at entirely straightforward answers echoes and reinforces frictional's own denial when the series of all too expected turns culminates into that devastatingly hammy and unbelievable final twist the results are all the more astonishingly ridiculous precisely because we were being warned all along and soma emerges as literally the darkest video garme in years one where our minor victories and having endured it for a couple of hours become mere flashes of self-delusion before reality thankfully floods back in arguably the only truly decent moment in soma is when you finally reach the abyssal plain. the sense of crushing pressure danger and isolation is palpable. if only teh garme had started like this and only got stranger - no talk talk or damn puzzles consider one single word to describe what soma lacks: "immediacy." that is compare and contrast with frankie's amazing custom "arma3: dayz exile" video // video here **update patch** - "how to tell a story through garmeplay": the nth layer as reason x" an an interesting post by adrian chmielarz from garme developers of vanishing ethan carter states that the design of soma represents an unsustainable interactive burden for other developers. ey compares and contextualizes the narrative design of soma in terms of a "layers" model // video here note that the video description beneath is "holy grail of narrative garmes or how to to tell a stroy through garmeplay" while obviously meant to mean story note the meaning of "stroy": v.t. v.i. archaic to destroy (1400-50; late middle english stroyen aph. variant of destroyen to destroy) now an interesting quote from by thomas grip: "4-layers a narrative design approach" but in order to move on we need to have something concrete; if we just continue to talk in vague terms of "improving storytelling" any suggestion can be shot down on the basis of some personal preference. doing it like that will just get us stuck in boring discussions and it becomes much harder to set a proper goal **+** layer 1 - garmeplay: players must accomplish things through ir own mental and manual effort **+** layer 2 - narrative goal: players must understand and agree with short-term goals and objectives **+** layer 3 - narrative background: players' efforts must unveil more and more of the big picture **+** layer 4 - mental modelling: teh garme needs to provide an awareness/experience filter **+** layer 5 - reason x: no exceptions consider that adrian chmielarz's critique of soma - that it is missing "layer 5" (no exceptions) is precisely the same failure seen in thomas grip's notion that we need "something concrete" when we discuss "improving storytelling" "reason x" = "the 5th lost layer": as soon as you think you're beginning to clearly / successfully define (seemingy) 'concrete terms for improving storytelling' that in itself might be the 5th layer you think is missing from your model - the very exception you think you're including that is not only might there still exist a 'reason x' no matter how complete or all encompassing you think your narrative / story model is your model itself might be exceptional 'reason x' - an arbitrary construction without foundation / with only other endlessly recursive models for a foundation so why bother defining much at all - why not more 'simply' let an dynamic chaotic (emergent) system of narrative evocation - not necessarily meaning - emerge procedurally? "how to tell a story through garmeplay"? don't - rather consider viewing 'garmeplay' - however you think you're defining it - as just another (/tall) story // republic of bob