Soma
Film
Directed by Giovanna Pezzolato
3 positive1 negativefrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Hacker Cinema Hacker CinemaFilm
Directed by Giovanna Pezzolato
3 positive1 negativefrom 4 commenters
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
> I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow
Really? Interesting. I'm a die-hard scifi fan since forever, and of course I know the topic of consciousness and identity are well explored in scifi (and philosophy), but I thought SOMA did something genuinely deep and unique with it:
It put it you in the center of the experiment. It's YOU who's experiencing all sides of this, you who get to be surprised by the consequences. This is very different from reading about it in a scifi novel or even watching it in a movie. By making you the protagonist, and having it be an ineractive experience, you get to experience first hand the cognitive dissonance and confusion of... the thing.
SOMA (re)convinced me that videogames can be art. Not saying it's the only example, of course!
> A movie will be able to deliver its stories a lot better than a game.
I don't agree. Something like SOMA would just be a generic sci-fi B-movie but it's an awesome game, even though there's no real choice and is in essence just a walking simulator.
Penumbra: Black Plague remains my favorite. It's good enough on its own you don't even need to play the first Penumbra episode if you're time constrained, though the first Penumbra was pretty good too. I played Amnesia later and it was good, but not as much. Haven't gotten around to Machine For Pigs.
SOMA was disappointing. It wasn't bad, but I don't think of it as horror, and its story and characters were the weakest in the lot. But maybe that's just because I'm too familiar with sci-fi covering the same things much better and with better characters, and there's even a non-fiction book analysis of a future which assumes the central tech comes about that's deep enough in exploring implications to put the sci-fi to shame on that metric.
SOMA was wonderful. Maybe it helped that I didn't have really high expectations going in -- I pretty much thought "more horror like Amnesia, but in a new setting". So I went into it blind.
But it ended up being one of those experiences that you keep thinking about for a few days afterwards. And it's a rare video game that I think would have lost its impact as a movie or a book, despite not having much gamey stuff to do (it's practically in the walking simulator category).
The philosophical questions it brings up may not be anything new, but the game does an excellent job of putting the humanity in them and making you really consider what it would feel like to be in the circumstances of its characters -- not just the playable ones or the ones they interact with directly, but the ones you find audio logs and transcripts from.
Edit: I should also note that I played The Talos Principle shortly after playing SOMA and was struck by a couple similarities they have. Talos is a much less story-driven game, you can almost ignore the story and just focus on the puzzles if you please. But playing it right after SOMA I couldn't help but enjoy how it almost covered the same type of scenario from another -- perhaps more optimistic -- angle.