SOMA is easily one of the best gaming experiences I've had, and I cannot overstate how harrowing, thoughtful, and encompassing I found the narrative.  It is, of course, not perfect and not for everyone, but it comes with my personal highest recommendation.

If you want just the facts and none of the flavor, here goes;

SOMA is a first person narrative-driven game by Frictional Games, makers of the original Amnesia.  It's out on PC and PS4, download only, for around $30.  It has a hard, Sci-Fi theme with heavy psychological horror elements, and contains no combat, mild stealth gameplay, and a handful of fairly simple puzzles.  It's a pretty easy game to complete by design, especially for the genre.  There is thematic gore and (situationally appropriate) language. 

SOMA is, by the end, more interested in the conversation it has with the player than it is about complex gameplay.  There is more direct involvement than say, a typical visual novel, and more gameplay than purposefully limited exploratory narratives like Dear Esther or Gone Home, but everything is streamlined to the point of interaction-for-the-sake-of-exploring and world-building.  It has obvious faults, including somewhat poorly implemented stealth and a jarring art style for character pictures and human models, which feel more like placeholders than artistic choices.  Some have complained about the voice acting, but I found it to be very well done.

If you have the means and ANY interest whatsoever, please stop now, get the game, and slowly ingest it, preferably with no lights and excellent headphones.  Take your time, as most of the story is in small bits scattered about.  Done?  Great.  Breathe.  Onward.

[MAJOR SPOILER TERRITORY FROM HERE ON, PLEASE ONLY READ IF YOU WILL NOT PLAY THE GAME OR HAVE ALREADY COMPLETED IT.  LAST WARNING.]



What do we define as 'life?' When does it end?  What about humanity is worth continuing after our individual, or even collective, death?  What compels us in our discernment about legacy, euthanasia, and more recently, trans-humanism?  These questions have been asked since there were humans, and philosophical pondering largely shapes our better science fiction and fantasy media.  As for video games, if they are asked at all, it is usually in a sentence or two before the game places a gun in your avatar's hands and tells you to go kill everything.
 
But like most media, video games do have the rare standout that takes things a little differently and provides familiar tools, but focuses on something a little different.  What makes SOMA a standout is not immediately obvious, even in the first twenty or so minutes.  It is extremely easy to try reducing this game to the sum of its very familiar components; a large dose of BioShock/System Shock 2, some of Gone Home, a little bit of The Matrix, the body horror of Dead Space, and a template similar to the studio's last hit, Amnesia.  But where SOMA distinguishes itself and, in my opinion, succeeds the greatest, is in how it uses interactive media to have a very brooding conversation on the relevance of existence, personhood, and the very root ideas of morality.  The ways in which it succeeds (and at times fails) are numerous enough to fill another article, but it is relevant to mention there is no clunky UI, a nearly non-existent inventory marker, no glaring arrows to point to an objective (save for some emergency-exit lights), no scoreboard, no collectables besides reading notes and listening to stationary audio, no underlying 'morality meter,' and thankfully the trophies are purely to denote story progression.  Even enemies are rarely fatal in the initial encounter, and usually leave our hero harmed but near the objective.  Every design decision is to focus on the conversation the game world and characters are having with the avatar and, indeed, the player.  And it is a conversation that can scare much, much deeper than weird and stalking abominations.

The stakes are familiar Sci-Fi tropes; in just under a hundred years from now, a comet levels the surface of the Earth in an extinction-level event, and the only known human survivors are in a series of advanced laboratory habitats known as Pathos II, located on the bottom of the ocean floor.  In light of these events, Pathos II's life support A.I., known as the Warden Unit or WAU, determines that humans cannot survive indefinitely in these conditions and begins researching ways to extend what it considers human life.  (In a remarkable departure from the typical way this trope is used, the WAU is not some talkative 'HAL' or Matrix 'Agent,' but is instead represented in the game world as a nano-substrate, a 'black goo' that literally permeates (and breaks through) the very walls of the complex.  The WAU cannot talk, reason, or argue.  Its very presence and threat is reminiscent of a cancer that is just biologically 'smart' enough to think it is healing you instead of turning you into something less... human.   

Such a backdrop is certainly interesting for folks like me, but still more of a cliche B-movie setup that may or may not amount to a fun and occasionally introspective summer blockbuster (or SyFy original).  But then SOMA introduces another layer that, while again familiar to fans of the genre, really begins to start the uncomfortable conversations going.  In its attempts to find new ways to extend human life, the WAU reverse engineers technology used by the station's 'pilot seats' (like using virtual reality to control the station's robots, but by using brain signals instead of a controller.  Or think Pacific Rim, Battletech, etc).  The WAU then uses the pilot seats to record a 'brain scan' from its users, essentially a copy of that person's consciousness, and implant a digital copy of a human brain into the various machines and robots around the facility.  Such experiments go about as well as expected, and some of the machines go insane, suicidal, homicidal, demented, or are just very confused.

The next layer is the fact that, as the story progresses, your protagonist discovers he is an odd summation of components; a copy of an original neuro-gragh taken from a terminally injured man almost a hundred years ago that would become a standard A.I. template (a stock development kit, if you will) that is placed on a normal robot cortex chip, thrust into the skull of the corpse of one of the last humans, and placed in a diving suit filled with that creepy WAU nanite 'structure gel' (the game's most egregious 'space magic').  You never really get to see the body horror of what you are except in quick images that flash if you 'die,' but if you want to see how horrific an amalgamation you are in-game, just below is a link that gets to some of these images that flash by.  This is one of the few times I'll likely ever post a link that's NSFW, and you can't unsee these, so be warned, some are pull-your-head-apart disturbing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/...bodies_later_in_the_game/

So yeah, your character's existence itself is rather freaky.  But the narrative takes this idea, that your brain can be essentially copied in digital form and then placed elsewhere, and presents some truly uncomfortable thought experiments.  Is an animated corpse running a digital copy of a person's brain still 'human?'  (Sit down, Alex Murphy, you still have meat up there.)  It can be easy for some to argue that really, the protagonist is just a robot, that after 'normal' people died, the robots (and reanimated corpses, and later, the experimental hybrids) are just robots running programs, regardless of the origin of those programs.  But any Sci-Fi buff like me knows that the genre has always asked the question, is a human just an organic computer, running a programmed simulation, and the body just a chemical factory transporting it all?  What parts of this can be swapped and still retain humanity?  How much of our body can we replace with inorganic parts and still 'count?'  What can be removed before that answer changes?  If the answer is our brain, why would an exact digital copy be less just because it is running on different hardware? Where's the threshold?  (Anecdotally, and irreverently, I wonder if those who say a digital copy of this game is the same worth as a physical disc copy of this game.  Would they say the same about the human brain?)

Ah, but the reason I like SOMA is because it keeps asking questions as we go further down the rabbit hole.  Later in the game, you have to essentially build another body, using similar components; a human corpse, a robotic cortex chip, a tube of the reanimating structure gel, and a deep-sea diving suit to hold it all in.  Your avatar sits in a pilot seat to 'transfer' his personality from one body to another (in a surely-purposeful transhuman twist, your neuro-gragh is from a man, but both corpses are noted as female, and the game makes no real relevance to it).  After 'pressing the button,' your character is horrified to realize his 'old body' is still talking; you weren't transferred, you were copied.  There are now two of 'you,' and your older self is unconscious and at your mercy.  And the game gives you a choice; drain his battery and save him the horror of waking up confused and stuck with a monster at the door, or leave him be and know there's another 'you' out there alone.  There is no direction to what is 'correct' here, just the protagonist's voice mentioning how terrible both scenarios are.

SOMA presents these ideas all over the place, from a pile of components wheezing on the ground and screaming in a woman's voice if you disconnect her/it from a power supply, to the last truly complete human that asks you to end her life because she doesn't want to live anymore.  Is one murder, and the other not?  At what point does life begin, and what is required to consider it worth saving?  Is 'life' just a form of intelligence regardless of form, and if so, what about the insane, demented, or even self-harming?  Is it mercy to end these people/things, and at what point would it be considered taking a life?  (As a dad of an autistic child and a guy with close friends who are medical doctors, some of these ideas hit close to home).  SOMA never gives answers, there is no score tally or achievement for one or the other, and there is no branching paths for these respective decisions.  The game just presents scenarios and moves on, and we are forced to confront our own ideologies.   

The protagonist comments that after leaving behind his old self (alive or euthanized) that he was lucky, that he just won 'the flip of the coin' as the guy who wakes up in this body and keeps going.  But his in-game companion named Catherine knows better, she knows that there is no real coin, and that the game simply shifts narrative to the 'new' body.  And at the end of the game, when another digital 'body swap' happens, the game brilliantly shows both angles, the pre- and post-game credits, of each copy.  The first is the horrified character that realizes he 'lost' the coin toss and is left who he is, and later the oblivious and happy copy who doesn't even mention his 'old' body.  In this case, there is an obvious question; was a new 'life' created when the copy happened, and is it more moral to 'kill' the old copy and spare it life after such events?  Which begs the further question, do our situations determine if life is worth living, and who should make that call?  And in what capacity?  We may think the answer obvious, unless we talk to fascinating individuals like Joni Erickson Tada or Nick Vujicic, whose lives prove that there is more to this debate than we may immediately dismiss.  And if we think that an identical copy or clone isn't the same as a new life, there are surely some biological twins, nature's own literal DNA clones, who have a voice in the discussion.

SOMA's story is ultimately a discussion on the modern take on trans-humanism.  It assumes an eventual singularity between man and machine, an event some folks see as an inevitability.  I personally don't think that will ever happen for a myriad of reasons, but SOMA postulates many important thoughts about such an event, and the thought experiments it presents really can move past the theoretical and reveal our underlying assumptions that are easily uprooted when a certain scenario is presented.  The game's culmination of this is represented in the idea of the Ark, a virtual reality that contains digital copies from those brain-scanned on Pathos II.  The end goal of the game is to successfully launch this mainframe computer into space on a satellite whose solar panels can power it and provide a sort of digital heaven, a lasting memory of humanity, for thousands of years after the Pathos II (and all of life on Earth) are long gone.  Some of the in-game characters see it as the only lasting thing available to do, a way to send off some of humanity to the stars and hope (rather futilely) some other intelligence finds it.  Other in-game characters see no real point to it, as it doesn't really represent actual humans, just a sort of digital make-believe heaven.  And still others think that the Ark represents the 'next evolution' of humankind, the most complete trans-human progression, and their suicides after being copied into the Ark kickstart the WAU's experiments to preserve 'humanity' into overdrive.  These latter individuals believe that just as the dead cells a body sheds to not constitute a real person, neither does their continued existence after 'evolving' by being placed in the Ark.
 
More than just a McGuffin, the Ark represents the greatest horror in SOMA; a complete lack of hope.  The only thing left, the game posits, is to send some desperate memory of us into the stars, and accept our own extinction.  Interestingly, there is no spiritual angle to the narrative, and the only real reference is a main character mentioning that she is not religious but she can understand why people would be.  Granted, Pathos II is staffed mostly by scientist and engineers, but some of our greatest minds have had serious religious convictions.  That absence in the narrative presents what may be the darkest component of the underpinning humanistic philosophy of SOMA; without moral guidance, the WAU, the very thing built to preserve humanity, doesn't turn on its creators so much as it develops its own ideas of what it is to be human and enforces that onto its hapless survivors.  The remaining pieces of humanity have only a profound sense of loss, a realization that without a belief in something past themselves, all they had was something easily lost.  That lack of control is universal, but rarely presented so completely in an interactive form.  Without using religion, which itself is so rarely used in any positive form in video games, SOMA gives an interestingly bleak picture of humanism and trans-humanism, showing many forms of hopelessness in its ultimate conclusion.  It could be summarized that many characters' final moments are communicating that without each other, there is nothing left.  The only legacy, the only children of humankind to be offered, is a box running a computer program, with an admitted time-stamp on it.  In the end, what was and is the value of a human, a life, all of humanity?  What will each of us come to, all of us come to, at the end?


Though imperfectly, SOMA asks these questions, and more importantly, it doesn't pretend that it can give us answers, in either a grand, heroic explanation or a grade of progress at the end.  It reaches out with an electronic limb that its mind still sees as human, and the best glimmer of hope it gives intrinsically begs us to do better.  And it does this best by asking the questions in the first place.




Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the two live-action shorts produced before the game (which are actually pretty significant events in the game's fiction)

https://youtu.be/lLVOif6CHgE

https://youtu.be/eytOzwyfiCA

As well as the eight live action 'transmission' segments which add up to the equivalent of a prequel movie of sorts.  The production value is pretty nifty for what must have been a tiny budget.  Really impressive stuff, I thought.

https://youtu.be/L8I_J2VjsqQ

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