Soma Review: Frictional Games Moves the Fear From the Dark to the Question of Personhood

Frictional Games built its reputation on running from monsters in the dark. Soma, released September 22, 2015, for PC, Mac, Linux, and PlayStation 4, keeps the running but moves the fear somewhere colder: into the question of whether the thing doing the running is still a person.

Trailer, via IGDBcom.

Simon Jarrett Wakes Up in the Year 2104

The setup is a bait and switch. Simon Jarrett survives a car accident in 2015, suffers severe brain damage, and agrees to an experimental brain scan. He blacks out. He wakes on Site Upsilon of PATHOS-II, a geothermal power center in the North Atlantic, and a woman named Catherine Chun tells him the year is 2104 — one year after a comet struck Earth and left the facility as the last known human outpost.

Soma is played first-person. There are no weapons. Corrupted humans, twisted creatures, insane robots, and the Warden Unit — the artificial intelligence that runs PATHOS-II — cannot be fought, only outsmarted or fled. Notes and audio tapes carry the background. Puzzle-solving and stealth carry the plot. Two years after launch, Frictional added a Safe Mode that keeps the monsters but stops them from killing the player.

Catherine Chun Is Not Human

The turn that makes Soma more than a monster chase arrives at Site Lambda: Catherine is a brain scan of a PATHOS-II employee downloaded into a robot. Simon learns he died in 2015 when his brain reconstruction failed. His scan was later uploaded into the modified corpse of another employee by the WAU, 89 years afterward. The WAU, tasked with preserving humanity, turned the surviving crew into bio-mechanical mutants. The only way anything human escapes Earth is the ARK, Catherine’s digital black box.

Release Timeline

What Soma Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t

The enemy encounters are the weak point. Critics of the game’s creature design have a case: the monsters embody the themes in concept but read as obstacles in practice, and the Safe Mode addition two years later is an admission that the stealth could get in the story’s way. Strip the creatures out and Soma loses little.

What holds up is everything around them. The voice work, the sound design, the slow reveal of what PATHOS-II is and what the WAU has done to it — that is the actual horror, and it does not need a chase sequence to land. Soma de-emphasizes inventory management in favor of narrative and character, a break from Amnesia: The Dark Descent that pays off.

A spiritual successor, Ontos, is set for 2027. That is the part worth watching: whether Frictional trusts the ideas again, or reaches back for the monsters.

Frictional Games · Game Reviews · horror games · PATHOS-II · sci-fi horror · Soma