SOMA

Most horror games ask whether you’ll survive. SOMA asks what “you” even means, and it won’t give you an easy answer.

Frictional Games built its reputation on making players helpless. The Swedish studio’s Penumbra series and, more famously, Amnesia: The Dark Descent took away the weapons and made hiding in a closet a staple of the YouTube let’s-play boom. SOMA came out on September 21, 2015, priced at $29.99. It was the studio’s attempt to prove that the formula could carry something heavier than jump scares, and it largely succeeds.

You play Simon Jarrett, a man in Toronto who agrees to an experimental brain scan after a car accident. He wakes up inside PATHOS-II, a crumbling research station on the floor of the North Atlantic, with no idea how he got there. The surface world is gone. The machines around him talk like people, plead like people and, in some cases, sincerely believe they are people. A facility AI called the WAU is growing something organic through the corridors, and nobody left alive can explain why.

Where it sits in the market matters. SOMA is closer to narrative games like Gone Home than to Resident Evil: think “walking sim with teeth.” There is no combat, no crafting and no skill tree. What it does have is dense environmental storytelling, two well-written lead roles and a philosophical thread that runs through the whole game. Many science fiction novels would envy it. More than a decade after launch, it still shows up regularly on lists of the best horror games ever made. That reputation is earned, with one notable exception that this review will get to.

• Existential Science-Fiction Narrative: The story asks what consciousness is, what happens when a mind is copied, and whether identity survives the copy. It puts those questions into moments you play, not cutscenes you watch.
• Combat-Free Survival Horror: You can’t fight. You get through every encounter by hiding, sneaking, creating distractions and running, which is the Frictional signature.
• Physical Interaction Model: You grab doors, drawers, levers and valves and drag them with the mouse. Every action feels tactile and deliberate.
• PATHOS-II as a Character: The underwater facility is split across several sites, linked by eerie walks across the open seabed. Nearly every room tells a story through notes, audio logs and the bodies, mechanical and human, left behind.
• Safe Mode: An optional mode added after launch. Creatures still roam but can’t kill you, so story-first players can get through the game without the stealth sections wearing them down.

The Premise Is the Mechanic

SOMA’s sharpest design decision is that you don’t just read about its central idea; you act on it. Within the first couple of hours you meet a damaged machine that insists it’s a man, and the game makes you decide whether to cut its power. There is no morality meter and no dialogue wheel keeping score. There’s a cable, a voice begging you not to, and your hand on the mouse.

That pattern repeats. Is a perfect copy of a mind the same person? Does the original still matter once the copy exists? SOMA keeps setting up situations where questions like these turn into a physical act you have to perform. Your choices barely change the plot. That’s deliberate, and it’s the point: the consequences stay with you, not with the save file. Few games understand that a choice can matter because of how heavy it feels, not because it branches the story.

The Gameplay Loop

Without the ideas, the loop is standard Frictional: explore a section of the station, read terminals and listen to audio logs, solve an environmental puzzle (restore power, reroute a system, find an access chip), survive a creature encounter and move on. Catherine Chun, a scientist whose voice reaches Simon through his omnitool, hands out objectives and argues with him along the way. The back-and-forth between her clinical pragmatism and Simon’s very human panic is the emotional engine of the game.

The puzzles are the most underrated part of the loop. They’re rarely hard; expect logic terminals and system routing rather than Myst-style abstractions. But they make sense. You’re repairing a broken facility, and the solutions fit that world. This keeps the game moving in places where Amnesia’s inventory puzzles sometimes stalled it.

The interaction model supports all of this. You drag a hatch open by hand, a few centimeters at a time, while something shuffles around in the next room. In almost any other genre, that kind of friction would be a design flaw. Here it’s the whole point.

The Monster Problem

This is the exception. SOMA’s creatures look memorable: glitching amalgams of flesh, machine and the WAU’s gel, and they tie into the story’s themes. Mechanically, though, they’re the weakest part of the package.

The encounters follow a fixed rhythm. A creature patrols, you crouch behind crates, you wait for it to wander off, you creep forward. Getting close to most of them makes the screen distort and crackle, and the game discourages you from looking straight at them. That’s a smart idea, but it pushes much of these sequences down toward the floor. Getting caught typically costs health rather than ending the run, a design that turns tension into trial and error instead of terror. Many of these sections are also long, dark and hard to navigate, so frustration is built in well before fear arrives.

The deeper problem is tone. SOMA’s real horror is intellectual: the dread of an idea clicking into place. Every forced round of hide-and-seek swaps that dread for cheaper adrenaline. Frictional clearly heard the criticism. A fan-made “Wuss Mode” mod showed that plenty of players wanted the story without the chases, and the official Safe Mode followed. Turning it on doesn’t break the game. For many players, it makes it better.

Pacing and the Ending

The campaign is mid-length, and the pacing mostly holds up. The middle sags during a run of back-to-back stealth sections. The final third, though, is a steady escalation of reveals, and each one changes how you read the last.

People still talk about SOMA years later because of its ending, which this review won’t spoil. It doesn’t reward you and it doesn’t punish you. It makes the game’s central argument airtight, then leaves you alone with it. There’s a short scene after the credits, so don’t skip it.

SOMA runs on Frictional’s in-house HPL3 engine. It still looks striking because of its art direction, not its fidelity. PATHOS-II is convincing industrial retro-futurism: chunky CRT terminals, riveted bulkheads, emergency lighting bleeding through condensation, and the WAU’s dark structure gel spreading across every surface like an infection. On the seabed walks you see only by bioluminescence and Simon’s own lamp. They are quietly beautiful spaces by the standards of the genre.

Up close, the game’s age shows. Textures are soft by today’s standards, human character models are stiff, and the few faces you see animate poorly. The game mostly gets away with this because most of its “people” are machines. The interface is almost nonexistent, with no persistent HUD to break the immersion, which is the right call.

The sound design does more of the work than the visuals. Mikko Tarmia’s score is used sparingly. The station’s creaks, groans and pressure hisses convey the weight of the ocean overhead more than any shader could. On the technical side, a 3D game of this scope is light on hardware: it was built to run on mid-range PCs of its era, and reduced settings should cover older machines.

On Steam, SOMA ships native Windows, macOS and Linux builds, and its modest system requirements make it a natural candidate for handheld PCs. Steam Deck owners should check the compatibility badge on the store page, but the hardware isn’t the issue.

The control scheme is what matters most. SOMA is built around the mouse. Dragging a lever, easing a door open or rummaging through a drawer is designed to feel exact and physical in a way that analog sticks can’t fully match. A gamepad works, and Steam Input fills any gaps, but some of the tactile control that makes Frictional’s interaction model special gets lost. On Steam Deck, the trackpads are well suited to these mouse-driven interactions.

Safe Mode is available as a difficulty choice when you start a new game on Steam, so story-first players don’t need mods. At its list price the game is a fair deal for its length, and Steam sales have long made it cheaper.

SOMA is not a perfect game, and its flaws are obvious. Frictional wanted to make a philosophy seminar with the lights off, and the monster sequences are the price it paid for calling that a horror game. They will wear on some players. But what SOMA does well, it does better than most of the medium manages. Science fiction usually treats a copied mind as a plot twist. SOMA makes you live through every awkward, horrifying implication of it. We rate it a clear recommendation with real reservations: play it in a dark room with headphones, and turn on Safe Mode if the chases start to break the spell. Leave yourself a free evening afterward, because you’ll need time to think it over.