SOMA is a new horror videogame by the makers of Amnesia The Dark Descent.
The developers list Phillip K Dick, China Mieville, Permutation City, and the works of Peter Watts as primary influences.
Main character lives in Canada in 2015, goes in for a new experimental high-resolution brain-scan to aid treatment of his recent brain injury—and then all of a sudden he is sitting on a chair in some kind of post-apocalyptic undersea base full of malfunctioning robots (many of which seem to think they are human and many of which are insane) and biological humans heavily infected by technology that seems much more organic than the base itself but seem to not have much like their original minds left. I leave it to the reader to infer what happened to cause this sudden perspective shift.
Game plot comes down to a conflict between a powerful yet stupid AI trying to keep alive the last of humanity after a catastrophe beyond its control (but with a rather different definition of ‘humanity’ and ‘alive’) and robots running human brain emulations trying to carry out the last wishes of the last biological humans.
I actually havent played Amnesia myself, but I can say this combines elements from it and a more existential horror of what the copied humans have become and what can be done to them and what the… I’m gonna say humans ‘corrupted’ by the AI have become. There is definitely overlap in horror mechanics and tone with Amnesia at times with the corrupted humans but that is just one type of horror in the game.
SOMA is a new horror videogame by the makers of Amnesia The Dark Descent.
The developers list Phillip K Dick, China Mieville, Permutation City, and the works of Peter Watts as primary influences.
Main character lives in Canada in 2015, goes in for a new experimental high-resolution brain-scan to aid treatment of his recent brain injury—and then all of a sudden he is sitting on a chair in some kind of post-apocalyptic undersea base full of malfunctioning robots (many of which seem to think they are human and many of which are insane) and biological humans heavily infected by technology that seems much more organic than the base itself but seem to not have much like their original minds left. I leave it to the reader to infer what happened to cause this sudden perspective shift.
Game plot comes down to a conflict between a powerful yet stupid AI trying to keep alive the last of humanity after a catastrophe beyond its control (but with a rather different definition of ‘humanity’ and ‘alive’) and robots running human brain emulations trying to carry out the last wishes of the last biological humans.
How severe would you rate the horror aspect as? This seems interesting, but I absolutely couldn’t handle Amnesia.
I actually havent played Amnesia myself, but I can say this combines elements from it and a more existential horror of what the copied humans have become and what can be done to them and what the… I’m gonna say humans ‘corrupted’ by the AI have become. There is definitely overlap in horror mechanics and tone with Amnesia at times with the corrupted humans but that is just one type of horror in the game.