On September 22, 2015, Frictional Games released the survival horror single-player game SOMA. It followed their well-received Amnesia: The Dark Descent, another survival horror game, released five years earlier. SOMA takes a different route from Amnesia, opting for a streamlined inventory. In Amnesia, the player is heavily involved with the inventory, collecting clues, and managing a dwindling supply of candles (Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Steam Version). The player suffers sanity damage if without candlelight for too long. In SOMA, you can pick up and inspect items and papers, but nothing goes into your inventory that is not needed later to move the game’s plot further. There is also no sanity damage, but as you become injured in the game, the world begins to look glitched, more and more like a busted screen. This is how SOMA integrates the player with Simon, the main character, and ultimately within the plot and themes of the horror game.

Simon Jarrett is the main character and player avatar. In the first scene of the game, a flashback reveals that Simon had been in a car accident that killed his girlfriend and left him with life-threatening brain damage. He agrees to meet with Ph.D. student David Munshi, who wants to help treat this damage by way of a brain scan, which Munshi intends to use to develop his brain reconstruction project. The treatment fails, but Simon allows Munshi to keep his brain scan. One hundred years pass between this scan and Simon regaining consciousness in an abandoned, underwater research facility called PATHOS-II at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. Neither Simon nor the player is aware of the intervening time in which the “real” Simon dies of his injury and the terranean world is destroyed by a meteor strike. It is a disorienting shift from Munshi’s office to PATHOS-II. SOMA is about consciousness and questions the circumstances of identity. SOMA uses this streamlined inventory to ingrain the player within Simon’s awareness. There is no awkward pop-up screen with neat little virtual shelves to store items, but an effortless application from Simon’s pocket as needed. It asks players not focus on meta inventory management, but to become ingrained in Simon’s experiences as he tries to escape PATHOS-II. This theme of identity is most evident at the station Omnicron. 

Simon and Catherine, a PATHOS-II employee with whom Simon establishes communication in the beginning and meets later on, are working together to launch the ARK. The ARK is a project Catherine worked on before PATHOS-II began falling apart, wherein David Munshi’s brain scan process, now a fully developed technology one hundred years into the future, is being used to store brain scans of PATHOS-II employees in a virtual reality. Catherine sees this as the only way to preserve humanity, and the game's conceit is making your way around PATHOS-II outposts to prepare the ARK for launch into space, where the virtual reality is powered indefinitely by solar energy. 

With this goal in mind, Simon and Catherine make their way to the station Omnicron to retrieve deep-sea diving suits, as the ARK and its launcher rest at the deepest part of the station, where Simon’s current suit would crumple under the weight. They find one working suit, but in order for Simon to wear it, his consciousness must be transferred to the preserved remains of an employee already within it. This is possible because of a substance called structure gel, which caused the death of most PATHOS-II employees. It essentially allows for the melding of human tissue and robot. This leads to some scenes of human and robot body horror, the remaining human consciousness (and sometimes tissue) horrifically melded with the robots previously used to run operations at PATHOS-II. 

It is revealed that Simon’s brain scan at the beginning of the game was placed in a robotic body with this gel, which is why he’s able to withstand the water pressure as he walks between PATHOS-II outposts along the ocean floor. In other words, he is no longer in a human body. Omnicron forces Simon to question his own humanity and sense of identity when Catherine misleads him about this process of transferred consciousness. Simon installs a battery pack, a cortex chip to store his brain scan, and structure gel to meld the robotic brain and human body together in this deep-sea diving suit they need to reach the ARK. Catherine begins the transferring process, but as Simon wakes up in the new body, he briefly hears his old self ask Catherine if the process worked before the original Simon powers down. Simon realizes that Catherine did not transfer is consciousness but copied it. For the rest of the game, Simon and Catherine are at odds about identity, Simon concerned that his copied consciousness is not valid and unethical, and Catherine convinced that copying consciousness does not matter as long as the copied version is preserved or working towards the preservation of humanity. Simon must now decide whether to remove the battery pack from his original body and let him die or leave him to eternal solitude amongst the murderous robots plaguing a human-less world.

This argument comes to a climax at the end of the game when Simon and Catherine finally make it to the ARK launcher at Phi station, where Simon thinks his and Catherine’s consciousnesses will be uploaded to the ARK. Once again, Simon’s mind is copied and uploaded, leaving the original consciousness in his corporeal body. He becomes angry with Catherine, insisting that the copies “are not us!” (SOMA, Epic Games Version). Catherine insists that they have preserved something of humanity, and that they just “lost the coin toss.” A technical issue fries the Omnitool wherein Catherine’s consciousness had been stored, leaving Simon completely alone at the bottom of the ocean. The end credits show the copied Simon and Catherine in the ARK, now digitally rendered in human bodies in an earth-like, virtual Elysium. They are happy and at ease in their new bodies and environment.

SOMA, like many other video games, lends itself to critical analysis. “Games are more commonly treated as works of entertainment, culture, or even art than as philosophical machines,” Patrick Jagoda writes in his essay, “Introduction: Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games” (131). But Jagoda argues, with reference to writings from Deleuze and Guattari, “that ‘art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and precepts’” (131). That is to say, art communicates ideas in a codified language of performance. SOMA is no exception, providing for the player and critical audience text with which to derive philosophical meaning. These texts include dialogue and narration, character and monster design, plot, music, and visual design, such as the use of colors, shadows, and light. The dialogue is overtly the “machine” in which philosophy is explored, with discussions about identity and consciousness between Simon and Catherine highly featured. But Simon’s questions of identity are explored through visual design as well, such as in his various bodies and the bodies of others. Horror as a genre device can even be used to explore identity, as evident in the various scenes of body horror in which PATHOS-II employees cling to life, paralyzed and perpetually revived by grotesque robotic amalgamations that are both parasitic and ingrained. In this way, the video game art of SOMA certainly philosophizes, if within the constructed affects and conventions of the video game genre.

Works Cited

Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Steam version, Frictional Games, 8 Sept. 2010.

Jagoda, Patrick. “Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games [Special Section].” Critical Inquiry, vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp. 130–233. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2018399663&site=ehost-live.

SOMA. Epic Games version, Frictional Games, 22 Sept. 2015.