T w e n t y S i d e d

Let’s talk about these health sphincters. I think it’s really telling that 60% of the Spoiler Warning cast all came to the exact same wrong conclusion, and saw the healing icon as a D-pad symbol.

There are a lot of problems here. One is that you don’t have a health bar, so you can’t see any change when the device heals you. The only way you can tell if you’re injured is if the screen is glitching, which:

1. At this early stage, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ve been injured. So you’re at full health when you encounter the first couple of healing stations. But even if you have been injured…
2. At this point in the game, you don’t have any idea why your view would be “malfunctioning”. If I’m hurt, shouldn’t the screen turn red? If I’m going insane, shouldn’t I be seeing shadows? What does this glitch mean? Am I hurt, insane, or is this a stylized videogame-y way of telling me “monsters are near”? Or is this just a special effect just to set a “techno-future” mood, like bloom lighting is used to make things “dreamy”?

After using the device Simon remarks that he feels better. But again, if he wasn’t injured you might assume he’s talking about his emotional state. And that’s assuming the player chooses to interact with this huge writhing black sphincter dripping with scary black goo. It’s reasonable to imagine most players would stay clear of that thing. There’s certainly no in-universe reason for timid Simon to go jamming his digits into it.

Later revelations clear up what this thing is and what it does (sort of) but by then you’ve passed a half dozen of these gizmos. That’s pretty late in the game for it to finally get around to making the mechanics clear.

So the player doesn’t know what this thing is, or what it does, and it’s directly connected to player health, which is another system they don’t yet understand yet. The icon it uses is easily confused with standard interface symbols, which only makes things worse. I suppose it would help if the symbol was a fat green or red plus sign, and not the broken, narrow white symbol we see here.

The only reason this doesn’t ruin the game is because SOMA is usually pretty easy (especially in these early stages) and the player can still muddle through without understanding the health mechanics.

It’s not a serious problem with the game, but it is a pretty good illustration of a situation where things that seem obvious to the developer can be badly misinterpreted by the audience.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

We wanted to do something light and quick before we dive into Fallout 4, which will no doubt consume a big chunk of the year. So we’re going to run through SOMA, the follow-up to Amnesia from Frictional Games. Unlike that one time we treated Amnesia like a joke, we’re actually giving SOMA a full play-through and taking it seriously.

I love the dream sequence here, which is something you almost never hear people say about any movie or game ever. Here is why this one succeeds where so many others have failed:

1. It’s short. Just 30 seconds. Far too many games make a dream sequence that lingers for several minutes. This ends in one of two ways: Either the player figures it out right away, in which case they spend the entire rest of the sequence impatiently waiting for the story to Get On With It Already because none of this matters. Or the dream feels like reality, in which case the audience feels cheated that you wasted their time because they watched a mundane scene that didn’t matter and ended as soon as something interesting happened.
2. It ACTS like a dream. Way too many storytellers seem to be under the impression that human beings dream in little expositional short films, complete with musical cues and establishing shots. But Simon’s dream really feels like dream logic. He’s driving his car, but he’s sort of aware that he’s about to be in a crash. But he’s already got the head injury from the crash. His head is bleeding, which is annoying instead of panic-inducing like it would be in real life. He’s having a conversation about the medicine he needs to take, which is a concern in his life now, long after the crash. This is the exact sort of casual continuity-bending nonsense that you only see in dreamsAnd Mass Effect 3..
3. It LOOKS like a dream. Note how the camera stays in first-person, and is mostly hyper-focused on small details, leaving the rest of the scene vague. Contrary to what Hollywood thinks, we don’t usually dream in third-person widescreen HD1080p with Dolby Surround sound.
4. It serves a purpose. These 30 seconds of screen time are packed with detail. We learn that Simon was in a crash. He injured his head, and possibly his brain. He had a girlfriend. The fact that she’s not part of his life when he wakes up is a pretty big hint that she probably died in the crash. We see the medicine and hear the name Dr. Munshi, introducing the elements the game will need in about 15 seconds. The writer uses the dream to bring us up to speed, while also conveying Simon’s ongoing unease and confusion.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.