Earlier I had some time to sit down and play through nearly two hours of SOMA, the new horror game from Frictional Games and these are my initial thoughts.
Disclosure: My key was provided by Frictional Games directly, and as always I will give it an honest look.
My initial thoughts
These are my initial thoughts, and they are not final as I've only put 1.9 hours into the game according to Steam that I did on my personal livestream earlier.
I have to say, the environment art and general atmosphere is fantastic. I much prefer futuristic settings for games like this as I feel more at home with it, and they really did a fantastic job on it. The robots, and whatever this infestation is looks gross and awesome at the same time.
Sadly though, so far it seems pretty slow to get into without too much tension, I only really had possibly two little jumps which were over pretty quickly. The game just doesn't seem like it's all that scary, it seems like Frictional Games have made it more story focused and more of an adventure game than a horror game like they have done previously. That's certainly not a bad thing, but it is quite a big change from what I was personally expecting.
The game makes heavy use of screen blurring and it looked like chromatic aberration too, it looked awful and I doesn't seem like there's a setting to turn it off.
I am enjoying walking around and interacting with everything, it was especially amusing messing with a certain robots power supply.
The puzzles in the game so far are a little annoying, with you need to pay serious attention to the little things around you to get what you're doing. I overlooked some really simple things, and it made for a slightly frustrating play through.
Right now, I think if you're looking for a proper horror game this isn't it, but I will be playing more to get a true feel for how it turns out and will post a more in-depth post on that.
It was giving me a almost solid 60FPS, I only noticed one drop to 14FPS for a split second which didn't really inturrupt anything, so performance wise at least for me it's pretty good. It does seem to be locked to 60FPS even without VSYNC on though. I haven't actually come across any bugs that I've noticed, so port wise it does seem to be well done, which is great to see on a day-1 release.
You can find SOMA on Steam, GOG and Humble Store (only a Steam key on Humble though). Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Disclosure: My key was provided by Frictional Games directly, and as always I will give it an honest look.
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My initial thoughts
These are my initial thoughts, and they are not final as I've only put 1.9 hours into the game according to Steam that I did on my personal livestream earlier.
I have to say, the environment art and general atmosphere is fantastic. I much prefer futuristic settings for games like this as I feel more at home with it, and they really did a fantastic job on it. The robots, and whatever this infestation is looks gross and awesome at the same time.
Sadly though, so far it seems pretty slow to get into without too much tension, I only really had possibly two little jumps which were over pretty quickly. The game just doesn't seem like it's all that scary, it seems like Frictional Games have made it more story focused and more of an adventure game than a horror game like they have done previously. That's certainly not a bad thing, but it is quite a big change from what I was personally expecting.
The game makes heavy use of screen blurring and it looked like chromatic aberration too, it looked awful and I doesn't seem like there's a setting to turn it off.
I am enjoying walking around and interacting with everything, it was especially amusing messing with a certain robots power supply.
The puzzles in the game so far are a little annoying, with you need to pay serious attention to the little things around you to get what you're doing. I overlooked some really simple things, and it made for a slightly frustrating play through.
Right now, I think if you're looking for a proper horror game this isn't it, but I will be playing more to get a true feel for how it turns out and will post a more in-depth post on that.
It was giving me a almost solid 60FPS, I only noticed one drop to 14FPS for a split second which didn't really inturrupt anything, so performance wise at least for me it's pretty good. It does seem to be locked to 60FPS even without VSYNC on though. I haven't actually come across any bugs that I've noticed, so port wise it does seem to be well done, which is great to see on a day-1 release.
You can find SOMA on Steam, GOG and Humble Store (only a Steam key on Humble though). Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I downloaded it and played it already. Got stuck behind a toliet. 10/10.
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Does it have to be scary to be good though? It's easy to expect another Amnesia in space, but I'd actually be happy if it was something new and original.
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Personally, I've never found Frictional Games.. games.. to be scary. There's always a couple of jump scares, but they're shortlived, and are padded out with wondering about, and crouching behind something when The Big Bad occasionally walks past. The only time I thought "wow, now this is actually scary" is when my graphics driver glitched out while playing The Dark Descent and all I could see was random coloured glitches. I thought it was some sort of insanity effect.. until I died and couldn't even navigate the menus. :l
I'll still get Soma, but I sincerely doubt I'll find it scary.
I'll still get Soma, but I sincerely doubt I'll find it scary.
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I'm just under 2 hours in and I agree it's not as scary as previous Frictional titles, at least no so far. I mean there have been a few pretty tense moments and Frictional's audio work, as far as ambient sounds and sound effects, is on point as usual. I always felt in their games the audio did as much, likely more, to build tension than the visuals. Still, overall nothing as creepy as their previous works, especially not compared to Penumbra: Black Plague (that had some really messed up moments). I'm fine with that, though, as I'm a coward, so less scary isn't a bad thing necessarily. I'm definitely interested to keep going to find out what in the blue hell is this place and what happened here.
Last edited by Keyrock on 23 September 2015 at 12:05 am UTC
Last edited by Keyrock on 23 September 2015 at 12:05 am UTC
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Porter here, you may remember me from the Shadow Warrior port ;-).
@TheReaperUK
Hoping to have this issue resolved today, sorry it snuck in :-(.
@TheReaperUK
Hoping to have this issue resolved today, sorry it snuck in :-(.
17 Likes, Who?
Porter here, you may remember me from the Shadow Warrior port ;-).It's appreciated, thanks.
@TheReaperUK
Hoping to have this issue resolved today, sorry it snuck in :-(.
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mulletdeath Sep 23, 2015
You're awesome, amelcher!
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Liam: You can turn the Chromatic Aberration off, just go to Settings>Game>Color Seperation and turn it to off :)
I'm about 2 hours in and really enjoying it so far. As Liam says, I quite enjoy the theme in this one over Amnesia or Penumbra (though I enjoy them both). I'm glad it isn't as stressful as ADD so far. I think my favorite previous Frictional game was Black Plague, which also wasn't too stressful, and had other characters to interact with so everything didn't feel so empty and hopeless; and this game reminds of of that, though the puzzles are not quite as interesting, the story a pace are quite good thus far.
Last edited by HadBabits on 23 September 2015 at 2:59 am UTC
I'm about 2 hours in and really enjoying it so far. As Liam says, I quite enjoy the theme in this one over Amnesia or Penumbra (though I enjoy them both). I'm glad it isn't as stressful as ADD so far. I think my favorite previous Frictional game was Black Plague, which also wasn't too stressful, and had other characters to interact with so everything didn't feel so empty and hopeless; and this game reminds of of that, though the puzzles are not quite as interesting, the story a pace are quite good thus far.
Last edited by HadBabits on 23 September 2015 at 2:59 am UTC
1 Likes, Who?
hardpenguin Sep 23, 2015
Porter here, you may remember me from the Shadow Warrior port ;-).Aaron always vigilant, so nice :)
@TheReaperUK
Hoping to have this issue resolved today, sorry it snuck in :-(.
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Some people categorized SOMA as a walking simulator :D
Well lets say that the few hours are like that , walking and exploring...
Also they have said that the estimate gameplay is like 7-9 hours so I assume and hope that SOMA will get more intense later...
Last edited by wolfyrion on 23 September 2015 at 8:58 am UTC
Well lets say that the few hours are like that , walking and exploring...
Also they have said that the estimate gameplay is like 7-9 hours so I assume and hope that SOMA will get more intense later...
Last edited by wolfyrion on 23 September 2015 at 8:58 am UTC
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Liam: You can turn the Chromatic Aberration off, just go to Settings Game Color Seperation and turn it to off :)
Oh really? That's good news, for some reason I didn't expect to have a graphical option like that under Colour.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 23 September 2015 at 9:03 am UTC
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Liam: You can turn the Chromatic Aberration off, just go to Settings Game Color Seperation and turn it to off :)
Oh really? That's good news, for some reason I didn't expect to have a graphical option like that under Colour.
Neither did I, a dev mentioned it on the forums. I felt a bit bad for him, he gave a meek request for people to give it a chance before turning it off; but it makes playing feel and look worse imo :v
2 Likes, Who?
Liam: You can turn the Chromatic Aberration off, just go to Settings Game Color Seperation and turn it to off :)
Oh really? That's good news, for some reason I didn't expect to have a graphical option like that under Colour.
Neither did I, a dev mentioned it on the forums. I felt a bit bad for him, he gave a meek request for people to give it a chance before turning it off; but it makes playing feel and look worse imo :v
I think it really helps with the immersion. I usually dislike it in other games, but it fits very well here, in my opinion.
1 Likes, Who?
Liam: You can turn the Chromatic Aberration off, just go to Settings Game Color Seperation and turn it to off :)
Oh really? That's good news, for some reason I didn't expect to have a graphical option like that under Colour.
Neither did I, a dev mentioned it on the forums. I felt a bit bad for him, he gave a meek request for people to give it a chance before turning it off; but it makes playing feel and look worse imo :v
I think it really helps with the immersion. I usually dislike it in other games, but it fits very well here, in my opinion.
I can understand your point of view, but I don't like playing a game that strains my eyes, I want to be able to see what I paid for and have the experience. What I got was a good half an hour of blurred vision and it didn't look good.
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[...] chromatic aberration [...]
I think it really helps with the immersion. I usually dislike it in other games, but it fits very well here, in my opinion.
I can understand your point of view, but I don't like playing a game that strains my eyes, I want to be able to see what I paid for and have the experience. What I got was a good half an hour of blurred vision and it didn't look good.
Then you probably felt just like Simon Jarrett! Immeeeeersiooooon! *spooky voice* ;)
1 Likes, Who?
I think it really helps with the immersion. I usually dislike it in other games, but it fits very well here, in my opinion.
Different strokes for different folks, yeah? I think the video distortion works pretty well. It literally obscures your vision, but it serves the purpose of both obscuring enemies so we can't oggle them at our leisure (as in AMFP), and quickly communicates that you should quickly relocate your eyeballs, and probably everything else, to a safer locale.
The most terrifying moment I've had so far was running into a new enemy. I quickly ran and cowered behind a table, I caught sight of it in the doorway, accompanied by some static, so I looked away and hoped it'd go away. I was temporarily relieved when I looked back at an empty doorway before shrieking when I turned to exit my hiding place: he was directly in front of me and everything got washed by white noise and terror XD
1 Likes, Who?
I think it really helps with the immersion. I usually dislike it in other games, but it fits very well here, in my opinion.I'm with you on this one. I usually dislike chromatic aberration in games as well, but I think it works really well in this particular game and so I left it on. It does strain my eyes a bit after a while, but that kind of works for me in this game, it fits, it adds to the weight on my mind the game puts through the foreboding that, in my opinion, Frictional does really well.
Anyhow, this is why graphical options are always a good thing, people can turn them on or off to their liking. :)
1 Likes, Who?
Porter here, you may remember me from the Shadow Warrior port ;-).
@TheReaperUK
Hoping to have this issue resolved today, sorry it snuck in :-(.
Just got home from work, Loaded up steam and game is patching with 9.7mb patch, Look on the support forums and see you have fixed it, so good work and thank you i will continue play later tonight :D
I can confirm that the fix works; it was awful having to stop playing for hours ;) Really liking it so far, probably more than any other game this year.
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Wow it's collected a metascore of 85, that's very good. And not too scary? A game for me then. I'm sure I'll have my moments of scare. :)
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Plintslîcho Sep 23, 2015
I quite enjoy the theme in this one over Amnesia or Penumbra (though I enjoy them both).
Yeah, same here. I really enjoy the setting and the graphics and sounds are simply beautiful and absolutely atmospheric.
Maybe the game isn't as scary as Amnesia (I'm not so sure about that, though) but that's fine with me because this way I can concentrate better on the story; I really want to continue playing and discover more of what's going on.
By the way, I had some DBUS address error at startup with the game bought from GOG.com.
But that was easily fixed by moving libSDL2* out of the games lib64 folder so that the game uses the system library.
1 Likes, Who?
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