SOMA

"Welcome to SOMA — your expressway to the stars."

SOMA Wiki has a more detailed and comprehensive article on SOMA.

"Do you see this page, Weyer? It deserves so much more!"

This article or section is a stub. You can help Amnesia Wiki out by expanding it!

SOMA
Developer(s)	Frictional Games
Publisher(s)	Frictional Games
Director(s)	Thomas Grip
Writer(s)	Mikael Hedberg
Composer(s)	Mikko Tarmia
Engine	HPL 3
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows Linux macOS PS4 Xbox One
Release	2015
Genre(s)	Science fiction Existential horror Adventure First-person Real-time

SOMA was a stand-alone survival horror game made by Frictional Games and released in 2015. Like its predecessors in the Amnesia series and the Penumbra series, SOMA is a first-person game with elements of science fiction and point-and-click adventures, though with a somewhat greater focus on narrative than previous games.

Gameplay

"Do you see, Daniel? A whole other world – isn't it beautiful?"

The following section is written from an out-of-universe perspective.

SOMA is an adventure game in the science fiction and horror genres, where the player character and protagonist—a man named Simon Jarrett—wakes up in an unfamiliar, hostile underwater facility. The player progresses through it mainly through solving puzzles and avoiding monsters. Unlike previous titles by Frictional Games, SOMA does not contain inventory management as a mechanic. The complexity of the puzzles is also reduced relative to Amnesia or Penumbra games. However, there are also a wide variety of monsters in the game, each present at a different site, requiring the player to employ different strategies to avoid them respectively.

Plot

Section missing!

This section is needed but has not been written yet. You can help Amnesia Wiki out by writing it!

Storyline

Simon Jarrett, the survivor of a car crash that killed his friend Ashley Hall and gave him permanent brain damage, wakes up from a nightmare relieving the incident in his apartment. He receives a phone call from a neuroscientist, Dr. David Munshi, to remind him of the necessary preparation before their appointment for his experimental brain scan. Jarret meets with Munshi for the appointment and sits in the scanning apparatus, which would scan Simon's brain and assist medical professionals in rapidly modelling treatments for his serious brain damage.

When the scan completes, Simon sees a bright flash and wakes up in an unfamiliar location, which he discovers is an underwater research complex called PATHOS-II, at site "Upsilon," in a state of eerie disarray. Simon wanders the halls, with no idea how he got there or where there is. Simon moves through the site and makes radio contact with a surviving woman, Catherine Chun. Catherine tells him to meet her at site Lambda.

During his exploration of PATHOS-II, Simon encounters no evidence of present human life, but finds instead a number of robots who believe themselves to be human. He discovers that PATHOS-II exists on Earth's Atlantic ocean floor and was established far in the future from Simon's own life, in the 2060s, as a self-sufficient multinational research facility for use in mining, robotic, and space technology. He also sees much in the way of an unfamiliar black, pseudo-organic growth which is spread across every site, has destroyed parts of it, and has even infected both robots and organic lifeforms. This is later revealed to be the outgrowths of the facility's controlling AI, the WAU, which escaped normal control and became manifest through a self-guiding nanomachine substance called "structure gel," formerly used for site repairs.

Development

Section missing!

This section is needed but has not been written yet. You can help Amnesia Wiki out by writing it!

Release

SOMA was released on September 22nd, 2015 for Windows PC, Linux, MacOS, and PS4. It was later released for Xbox One, on December 1st, 2017.

Reception

Reception
Aggregate scores
Aggregator	Score
Metacritic	PC: 84/100
Review scores
Publication	Score
Adventure Gamers
Eurogamer	Recommended
Game Informer	8.5/10
IGN	8.1/10
PC Gamer (UK)	80%
Destructoid	9/10
The Escapist
GamesRadar+
Gamespot	9/10

SOMA garnered consistently positive critical reception.

Section missing!

This section is needed but has not been written yet. You can help Amnesia Wiki out by writing it!

Where SOMA received negative attention largely focused around key-hunting and especially the enemies, often being called frustrating, too easy, or both. GameInformer's Tim Turi wrote that the enemies' "poor vision trivialized a lot of the encounters." Philip Kollar of Polygon stated that, though he doubted "if SOMA will scare people as much as Amnesia did," SOMA was undoubtedly the "stronger game."

Gallery

"Since no images have been made in my particular interest I must attempt to fill that void myself."

This article or its infobox is missing an image. Please help Amnesia Wiki out by uploading one!