copy paste soul delete

Happy Hallows Evening All! 

It's October, it's the season to shriek, scream and flee in terror and as such for the second year in a row I've decided to make it a horror gaming month. So I've been clearing some horror games off the backlog which I will discuss in due course but for this entry, my mind is going back to a game I played last year. A game that might just be one of the finer horror experiences I've ever played. I want to talk about SOMA. 

Spoilers ahead.

It's not the longest game I have ever played, nor the most mechanically complex. I wouldn't say it has the best characterisation or plot either but it tapped into something quite profound with a deft touch not often found amongst the bombast of blockbuster games. It skillfully navigates the age old question of what it means to be human. Press P to ponder.

Now obviously this is not new territory for storytelling or science fiction but it's clear a lot of love and attention went into the making of this game. A year after playing it and I still find myself contemplating it's finer moments. What starts with a man waking up in his apartment in the here and now soon takes us to somewhere altogether very different very quickly. There in a sealed dark metallic hell you find some very human voices coming out of some very robotic bodies. All speaking as if nothing is amiss and sounding like they are very much real people. 

It's a great 'what the what?' start to the game that only piles on the weirdness from there. Amongst the damp, murky darkness of said base, you chance upon someone who seems to be aware of their robotic predicament. A scientist who serves as your main source of exposition for the rest of the game. You see, if it wasn't already apparent, things have have gone very, very wrong.

Many years from now a comet has hit the Earth and when the proverbial hit the fan nearly everyone was wiped out with it save the isolated pocket of humanity toiling away at a space gun at the bottom of the ocean. Quickly surmising that the end of days has come and gone, the few humans left here deal with some weighty questions on survival and essential humanity. Here is where a somewhat typical apocalypse becomes something a bit special.

It all boils down to their project in progress when the comet hit. The aforementioned self aware scientist machine lady devises upon a scheme of digital immortality in lieu of the suddenly more depressing real life. Upload a copy of your brain to the matrix and once everyone is on board with this, shoot the matrix into space to complete the ascension. 

Not everyone is on the same page when it comes to this idea. It's not a transfer of consciousness but a copy and paste job on the human soul. This is where SOMA became something quite special in my view. Where it excelled past an effective mood piece and became an altogether more thought provoking journey. Upon commiting a copy of themselves to the digital void, some opt to check out permanently and end their flesh and blood selves. This is in an attempt to maintain some essential notion of continuity of the self, by refusing to exist as merely one of multiple versions of themselves.

It's the core theme of this game in many ways. At multiple points your character undergoes the same copy and paste job and nothing beats the unreal eerieness of hearing signs of life that sound like yourself coming from a body that is no longer your own. Indeed much of the core tension of the narrative comes from the main character unsuccessfully trying to wrap this idea around their head and only coming to terms with this in what remains one of the darkest endings I've ever played.

Along the way we get an AI hell-bent on keeping people alive at any cost, former members of the base who are not so much out of their mind as in near orbit around it and a nagging insistence that your self is just a copy of a copy of a copy. All disguised as a horror game where you spend much of your time running, hiding and keeping your head together against the prevailing tides of madness. Not a bad effort by any stretch and a solid contender for a high spot in my all time favourite games list. 

Rare does a game linger with me you know? It's final moments reached that special kind of something that stayed with me for the long after and remain even now. Such material could make for a good film or a thoughtful read but in this one particular case it happened to make for an excellent game. 

Until next time.