First off I would love to give huge amounts of credit to her voice actress, Nell Mooney because she absolutely crushed the performance of Catherine. She made her sound perfect. She felt like a real human talking and had conversations feeling alive.

Okay. I want to talk about Catherine and why I love her inclusion in this game. A big reason I love Catherine in this game is because it's unique. In most horror games you would be by yourself and would have no person there to help and guide you, non the less talk to and have a friend. So having her be there makes the game feel 100 times better to me.

And I believe this is because of how they do Catherine as an AI. Any other game Catherine would be an AI you slot in your head and is constantly able to talk to you. Which would very quickly ruin any horror and suspense the atmosphere and game is trying to make. Making it so you can only talk to Catherine in safe spaces and by plugging your Omni tool in is an AMAZING choice. Because that way you are still alone you are by yourself most of the time walking around facing monsters. So when you see a room you can plug in Catherine you feel safe. Which is an amazing atmosphere and characterization in my opinion.

What really sold me is her character. Catherine is amazing well acted. I love her jokes, her teasing, her sarcasm and how she reacts to things. She is her own character and when you talk to her it feels like you're having a real life conversation. She doesn't downplay the situation or lie to Simon. The only times she does manipulate or lie to Simon is when she knows he will react in a bad way to a necessary choice. She does care about Simon but she also cares about the ark and those things very obviously conflict with themselves. Everytime I talked to Catherine it didn't feel like she was a plot device or was setting me on another wild goose chase. It felt like she was genuinely important and was going through the same situation. She reacts and feels bad when things don't go as she expects or planned. She hates having to make the choices she does but still does them because she needs too. She gets all excited and nerdy when she sees the arks prototype. These are all amazing characteristics that make me love her character. How she talks and reacts to Simon feels very real.

I also love how she reacts to Simon's anger and being upset. She doesn't want to upset Simon. She doesn't like that and wants to avoid it because she cares about Simon's well being and health.

But I also love that she has boundaries and limits. Her main priority is the ark. Above all she needs to send it to space and she won't let anything stop her even Simon. She's willing to go down to the abyss by herself to do it. And I love that because she's actually got motivation that she's herself cares about. It doesn't feel like she's only there for Simon. She's there for things for herself as well and has her own motivations that eventually become Simon's as well.

I love her character and how she's done in this game because she feels like her own character despite being in the Omni tool. And I love how the devs did her because while she's a huge presence and is there she's not overstaying her welcome and is only there in specific areas.

I love this character and game so much! As well as it's choices! But I want to remind you all that I haven't finished the game so please no spoilers! I only now have reached the abyss so no spoilers there please 🙏

Once again please no spoilers! Only at the abyss so I would love to experience it myself!

But yeah as someone who's neuro divergent and loves Catherine it always pains me to hear Simon yelling at her and her reaction. She reminds me a lot of me when it comes to arguments. Plus to me she's always been so helpful and sweet and seems to genuinely care about Simon even if the ark is more important.

So whenever Simon starts yelling at her I feel extremely protective and upset over it because I feel like she's trying her best and she knows what will make Simon upset and tries to avoid it. While Catherine obviously has her own goals she cares about Simon so having Simon constantly react the way he does when she's the only reason we have a goal and companion is upsetting.

Yes I am human why do you ask? Oh my red eyes and lack of face? I'm just really really mad rn. Trust me.

Follow up of my last post about SOMA, I got to omnicron.

And I got to the part in SOMA where we copy our brain into the power suit. First off insanely fucked up thing to do in the first place. I understand Catherines choice, it was 100 necessary for their goal. It was a necessary evil and the fact she hated doing it helped.

Hearing Simon yell at her made me upset because she has no choice. I'd probably make the same choice in her shoes. She needs to get to the ark.

But secondly, I made the choice to keep OG simon alive because I believe it should be his choice whether to live or die. I can pull the plug, sure. But I'd want it to be my choice when OG simon wakes up in a few days he will be alone but he should be able to choose whether he wants to keep living or end his suffering. Because he could continue to live and find peace if he tried. And if he wants it to end... He can do that just the same.

I'd love to hear the choice you all made and why because it just felt there wasn't a right choice. But I felt it should be OG simons choice. But I'd love to hear whether you killed him or kept him alive and why. So let me know!

Also still playing through and just got to the ocean floor so no spoilers please!

Also still no spoilers please as I'm still playing through!

For me the proxy's stopped being scary as soon as after you fall down the elevator shaft you get grabbed by a proxy in a scripted cutscene and it doesn't kill you. To me they went from being actually scary things that could kill Simon, to just game mechanics there to slow me down.

Like they still are horrifying to look at obviously, but they went from something that felt like a real threat to the story and Simon's life to something I just had to avoid to slow down progress. Am I being weird? Does anyone else get this?

Youtube says its for “sexual content” does anyone have a backup of it?

Having no way of distracting the \\*** and having to literally sprint past and grab the power pack as she is standing right behind you is imo the most terrifying moment in the entire game.

This is they only enemy you cannot hide or run from, you have to walk right up to it and be at its mercy.

cant really draw sorry

The ending didn't come as a huge shock to me. Being an outside observer, I was able to grasp the concept being presented from the moment we created Simon-3. Was I surprised that the POV didn't switch immediately to Simon-4? A little. But ultimately, I knew Simon-3 wasn't making it.

That being said, I understand Simon's refusal to accept that it isn't a coin-flip, and that it is truly just a copy-and-paste. And I do think that this is him refusing to accept it. Similar to how he knows that he is a robot, but his brain doesn't want to think about it. Subconsciously, I think he understands the brain scan, but he just doesn't want to think about it. Anyways, the events of SOMA all happen in less than a day for Simon. He woke up in the morning in Toronto, then suddenly found himself in PATHOS-II. It's no wonder that he's having some trouble keeping up with everything.

Also, heavy disagree on the Catherine hate. I agree she omitted the truth from Simon just to placate him. But she had no way of knowing how Simon would react if she told him the truth. She knows that every other brain scan that learns the truth either crashes the system or goes completely insane. I don't think she enjoyed doing it, but Simon was her only chance to get the ARK into space. It was realistically her only option just to placate him and keep him going.

If you're interested in a random stranger's thoughts on the rest of the game, they're here.

I'm a huge fan of horror. But my biggest fear in life is clearly water, the depths, and scary fishes. I've played Subnautica and it was a wonderful but stress inducing and frightening experience. The fishes of Dark Bramble in Outer Wilds still haunts some of my episodes of paranoia, and Bioshock 1 or 2 didn't scared me at all.

So, now that a friend gifted me Soma, I want to know: is Soma as intense in the thalassophobia as i've heard, or will I be able to play it ? No spoilers please

I've been playing through this game for the first time after putting it off for years (it was on game pass then got taken off so I bought it) and after playing security breach, poppy playtime and so many other mascot horrors or crappy slop Roblox horror with my friends, I get it. I get why this game is so hyped.

This is the first horror game in years to actually catch my attention and have me scared and Intrigued in the story. I feel for the characters. I get scared. I get caught off guard. I love everything about this game. The conversations feel so human and real. The jokes and how Catherine and Simon interact. The mystery everything makes me love this game.

Still wakes the deep will always be my favorite but this is slowly getting tied for first place with it and I'm probably not even half way through. It's worth every dime. I love everything about this game.

The story is amazing and I love the atmosphere and monster design. I usually don't feel scared but I feel unnerved just by the atmosphere and the monster designs are amazing.

I love this game. I get the hype. I get the glaze. It is genuinely that game. And it has blown all horror expectations out of the water for me.

I’m looking for a playlist where Mauler plays SOMA; I used to have one bookmarked, but I can’t find it.
Does anyone have a link?
Thank you my massives, it’s much appreciated.

In the game Arc Raiders, one of the newest quests has you investigate project that was going to make androids be more human, the project is called Pathos. This has to be a reference to this game.

SPOILERS

What I mean: the ARK project is about taking the mind of a few "lucky" people and shooting it into space, letting them live in a VR Chat server in space either until it breaks or humanity rebuilds and goes out and retrieves them. Being critical, it can be called a selfish project. They aren't really saving humanity, just themselves. Naming it "The ARK" like its Noah's Ark is ill-fitting, as they aren't gonna go back and repopulate the earth later. They hope someone else might rebuild. Being empathetic, its natural to not want to die. (Now I know that the people uploaded to the ARK didn't really survive since they were copied, but it also seems that most of the supporters of the ARK didn't want to accept this either).

On the other hand we have the WAU. Its definitely imperfect, and the victims of it are, well, victims. Every time it interacts with a human its a new experiment. It knows it has to "Save humanity", but it still has to learn what that actually means. It leads to some pretty disgusting and horrifying fates, however it actually might have a shot at finding a way to save humanity. Maybe as half fish-half gel people that can live underwater. Maybe as robots. Its clear humanity probably can't stay in our old form if we are to live underwater, so its trying to make new people. Its almost noble, but I can't blame any of its test subjects for being against it.

I know there's a million ways to analyse SOMA and I'm probably not the first to see it like this, I just thought its an interesting idea.

I’m wobbly because I got hurt earlier, so I'm not fast enough to escape the monster after pulling the 3 cables. I would like to heal but all the pods on the ship seem to be disabled, and I haven't even used most of them. Am I supposed to enable the pods somehow to heal before pulling the cables?

i started playing soma yesterday and now i was searching for lambada but i got stuck. is there any way without deleting my save data and start from beginning? i accedently saved und closed the game and when i started the game new i was on the same spot still stuck...

edit: sorry i just realised that you can load in the menu the last save point so i just lost like 15 minutes but everthing good

Hey all,
I decided I wanted to finally dive into soma and play it during the spooky season. But I’m running into a weird issue. I locked it to 60fps in the Nvidia control panel, and followed guides online, but it always feels a little sluggish? On top of that after maybe 20 minutes or so it’ll just drop from a locked 60 to like 12 fps. Is there any settings or anything I can do to get it to feel better?

I have a 5080 and an AMD 9800x3D cpu. I know sometimes older games or engines can have issues with current hardware. I can honestly deal with the slight sluggish feeling. It might just be the game. But the drops to 12 fps are brutal

Lambda

- Catherine’s comments on the state of Lambda she is able to view:

“What happened to the dock, to the welcome center? All the cameras show static. It’s…it’s so strange.”

When did this level of damage happen to Lambda that Scan Cath has no idea what could have caused it? I assume it’s not from the aftershocks. I assume if the site was THAT damaged from aftershocks they would have evacuated crew sooner AND that Catherine would have known since Scan Cath was created after the comet. I don’t know, it’s a line that always sits eerily in that scene for me. 

Delta

- Finding Komorebi in the annex - her blackbox gives us a dialogue where we hear her trying to warn Strasky not to allow Akers to enter Theta. Beside her is a tablet with pictures of the mutated Akers. Strasky could not hear her. The photos could not be sent. Theta is the next stop on OUR mission and now we know something very, very bad likely awaits us. Also just so sad to see Komorebi use her last breaths to try and warn her crewmates - she tried so hard.

- Frictional in general does a fantastic job of letting players know storywise what we will be expecting in later sections. They let us know just enough to piece out what we can expect to see and it STILL winds up being terrifying. FUCK YOU AKERS.

Theta

- The music that plays upon first reaching Theta - the ominous, droning horns that blast as you look upon the largest of Pathos’s sites. Its gargantuan doors slowly opening, like a mouth, swallowing you into itself. It’s a MASSIVE moment, finally reaching Theta which makes Simon’s like of,

“Well, Catherine, we found Theta.”

very chilling to me. This site - the LARGEST, most populated, should not be as much of a ghost town as every other site we have been to so far. 

- All of the hints and clues about what happened to the crew, why they all moved to the shuttle station, etc., are so scary and do so much to build the atmosphere of Theta. Akers and the proxies make for scary moments but Catherine’s lines,

“Why would they abandon the gate? And the habitat?...Why move downstairs…just labs and offices…I don’t like this at all…”

REALLY amp up the wrongness of why every human left at this site decided to congregate downstairs for some reason.

Omicron

- The first shot of the headless corpses on the ground when you finally enter Omicron, chefs kiss moment right there, chefs kiss chefs kiss CHEFS KISS. What a sucker punch to what should be a moment of relief of finally getting inside.

Tau

- The screen in the dive room showing another active power suit…in the site with you…

- JIN FUCKING YOSHIDA MY BELOVED, FAV MONSTER OF THE GAME, FAV SITE OF THE GAME

- The overall vibe of fatigue and desperation over Tau, as people listlessly wait to essentially starve to death.

- Sarah’s genuine shock that she is likely the last human left alive  - how much hope had she been still holding onto? That someone from the plateau may still find a way to her? To bring her back up somehow? To help launch the ARC? To…just have some company? 

Phi

- Bright, clean, white - just as empty. Just as dead. 

- The only site with an instruction to return to a previous one (the sticky note saying to go back to Tau because all food supplies have already been moved there.) But…we know there is nothing to go back to. We have only one path forward and we have reached the end of it.

Hey everybody. I recently seen the Ontos trailer and I decided to get back to Soma after having it rot in my steam library for years. I played the whole thing blind. Now, hear me out.

I kind of regret not playing this game back in 2015, because it would have probably felt different back then. The themes and the ending did not caught me off guard I saw that coming even before Simon 2 got copied and killed/abandoned in Pathos II. Why? Probably because in the last 11 years I consumed a lot of media that took this idea and explored it in many ways. So in way, the whole "digital mind copy" felt outdated to me.

First popular example might be Black Mirror TV series, back in 2014 the special Christmas episode popularized the unsettling idea of a digital mind copied from a real one, the same idea was explored one season later. The questions are the same, is that digital copied mind you? Or someone else? You share the same memories but since the moment the copy is done you become two different people? Is it ethical to torture that digital mind? What about killing it? Is it alive?

Another example would be Cyberpunk 2077, the enneagram of Johnny Silverhand is a copy of his mind, not him, or is it? Is Johnny alive? When Johnny takes V's body in one of the endings who and what the hell is that person?

Maybe even Rick and Morty. When Morty makes a mess a turn everybody in monsters after they all fall in love with him, he abandons his universe to replace another morty in real life and pretend like nothing happened, but those people he lives with are they really his family or not? Even if they share the exact memories till that moment?

So maybe if I played the game back then it would have been way more impressive to me, in any case I still enjoyed very much and the concept of WAU is something I never saw in media before, an AI reinterpreting what it means to be a living creature and trying to reshape organisms to "optimize" them is absolutely cool and terryfing, other than very original. The whole WAU part kinda says that no matter how advanced an AI could be, it won't think like humans and left alone it would possibly do things no one could imagine or want when they programmed it.

So yeah, great game, but maybe I should have played when it came out to enjoy it better.

​

A great excuse to revisit this game , play it in VR!!

Okay, I know the game didn't have the ARK properly thought out, so why don't we do it instead?

1) The first issue everyone has with the matrix is that they know they are inside the matrix. Make it so that you don't know that you are in a simulation. Just like the one you are in right now ;)

2) Make the Ark's inside to be procedurally generated. Virtually infinite so it never feels like a prison.

3) Make the satellite in a way, that can interact with the outside world. Land on places, self repair, get fuel, improve it's own hardware. I image it to be more like the grey goo rather than a satellite. And make it travese the universe. And if it encounters any sentient life-forms, stealth scan them too and add them to the simulation wile also leaving the 'real ones' intact.

4) You can't create the perfect matrix without extensive testing, it will need to be updated from time to time, in order to do that: Create a janitor A.I. With a mix of every habitant's own brain scan that is removed from all human needs (boredom, requiring social interactions, etc) and make it so that it can monitor the well-being of the habitants and make reasonable adjustments to the simulation and create content if needed. So basically a benevolent A.I. God that knows you because it IS you.

Came across a video that offered an interesting perspective on why they'd choose to exist on Pathos II instead of the Ark, so I thought I'd share it, as well as my comment on the video.

VIDEO TITLE: Why I'd Choose SOMA's Nightmare Over Its Paradise
VIDEO LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQAm2TMVXvY

MY COMMENT:

Fascinating consideration about never being able to leave [the Ark]. Perhaps Catherine has the ability to erase a scan from a control panel within the Ark if they would prefer not to exist. I could see an entire sequel game based around things going wrong in the Ark in some unexpected way. What if you had a fight because someone kept stealing and eating your breakfast strawberry sprinkle donut every day for 500 years in a row, and finally you snapped and deleted their consciousness when Catherine wasn't looking? Catherine may have accidentally created the torment nexus...

One of the things I find disturbing is how much people obsess over which version would be "you" or "the real you". The word "copy" implies less value - something "not original", which I find really problematic when making a choice like this. Perhaps "mirror-being", "mirror", or "gen-con" (generated consciousness) might be a better name without as much implied value reduction. None have any more or less value than any other - as soon as you copy over it is a different, wholly legitimate person. I feel like the game makes that painfully obvious. It's a bit concerning how much control people want over what happens to their copy without consideration or treating them like any other conscious person. They would want the ability to decide for themselves, but power off Simon 2's battery without a thought.

I go back and forth on what to do with some of the choices in the game - unfortunately, we do not get the option to explain Amy or Robin's situations to them (so they can consent to a choice). The scary thing isn't that killing or not killing can both be justified, it's how many people make a quick choice without any consideration. "I wouldn't want to exist like this" isn't a justification, because this isn't you. They might want to, and that should make it a much more difficult choice.

For me, the most difficult consideration is that every form of life we extinguish may be further eliminating any chance of that life better evolving moving forwards. The WAU undeniably creates suffering, which should be avoided as much as possible (of course)...but how many human beings have suffered throughout human history for us to have our existence? Is it selfish for us to be grateful that they suffered so that we could exist? Is it selfish for them to not wish to suffer, ending the chance for us to exist? When discussing the potential survival of an entire species/form of life, is there any amount of suffering that is too great, or is it absolutely necessary when weighing millions of potential fulfilling lives in the future?

I don't have an answer. It is an incredibly difficult question to wrangle with. I think I'd lean towards the survival of the species, but that's easy to say when I wouldn't have to be the one to suffer. If I knew I was a lynchpin in the future survival of humanity, how much suffering could I endure? How depressing would it be that humanity would likely never understand the extent of my sacrifice? Fascinating stuff to consider.