SOMA Preview

Much to the dismay of horror aficionados everywhere, the promising new Silent Hills project, with Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro at the helm, has been canceled . But perhaps there’s another horrific adventure to fill the void. Maybe if we turn to Amensia: The Dark Descent developers Frictional Games, we’ll satisfy our craving for thrills and chills. If you consider yourself a card-carrying member of the horror community and you’re always intrigued by the dark and freaky (you loved Outlast , right?), you should be very interested in Frictional’s latest. It’s called SOMA and after a lengthy development process, it’ll finally be ready to scare the ever-loving crap out of you in September.

You play as Simon, an engineer in an underwater research station who must unravel the mysteries behind the disappearance of the crew. Simon finds himself alone in an unknown part of the station, and he quickly realizes that his situation is beyond dire. The machines have started to exhibit human characteristics and as you might imagine, these characteristics aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy. Some of the robots have even melded with the deep oceanic biology around the station, resulting in nightmarish creatures that will kill anything they see. Simon has to use his own resourcefulness as an engineer and somehow survive every monstrosity flung in his path. The hardest part of the adventure will be familiar to those who enjoyed Amnesia :

There are no weapons.

The player must instead use his or her imagination and innovation to survive. This involves utilizing various gadgets and tools to evade the hunting foes and sometimes, it makes sense to simply hide. The developers say the key is evasion, which should drive the urgency of the game through the roof. Don’t forget that we’ll be trying to solve puzzles and escape the underwater facility the whole time we’re avoiding contact with the denizens of the deep. That won’t be easy but it should be appropriately tense and nerve-wracking. Our immersion will be further intensified by discovering more of the mystery; bodies of workers may contain clues and in fact, these workers had an internal black box installed, so you can actually experience their last moments via audio log. Creepy.