Soma is an existential psychological thriller that puts you in body of Simon Jarrett, a young man in his late twenties working at a comic shop somewhere in Toronto. Suffering brain damage, an aftermath of a car crash that took the life of his friend and coworker Ashley, he decides to undergo a medical examination that seemingly lands him in in an undersea facility of unknown origin.
PATHOS-II as it is later revealed to be called, is a self sufficient sprawling complex of multiple undersea sites built for the purpose of maritime and space exploration research. Simon makes his way through the unknown corridors of PATHOS searching for answers to what has happened to him and the occupants of the place he is currently stranded in.
Mere one third into his journey, Simon finds outs about the circumstances that led to his arrival on PATHOS and his purpose in all of it. SOMA sacrifices its plot for the sake of being able to soak the player in a pseudo-existential soup of poorly fleshed out philosophy that players are going to make their mind strongly about the first time it comes up. The game presents the player with moral choices that have no impact on the game whatsoever, or are decided for the player in order to expose them to the existential soup some more.
Due to circumstances Simon has found himself in at PATHOS-II it is very difficult for the player to care about what is happening. With nobody but a disembodied voice of Catherine Chun talking at him via his Omnitool, players find themselves alone dredging through flooded corridors of PATHOS-II with little enthusiasm in reaching the end of it all.
SOMA is a game of simple mechanics, pressing buttons and lever pulling. Because of the lack of combat, items and meaningful mechanics, the only thing stopping players from reaching the end of the game is a sprawling corridor of locked doors and malfunctioned passages that require alternate ways to be found. Unlike Amnesia and the games before it, SOMA does not use its physics engine for anything meaningful, save for the two times the player has to smash through a window, one time of which is right at the beginning of the game. The game seems to choose to not bore players with puzzles as there is a grand total of about three which take roughly 30 seconds to figure out.
At the start of the game the player is present with their inventory and upgrading their Omnitool hinting at the game's soon to be found depth, an illusion that dissipates quickly as the players realize aforementioned concepts are not employed in the game even a single time after that.
Because of the lack of meaningful inventory, or stats. There are no consumables or items to be found in the game's many drawers and lockers. The game does not waste your time about deciding which glowing item is used on what since you will rarely ever hold an amount greater than one. To spare you of the effort of thinking and to defeat the purpose of the game's inventory, Simon automatically pulls out usable items whenever he reaches close vicinity of the place at where they are needed.
SOMA boasts with some intriguing enemy designs, that moderately succeed in making players uneasy. It does not alway telegraph the behavior of enemies beforehand, leading to trial an error of deaths as Simon is forced to find out what the different enemies react to. Unfortunately, since there is so little to find, players may often be tempted to brute force their way to the one door that is relevant rather than try and look for hidden postcards and logs risking death. Despite being linear, one may lose track of the objective thanks to a lack of log and relative uselessness of Mrs Chun.
SOMA is a game that tries to say a lot, however without surprises up its sleeve and with the ending revealed mere two hours into the game it fails to say anything much at all. SOMA sacrifices its plot and pacing to give the player space to think about, unfortunately it fails in bringing up a topic relevant enough. Without compelling mechanics there is very little to entertain players to press forward, its existential questions are shallow 5th grader lunch break talk that are repeated so much the player is going to mutter "I don't care" the next time the game attempts to bring them up.