Most of the time I felt a disconnect between what I was doing and the apparent meaning of my actions.
Thematically, it addresses questions related to Cartesian duality, consciousness and existence, and at its best it draws connections between those questions and the experience of hiding from scary creatures and fixing computer systems in an underwater facility. Initially, I thought SOMA would fall into that subgenre but the more I played, the more I realised Frictional's game is more interested in a form of philosophical horror. Psychological horror is a broad term, mostly used to denote a game or film that's more than blood and guts, and one which targets mental and emotional conflict, as well as archetypal doubts and fears, rather than simply threats of death or physical harm. Sometimes all it takes is a single uncanny image, sometimes it's a persuasively uncomfortable bit of psychological insight or trickery. My favourite horror games and films are the ones that scatter seeds in my mind, ready to sprout into nightmares while I'm sleeping, or to keep me looking over my shoulder as the lights go out on the world.
By the final third, when the plot solidified into a palatable but unexceptional form, I was satisfied with the scares along the way and the thick dread that hung in the shadows of the prison section in particular, but there were no lingering tendrils of terror. Dark places, creepy noises, things that hunted in the dark. I've faced my fears and here's wot I think.Īmnesia: The Dark Descent was a ghost train, a haunted house. Now, with SOMA, the studio have switched from gothic castles to science fiction and they're taking us right to the bottom of the ocean.
Five years ago, Frictional released Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a horror game that made us afraid of the water.
0 kommentar(er)
