SOMA: They're (Not) Us

The rambles of a player figuring out if he was actually a character all along

What does it mean to think, to react to the world in a way that someone else doesn’t? What do you feel when you see a sunny day? What do you feel when the rain fills up your week? Is there a moment of your existence that can be captured, stretched out, understood from its gestalt constitutents, extrapolated and assessed to give us some picture of who you are? If I boiled myself down into code, into a string of reactions and actions, if/else conditions, would that be me, even if, beneath the surface, there’s no neurotransmitters conveying a rich sensory input, there’s no limbic system, no endocrinological manipulations of my body that make me feel love, hope, anger, hate, anxiety. Am I still me if an algorithm can simulate all those responses within myself — or is there something innately me about that experience within a body?

It’s usually a sin to start off with a question. Here I’ve started with a multitude. Soma is a game fitting of such a start. It’s a mire of questions. A swamp of ghastly implications about what it means to be human, to be alive. Like most Frictional games, we take the helm of the underpowered, continually-chased player-character who is dragged along a plot they had no willing part in. Trading the Lovecraftian aesthetics for the glitchy biopunk vibe, Soma updates the formula by having us embody what is essentially an empty husk. It is about half-way through the game, after all, that we learn the truth of our being in the game, that we are meat puppet, running off some kind of biomechanical serum that intermingles life with inanimate existence so well that my prior questions about what it means to be human are kind of laughable. Why does being ‘human’ matter? Can’t being human boil down to being alive? That’s what Soma points out at every grisly turn of a oil-splattered corner, of some rotting, fly-infested splotch of blood covering a gel infused with life. They are all human if we are to recognize that the innate thing about being a human is our propensity for life. Our deeply held connections we have with what it means to be alive.

This game is a trick of shadows. Leaving the horrors aside of those poor, bloated corpses who have become exposed to a sentient biomechanical gel that forces life on whoever receives it, even the constant search for meaning in what is a rotting husk of a station can often lead us to the mirrors and tricks of a conclusion: that to be alive is to experience.

But what does that mean? To experience? If to experience is to be alive, then Soma rightly points out that this is too low a bar to have when it comes to so important a topic. Chickens cooped up in the millions are alive, cows in their dairy farms are alive. They exist so as to be fed upon — much like how game characters exist in their own tragic loops for players like myself to obsess philosophically over. This surely cannot be life. This is hell. Life must involve some kind of enjoyment in it—the game constantly shows us what life looks like when the only prerequisite it must meet is to simply exist. Cancer exists. Grows. Eats. Do tumour cells deserve a chance at life? No. And the game routinely confronts us with these moments where the only thing keeping a being alive is some cancerous malformation of space horror. Being kept alive. Forced into goop-leaking tubes that rip apart the lungs to replace them with some cynertic, though alive, interface. Being forced to live is no kind of life either. What must be allowed in any of this is the simple, yet never-to-be-attained, quality of ebing allowed to choose to live.

There are multiple occasions where you can choose to kill something that is clearly being forced to live. The game leans into its own medium, shows us that everyone invoked does not choose to be here. I have inflicted a great harm on them when I boot up the game. There was a moment where this guilt manifested in the real world as well. I hadn’t booted up this game for quite a while (horrors are far too impactful for me sometimes), and when I did, there was a scene where Catherine, our helpful companion trapped digitally in one of our tools, says that she can never get used to being unplugged from a console. Every time she does, her life is ‘paused’. She won’t know this, of course. The same way we don’t know we’ve fell asleep until we’ve woken up. This little tidbit itself is where a lot of horror lies for me in my day-to-day. When my anxiety is at its worst, I’m convinced that if I were to die there and then, I would never know. I would never know if a bullet passed through my head, I’d never know if I had an aneurysm. I’d simply stop.

I’d stop never to be awake again.

This game was special. The gameplay itself wasn’t. Touting instead the simple ‘run and hide’ mechanics of these kinds of horrors, the run and hide and think, I should say, wtih its puzzles (though the puzzles left much to be desired sometimes). But something tells me that Frictional Games didn’t really want the gameplay to pull away from the themes here. it felt much more important to establish the constant worry that fills us players with dread, that when we play a game, we force something into a mimetic life. We are the villains of these stories. If I never booted up Soma, the meteorite that brought that game-world to its knees would never have happened. But I did boot it up, so it did happen. And now that the game is off, all those characters will exist in a paralysed state of hell. They will exist never knowing that I was piloting their every thoughts. I was them. I am them. I remember Simon’s life as much as he did his own. I remember Catharine’s anxieties. Her rotting shell on the floor, slain by her own friends. I remember it all. I am it all. It’s unfair that they will remain trapped in there forever, while some part of them lives on in me. It brings me finally to that delightful phrase, they are (not) us. It exists in two states, a curious balance that the player is never the character but are always being characterised as they play. We empathise and love and hate and live the game as though their lives are our own. We imagine. But in so doing, I have stolen them, whisked them away into a night they will never know the blackness of. They will sleep, but never dream.

Soma reminds me that life isn’t something to question about. It isn’t some grand idea to philosophize over. That life has consequences. Suffering saturates each moment. And for that, I am a monster.

I am a monster because at the end of all this I will say:

Play Soma. Play it and remember that they are not us, as Simon would scream. And yet, they are. They are us and we are them. Only they will never know it.

Treat them with kindness, for, as Schopenhauer would say of all of us who have been dragged kicking and screaming into an existence we never asked for, remember these characters, your kin, as ‘fellow sufferer,’ as ‘compagnon de misères.’

Remember they’re (not) us.