Soma: The Horror Game that asks what defines the human race.
What does it mean to be human? Is it our ability to critically think and communicate, our carbon-based bodies, or our spirit? Frictional Games pose this question in their 2015 survival horror game Soma. Horror games are commonly known to be all about the jump scares and the adrenaline rush of being chased by a monster. Frictional Games manages to deliver all those staples while asking one of the most intensely debated philosophical questions of all time in a truly thought-provoking way.
We see the player’s character, Simon, go on a journey of reflection and horror as he travels across the bottom of the ocean through a series of connected stations, unaware of how he arrived there. To fully grasp the power of his journey, we have to go back to the beginning of Simon’s story.
The player wakes up as Simon, who lives in Toronto in 2015. The player wanders around Simon’s apartment searching for some fluid that he has to drink for a brain scan he has later that day. After he falls asleep during his routine brain scan, he wakes up in an unfamiliar room with his doctor nowhere to be found. He starts exploring and realizes that he is on an underwater research station. As he continues to explore, he meets robots going about their normal tasks convinced that they are human, as well as aggressive robots that seem to be partially organic. He establishes contact with a human at another station and sets off to meet up with them and figure out what is going on. He travels to the next station by walking along the ocean floor. Confused by how he is able to breathe and withstand the pressure, he quickly explains it away as the suit he woke up in.
When he meets up with the human, Catherine, he discovers she herself is yet another robot and is completely self-aware of that fact. Catherine explains that it is the year 2104 and Earth was struck by a comet. The surface was rendered uninhabitable and that all that is left of humanity were those on the underwater station, Pathos-II. Despite the grim situation, Catherine and the crew on Pathos-II had a solution to preserve humanity. They created a self-sustaining computer simulation and uploaded the remaining humans into this “Ark”. In order to launch the Ark into space though, Catherine and Simon must make it past the WAU, an AI developed to preserve humanity, and the creator of the synthezoids chasing Simon.
Simon’s story ends in tragedy, after defeating the WAU and getting the ark into the launch tube, he and Catherine upload themselves into the Ark and launch it into space successfully. As it hurtles past the atmosphere, Simon and Catherine realize that they were left behind. Catherine tries to explain that it wasn’t a one-to-one transfer, but a copy of their consciences, but at this point, Simon has had a full mental break. He has realized that all of his struggles have been pointless and that he will die alone at the bottom of the ocean. As the final nail in the coffin, the panel that Catherine is plugged into shorts out and she dies. Leaving Simon with only darkness, pure despair, and utter solitude.
The game fades to black as the credits roll, leaving us shocked and hurting for Simon. After the credits roll and the player is still reeling in shock, one final scene appears. Simon wakes up under a bright sun, and the player explores and discovers Catherine standing in awe before a giant city, Ark. Their copies made it, perfect in every way to the original, and they live on in paradise without a second thought of their original selves that they left behind.
Over the next few days, I kept thinking about Soma and the question it posed, what defines humanity? As I thought more and more about Soma I discovered three possible answers that the game proposes. First, Simon’s view at the beginning. He feels that humanity must be something more than just copied data, no matter how perfectly copied, shoved into a mechanical body. Second, Catherine is at peace with being a copy of herself in a mechanical shell. Finally, the WAUs perspective. The WAU was created to preserve humanity by any means possible. It found the organic synthezoids and zombified creatures incapable of independent thought acceptable forms of humanity merely due to their organic human tissue.
So which view, if any, is right? What makes us human is a question that philosophers have been trying to answer since the dawn of time and yet Frictional Games takes the question and makes their players think about it in such a way that will leave more questions than answers.
For example, let’s look at Simon, a man who was ripped from the year 2015 and brought back as a “copy” almost 100 years later as if no time had passed. Even if you take the fact that a comet had wiped out almost all of humanity, all of his friends and loved ones would have died by this point, leaving him in an alien world all alone. The toll that would take on the human psyche is something we have seen depicted many times in movies, such as Captain America, but would take a much deeper traumatic toll in real life and comes with many ethical implications.
One such ethical question that is addressed in Soma is the life of the original and the copy. The original Simon went and lived his entire life with his friends and family. Meanwhile, the copy of Simon’s last memory was getting the brain scan and waking up in the laboratory eighty-nine years later. He had no sense of time passing in between those memories due to the fact he essence/code was merely paused during that time. In addition to the psychological toll that void in time would exert, it also poses the ethical question of sending this preserved form of a person unprepared to function in the brand new world that awaits them. Ideally, there would be infrastructure to help guide and acclimate them into their new life, but that infrastructure would have to be so in-depth and complicated it poses the question, could it be done in a way that truly benefits the copy and leads to a fulfilling “second” life.
Catherine has an interesting and quite frankly, controversial take on the whole morality of the situation. She merely seems indifferent to the entire way of thinking, even as a robot herself. To Catherine, it is merely a tool of survival for humanity. She sees a situation where humanity has been pushed to survive, and to question the morality of the actions taken will only cause unnecessary problems.
The ends justifying the means is often a scary principle. My first thought is always of the United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima to avoid the estimated 250,000+ American lives it would have cost to take the mainland of Japan by force. Historically when I think of actions taken on a scale of this relative to this level, I can’t say I agree with any of those taken, and yet when faced with the extinction-level event Catherine is presented with, I can’t say I disagree with her decision entirely. Given the same situation, I would more than likely end at the same result. Where I start to question it is the result of moving from organic material to purely mechanical. What aspects of humanity would be lost, if any? It is a question I drove myself crazy with for days after finishing Soma and writing this piece. While many people smarter than me consider these questions for a living, I don’t think we can truly know the answer, at least not yet. If for no other reason than that the technology doesn’t exist and we have no examples to look to on that level.
Finally, you have the WAU with the most unique, and quite frankly most startling, view of humanity. Humanity is nothing more than organic tissue. The WAU’s job was to preserve humanity and did so by mixing organic tissue with robotic components to control it via a hive mind similar to the Borg from Star Trek. So that poses the question, are we merely blood and bones? Are our thoughts and emotions nothing more than electrical impulses? If that were true where do we derive meaning? It throws out the importance of so many things in our day-to-day lives. The WAU’s view of humanity in a way is a common view of people’s perception of life taken to the ultimate extreme. That view being that when we all die nothing we will have done will have ultimately had no importance in the world. The WAU just that just a step further by removing the ability for unnecessary actions such as thought and desire.
At the end of Soma, Frictional Games leaves the player as internally conflicted as it is terrified at the monsters you face in-game. It leaves you wondering what makes you who you are in an impactful way without ever actually answering any of those questions. It pushes the limits of storytelling in a horror game in a way I have never seen done so beautifully.
