#frictional

About a year ago I played Soma, a horror game from Frictional Studios, who are best known for the YouTube screamfest favourite Amesia: The Dark Descent. While it certainly has problems, Soma was an intensely immersive experience for me and I maintain that it has one of the best stories of any game in recent memory. Key to the world and story’s appeal, though, are the choices the player has to make along the way.

“Player choice” has been a marketing buzz term for a while and it’s not hard to see why. People love games like Fallout, where you can explore a sandbox and get involved in countless little adventures that feel personal because no two players will encounter each obstacle in the same order. Even a choice that’s less of a moral quandary and more of a practical one can carry a lot of emotional weight. But a big problem I’ve railed on before is how developers have a tendency to undermine the gravity of these moments by needlessly “gamifying” them. The classic example is Mass Effect, which has some genuinely clever and ethically grey scenarios…but completely kills the mood by labelling each GOOD and BAD. Then there’s Infamous, which withholds power from the player unless they commit fully to either a good or evil extreme, rendering the choices effectively pointless except to provide a slightly different experience on a second playthrough.

To put it simply, less really is more when it comes to forcing your audience to make a moral decision. The Witcher quite notoriously forces you to make decisions where there is no clear cut right answer, and after a while you realise that if the answer seems too obvious, it’s usually because you’re missing a piece of the puzzle. Even if the actual consequences of a given choice is minimal, you feel personally responsible.

Soma is something of a master at this. The entire game begs the question of how we define humanity, consciousness, and what we’re willing to sacrifice for the greater good, and along with the huge, plot-essential decisions that people have been getting into heated arguments about ever since the game’s release, there are also optional conundrums which are easily missed but no less interesting. Soma is just remarkably good at making players feel guilty, as evidenced by the many many let’s plays where you can witness the fascinating display of a real person agonisingly trying to decide the fate of a videogame character. Even the fact that there’s only one ending feels deliberate to me, as the tragedy of (this particular) Simon realising he’s still trapped at the bottom of the ocean will be contextualised differently depending on what choices you made up until that point.

And that’s another idea I don’t see talked about much: sometimes giving a player a choice that turns out to be meaningless can, in fact, have meaning. I won’t spoil the specifics, but one of the Metal Gear games ends with the protagonist killing a major character, and the moment is made more significant because the cutscene pauses until the player presses a button. The same button they’ve been using to shoot people for the whole game. Mechanically, it’s a dead-simple interaction with no options or skill requirement. But emotionally it’s a great addition because it draws attention to the fact that the player is complicit in a death which goes on to have wide ramifications for the entire Metal Gear timeline.

Then there are games where there’s a fairly obvious “good” ending and a fairly obvious “bad” ending, but maybe the good option requires some kind of sacrifice. This situation can feel half-arsed, as if the bad ending was tacked on with little thought, but when done right it can arguably add weight even if 99% of people choose the obvious good ending. If saving the world requires you to sacrifice a friend, as per the case of one game whose name I won’t give away, then ethically that’s a pretty straightforward “lesser evil” scenario, but it becomes more meaningful if you still have the option to save that friend, even if doing so would necessitate a greater evil. Sacrificing your friend is the only real moral option, and dramatically it makes more sense than “and then I learned nothing and let the world go to shit”, but like pulling the trigger in Metal Gear, having to make the choice to sacrifice your friend makes you complicit.

Soma ultimately gives you no choice at the very end. Simon #1 died in 2015 with no idea what his brain scan would be used for, Simon #3 is stuck alone under the sea, and Simon #4 lives out his days in paradise on the Ark. But the fate of Simon #2, the cyborg corpse that WAU activated and who copied himself into a power suit to create Simon #3, is entirely up to the player. Did you leave him to wake up alone surrounded by monsters (but at least have some say in his life), or did you euthanize him while he slept? His fate has no bearing on the rest of the plot, which I’ve seen some call lazy design, but I think that’s half the point because it makes it a pure question of mercy. Is it kinder to kill him, or give him a chance to make the decision himself? Simon #3 isn’t even responsible for this situation, as it was Simon #2 who made a copy of himself. You have no standing in his life so there’s no cynical option that you stand to profit from. The only consequence for you is your own conscience.

But imagine Simon #3, whose fate is to inevitably be trapped in the ruins of Phi, slowly realising, in the moments after he fired the Ark into space, that he hadn’t fully appreciated the ramifications of being a potentially immortal robot stuck alone at the bottom of the ocean, until he found himself in that very situation.

And if you enjoyed this post, I have many other similarly fabulous game articles you might find pleasurable.  

You might also get a kick out of my Soma let’s play, featuring my blind first impressions of the entire game from spooky start to freaky finish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us0jf_dRSCM