[Jach]

Penumbra: Black Plague remains my favorite. It's good enough on its own you don't even need to play the first Penumbra episode if you're time constrained, though the first Penumbra was pretty good too. I played Amnesia later and it was good, but not as much. Haven't gotten around to Machine For Pigs.

SOMA was disappointing. It wasn't bad, but I don't think of it as horror, and its story and characters were the weakest in the lot. But maybe that's just because I'm too familiar with sci-fi covering the same things much better and with better characters, and there's even a non-fiction book analysis of a future which assumes the central tech comes about that's deep enough in exploring implications to put the sci-fi to shame on that metric.

[account42]

I can definitely agree to disagree on which game mechanics are better but calling the SOMA story the weakest among the Frictional games just confuses me. If anything I found the magic ancient alien plot of Amnesia to be super meh. Guess you're not much of a Sci-Fi fan?

[Jach]

On the contrary, I like sci-fi. I'll repeat myself that I think seeing the themes explored in other places more thoroughly and with better characters (I'll give one of many anime examples: Ghost in the Shell; two of many fiction books: Permutation City and to an extent The Golden Age trilogy; a video game: Nier Automata), including a deep non-fiction analysis (http://ageofem.com/) makes me more dismissive of SOMA than perhaps I ought to be. In particular near the ending of SOMA where the thing happens to Simon and he freaks out, despite the same thing happening shortly beforehand and freaking him out, was the most annoying bit that really sealed my distaste. The resolution or not of the sideplot driving the 'horror' was also lazy...

I'll agree Penumbra and Amnesia don't have world-class stories either, but what they do have is told well with better characters, the horror aspect is better, and I more enjoyed the rest of the non-story elements that make up a video game. SOMA easily wins on graphics and slightly less clunky control, if it changed nothing else but its main character it may have even won me over, but as it is I can only call it not bad...

[jjoonathan]

(spoiler warning)

Self-delusion is one of the major themes of SOMA. Simon and Catherine partake. I can understand how it came across as annoying and lazy writing, respectively, but it's not. Well... if the writing was annoying or lazy, it wasn't for those reasons.

As for the book comparison, I also think that's slightly uncharitable. Books go far deeper because the written medium facilitates doing so, but interactive media have their own unique benefits: they can force you to make decisions, prohibiting the kind of lazy fence-sitting that's so easy with passive media. I wouldn't object if someone found the book analysis more valuable, or vice-versa, but without a specific disambiguating goal in mind I don't think it's fair to judge one by its strengths and the other by its weakness.

[account42]

> In particular near the ending of SOMA where the thing happens to Simon and he freaks out, despite the same thing happening shortly beforehand and freaking him out, was the most annoying bit that really sealed my distaste.

I agree that that was a weak point but not because it's unrealistic for Simon to be surprised - that continuity of Simon did after all jump along with every copy so he did not really experience the same thing before. Being so focused on getting on the Ark I find it quite believable that Simon would not think too much about that he would also be staying on the sea floor.

Forcing that reaction onto the player was a mistake though. I think it would have been better use of the medium if Frictional had not added the Ark ending and instead left the player stranded under the ocean with nothing to do and leaving you to come up with your own reaction.

For me that ending didn't take away from the rest of the game though.

> the horror aspect is better

As weird as it is to say about Frictional's games, the actual horror aspect is the least interesting part to me. I guess that also explains why I'm a bit biased against TDD. I do agree that the Penumbra games have great characters though - Red is one of my all time favorite video game characters.