| HN Mirror

I might suggest the two cases differ less in detail than at first blush, in that each describes an effort to pitch one of the game's ludic ('play-wise') or narrative aspects toward a broader audience than might select itself into playing something with such a high-concept story and that could also look like belonging in the sometimes fraught "walking sim" genre. I met System Shock 2 in 1999 and have been so imsim-brained since that I don't even play first-person games with nondiegetic music turned on, so SOMA is kind of a theme park for me, but I fully get why they'd ship a patch to give folks the option. Part of tuning the experience is giving its audience the tools to tune that for themselves; that's one of the things at which games can really excel.

With respect to protagonist vs. player character, that deserves discussion in detail, because it's an important and quite central decision to make those roles distinct. The technique itself isn't novel at all; in games I grant it's not that common, but Doyle for example did the same thing in his Sherlock Holmes stories, whose titular "scientific detective's" intentions and actions largely drive their plots, while we as the audience enjoy our perspective on said plots - and explanations thereof - from the viewpoint of the doughty Dr. Watson. Just as with the Holmes stories, SOMA's has, as you rightly note, a lot of work to do in explaining itself, if it's going to appeal successfully to an audience not already steeped in its ideas. Even in a book, that's better done in dialogue and action than by pseudencyclopedic "info dump," and in a game certainly no less so - indeed much more so, if we as the player are not to start rolling our eyes and skipping cutscenes. Hence placing Catherine in the protagonistic "Holmes" role of primary influence in developing the action of the plot, while Simon, the character who gives the player access to the story, acts as a kind of "Watson."

The parallel is far from exact and shouldn't be overindexed upon, but the technique is the same in both cases and, absent an authoritative comment on the matter from the authors of SOMA, I don't see cause to assume it more accidental in one case than the other. Indeed, absent evidence otherwise, its importance here makes the only sensible assumption that the choice was extremely intentional, in that a player naïve to the game's ideas may well also need them explained several times, and doing that in a game with its own clock demands more artifice than in a novel whose text unfolds exactly at the reader's pace. Even in a game allowing cutscene replay, that's a lot more disjointing to the experience than rereading a paragraph in a novel, or even pausing to think it over for a moment. Artifice, then, is required to obtain an excuse for organically repeating the plot's basics several times from different angles, to help make sure it can sink in and not leave the naïve player with a plaintive "...what the hell?" Giving the player access to the story via a well-meaning but brain-damaged, ignorant, incurious, and mostly useless early-21st-century airhead such as Simon constitutes exactly such artifice, and I regard its implementation here as a minor stroke of genius. SOMA's is a story I'd be proud to have written.

And for those of us not in need of so much handholding on ideas like the difference between mind uploading and consciousness transfer...well, this is meant to be an existential horror story, after all, what with the extinction-level event immediately following the prologue in our (and Simon's) subjective experience. Irritating though his obtuseness can be, try to have a heart for the poor dumb ox, won't you? It's good emotional exercise. After all, he just thought he was going in for some kind of experimental MRI or something. It isn't really his fault he finds himself in this situation so far beyond his comprehension, both in circumstance and in the demands with which it taxes the character of those present.

You or I would speak and act much differently, no doubt. (One hopes. TBI and fear can both change a person for the lesser.) But the story isn't trying to be about what you or I would say and do. I think that choice improves the result, which I admit is slightly surprising; in this sense it resembles Ian McEwan's Solar, which I cordially despise exactly for its viewpoint character's constant venal fecklessness, but that guy had a lot of choices which Simon really doesn't, and I think that makes a real difference in how the characters deserve to be read. That as far as it goes is opinion to which the usual dictum applies, but I do mean to push back on the idea that the game's story is like it is in any way by mistake.

(If nothing else, good grief, think how much complexity would be alleviated by not voicing Simon. No VA to find and work with, none of his dialogue to write and accommodate in the narrative, no ludonarrative dissonance to attend - Simon cost the devs a lot of money to implement the way they did! If that core a decision to both story and production had been made by mistake, it might be hard to understand how the same people who screwed that up so bad could get so much else so right, you know?)