SOMA AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR

SOMA is the most philosophically serious horror game ever made, and I'll fight anyone who disagrees. Frictional Games built a game about a brain scan and ended up with something that belongs in a conversation with Ingmar Bergman's Persona. It's not a game that scares you with jump cuts and monster closets, though it tries to. It's a game that sits with you weeks later because you still don't have an answer to the question it asked on hour two.

The question is simple. If you copy your consciousness perfectly, which one is you?

That's the whole game. Everything else, the flooded research station, the leaking corridors, the voice on the radio telling you what to do next, is just infrastructure built around that one question. And the answer the game gives you, or refuses to give you, is what makes SOMA real psychological horror video games territory rather than just another spooky walking sim.

The setup nobody explains to you up front

You play Simon, a guy in Toronto in 2015 who's dying from a brain injury. He goes in for an experimental brain scan and wakes up in Pathos-II, an underwater research facility at the bottom of the Atlantic, in 2104. The world has ended. An asteroid hit Earth. Everyone is dead except for the people who were already underwater, and most of them are dead too.

Simon doesn't know any of this for a while, and neither do you. You wander around confused, meet some hostile creatures, and slowly figure out what happened. The twist isn't really a twist. The game telegraphs it. You aren't Simon. You're a copy of Simon's brain scan from 2015, poured into a diving suit at the bottom of the ocean almost a century later. The original Simon has been dead for decades. You just woke up thinking you were him.

This is where most games would stop. Cool twist, roll credits. SOMA is just getting started.

The coin flip that broke me

About halfway through the game you meet Catherine, a researcher at Pathos-II whose consciousness has been preserved on a storage device. She explains the Ark to you. The Ark is a simulation, a digital paradise where scanned human consciousnesses can live forever. The last hope for humanity. The plan is to launch it into space so something of humankind survives.

Then she tells you the thing that breaks the game wide open.

To get your consciousness onto the Ark, you have to scan it. The scan creates a copy. The copy goes on the Ark. The original, which is you, stays behind. She calls this the coin flip. When the scan happens, it's like flipping a coin. One side ends up on the Ark, experiencing paradise. The other side ends up stuck in a diving suit at the bottom of the ocean, alone, forever.

There's a fifty percent chance it's you.

Except there isn't. That's the trick. From the perspective of the scanned copy on the Ark, they are Simon. They have all his memories. They lived through everything. From their perspective, the coin came up in their favor. From your perspective, sitting in the wet suit in the dark, the coin came up against you. Both perspectives are real. Both are Simon. Neither is a lie.

The coin metaphor is wrong and Simon figures that out and it destroys him. There's no coin. There's no single consciousness that gets transferred. There's just copying. The thing that happens after the scan is that one of you wakes up on the Ark and one of you wakes up where you already were. Both are continuous with pre-scan Simon. Both have equal claim to being him.

This is the coin flip metaphor and it's the most important thing in the game because it's a lie Simon tells himself to cope. The lie falls apart the second he actually experiences it.

Why Pathos-II works as a setting

Setting this story underwater was a masterstroke and I don't think SOMA gets enough credit for it. Ocean horror as a genre works because the ocean is already hostile to human existence. You can't breathe down there. The pressure will crush you. It's cold, it's dark, and there are things living in it that evolved without any reference to light.

Pathos-II leans into this in a way that makes the philosophy hit harder. The facility is flooded, decaying, and in the process of being overtaken by the structure gel that's trying to make everything alive. The setting is already questioning what counts as living. Robots think they're people. Dead bodies have brain scans running inside their skulls, still conversing, still convinced they're flesh. The gel is animating corpses and machinery alike.

You walk through sections where human and machine have merged, where a diving suit has a human brain scan thinking it's a person, where a robot is sobbing because it remembers being alive. The environment is making the argument before the game even gets to the explicit dialogue. What makes something alive? Is it the body? The pattern? The memory? The subjective experience?

By the time Catherine explains the Ark, you've already met the question a dozen times in the environment. You've shot something that screamed in a human voice. You've walked past a woman's corpse that was still dreaming. The game doesn't rely on the dialogue to do the philosophical work. The setting does it for free.

The ocean is uniquely suited to this kind of dread, and Pathos-II uses it better than almost any other game setting. Water plus isolation plus the unknown becomes a genre unto itself.

The monsters are the weakest part

I'll say it. SOMA's monsters are bad. Not bad in the sense that they're poorly designed visually, the designs are genuinely unsettling, but bad in the sense that they don't belong in this game.

The monster encounters in SOMA follow the Amnesia formula. A creature wanders a patrol route. You hide behind something. You sneak past while its back is turned. Rinse and repeat. The AI is predictable. The patterns are memorizable. The second time you encounter the Construct in the Upsilon section you've already figured out how to avoid it.

This would be fine in a game that was just about scares. In a game that's about ontological crisis, it's actively disruptive. You're sitting with the weight of what Catherine just told you, and then you have to crouch behind a desk and time your movements around a splashing noise. The switch from existential horror to mechanical stealth takes you out of it.

Frictional eventually admitted this. The Safe Mode patch lets you play through without monster threat if you want, and a lot of players argue the game is actually better that way. I'm inclined to agree. The monsters are there because horror games have monsters. The game doesn't need them. It already had you terrified of yourself.

The fact that the scariest parts of SOMA are the dialogue scenes tells you everything. The scene where Simon wakes up in the deep-sea suit and realizes what he is. The conversation with the scan of Catherine in the chair. The moment in the comms room. None of these have monsters. All of them are more frightening than any chase sequence.

SOMA sits in a specific place in the broader horror pantheon, and what makes it live in your head after you finish it has nothing to do with the creatures you hide from.

The Simon problem

The thing SOMA does that almost no other game pulls off is make you complicit in the philosophy. You don't just watch Simon grapple with the coin flip. You make the choices.

At one point you have to transfer your consciousness from one body to a newer, sturdier suit for the descent. The scan copies you. The new suit wakes up. The old suit is still there. The game asks you what to do with the old suit. You can leave it running. You can turn it off.

If you leave it running, it sits there forever, aware, in the dark, at the bottom of the ocean. If you turn it off, you're murdering yourself. Both options are horrifying. There is no third option.

This happens multiple times. Each time Simon does it, he gets worse at handling it. By the end he's begging not to be the one left behind. He knows, intellectually, that the coin flip isn't real, that both copies are him, that whichever one wakes up on the Ark will feel like they made it. But he can't stop being the one who stays behind. From his perspective, the scan always fails. The coin always comes up tails.

This is the deepest cut in the game. The scan genuinely works. The Ark launches. A version of Simon and a version of Catherine do wake up in paradise. The ending sequence shows you this. But you, the player, are always the one left behind, because you're always playing the version that didn't transfer. The structure of the game itself is the argument.

Why this sits next to Bergman

I said at the top that SOMA belongs in a conversation with Persona and I meant it. Persona is a 1966 Ingmar Bergman film about two women whose identities start to blur. It's not a horror movie in the conventional sense. Nobody gets chased through a house. But it's horror in the sense that it's about the terror of selfhood dissolving. The two women look alike, their dialogue overlaps, the film itself breaks and burns halfway through. By the end you're not sure which woman is which or whether either of them is a real person or both of them are halves of the same mind.

Persona is about the fragility of the self. SOMA is about the same thing. They arrive at it from opposite directions. Persona gets there through art film experimentation, jump cuts, fourth wall breaks, silence. SOMA gets there through brain scans and diving suits. But the destination is the same. You are not what you think you are. The thing that thinks it's you might not be you. The thing that isn't you might have a better claim.

Bergman was doing philosophical horror in 1966. Tarkovsky did it in Solaris in 1972, and for my money that's the closest cinematic cousin to SOMA. Solaris is also set on a research station, also features consciousness being copied by an alien force, also ends with its protagonist unable to distinguish the real from the copied and choosing to live in the copy anyway. The family resemblance is obvious.

Most horror games are not trying to do this. Most horror games are trying to make you flinch. That's fine. Flinching is a valid response. But SOMA is trying to do something that almost no medium attempts, let alone video games. It's trying to make you doubt the fact of your own continuity as a thinking thing.

What succeeds

The things SOMA does right are the things that couldn't work in any other medium.

First, the first-person perspective. When Simon looks at his hand and sees a mechanical claw for the first time, you're looking at it. The disconnect between what he thinks he is and what he sees is delivered directly to your eyes. A novel could describe it. A film could show it from a third-person camera. Only a game can make you the one noticing your own body is wrong.

Second, the choice structure. The game lets you make the Ark decisions, the euthanasia decisions, the abandonment decisions. Your answers don't change the ending meaningfully. But making them implicates you. You sat there and decided whether to turn off a version of yourself. That choice lives in your head after the credits roll.

Third, the voice acting and the pacing. Simon, voiced by Jared Zeus, is written as a normal guy. Not a soldier, not a scientist, not a chosen one. A regular person who was going to die of a brain injury and agreed to a medical scan. His reactions are the reactions you would have. He panics. He refuses to accept what he's been told. He argues. He breaks down. Catherine, voiced by Nell Mooney, is his opposite. Scientific, pragmatic, already past the grief. Their dynamic is the spine of the game and it works because both performances are restrained in a way that horror games almost never manage.

What fails

I've already covered the monsters. The other failure is the pacing. The Theta and Omicron sections drag. There's a stretch where the game forgets what it's about and becomes a fetch quest. The philosophy takes a break while Simon runs errands. The game recovers hard in the final act, and the Phi launch sequence is as good as anything in the medium. But the middle could lose three hours and be better for it.

Why it matters

SOMA came out in 2015 and the conversation it started hasn't ended. Every time someone asks whether a simulated mind is conscious, every time there's a new thought experiment about uploading, every time Black Mirror does another episode about digital copies, SOMA is in the background. It got there first in the game medium and it did it better than anyone has managed since.

The game is not perfect. The monsters are a mistake. The middle drags. The visual effects are showing their age. None of that matters because the core argument is intact and the core argument is devastating.

If you haven't played SOMA, play it with Safe Mode on. The monsters will only get in the way. If you've already played it, play it again. You'll catch things you missed the first time because the first time you were too busy trying to survive.

For context on why horror works best when you're alone with your thoughts, why isolation horror covers the structural reasons a solitary protagonist hits harder than a group.

SOMA is the rare horror game that treats you like an adult. It assumes you can sit with a hard question. It assumes you don't need the answer. It assumes the question itself is scarier than any monster in any corridor. And it's right.

The coin flip isn't real. That's what Simon can't accept. That's what you can't accept when you play him. The thing that wakes up on the Ark is Simon. The thing stuck in the diving suit at the bottom of the ocean is also Simon. Both. Neither. The question was wrong from the start. The horror is that there's no right question to ask.

That's philosophical horror. That's what the genre should be.