SOMA
A sci-fi horror game set in an underwater research station. The monsters are the least scary thing in it.
- //Made by Frictional Games, the studio behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent. SOMA shares Amnesia's helpless approach to horror but is set in sci-fi rather than gothic horror.
- //Has a Safe Mode that removes enemy danger entirely, letting you experience the story without combat tension. The story still works.
- //Set in PATHOS-II, a deep-sea research facility in 2104. The horror is existential and philosophical, not jump scares.
- //Inspired by philosopher Derek Parfit's work on personal identity. You do not need to know philosophy to be affected by it.
- //Regularly goes on sale for under $5. One of the most underplayed important games in the horror genre.
SOMA is a first-person narrative horror game where you wake up in an underwater research facility called PATHOS-II with no memory of how you got there, and spend the next several hours working out what actually happened to you, the station, and everyone in it. There is combat-adjacent danger from a handful of monster types, but you have no weapons and cannot fight back, only hide or run. That is not really the point. The game is built around a set of genuinely uncomfortable questions about consciousness, identity, and what makes a copy of a person the same person, and it forces you to make choices that engage those questions directly rather than just read about them in a log.
One of the most philosophically disturbing games ever made. The horror is not what hunts you. It is what you discover about yourself.