SOMA

SOMA opens like a fairly conventional survival horror game — dark corridors, disfigured creatures, audio logs explaining what went wrong — and then, gradually and deliberately, becomes something else entirely: a genuine, unflinching argument about what a mind actually is, and whether copying one preserves anyone at all.

A story that earns its reputation

Reviewers across nine years return to the same conclusion with real consistency: this is one of the smartest, most thematically committed horror games ever made. "Thank god for developers like Frictional Games, that are willing to take the risk and time to explore more complex themes and ideas," reads one of the most-upvoted reviews, going on to say the game "isn't perfect" but that its ending justifies everything before it. Another, writing eight years after playing it, says they still think about the game and its ending "on a regular basis" — a specific, recurring pattern across the corpus of players describing the story as something that stayed with them long after a relatively short, ten-hour playthrough.

The honest gameplay criticism, unchanged since launch

What's notable about SOMA's negative-review corpus is how little it's shifted in nine years. The core complaint present at launch is the same one present today: the monster-stealth encounters, meant to create survival tension between story beats, are described by a consistent minority as thin and repetitive rather than genuinely frightening. "Scary for the first 30 minutes or so then not really anymore," one reviewer writes, describing enemies becoming "an annoyance" rather than a threat once their patterns are learned. Another, more pointed, argues the gameplay actively works against the story: "if you can stomach boring gameplay for a good story yeah go buy this, if not just watch analysis/gameplay videos on youtube." This is a considered criticism, not a rejection of what the game is trying to do — several of these same reviewers explicitly credit the writing and ideas while still finding the moment-to-moment play a weaker complement to them.

Frictional Games' own response to this exact tension is worth noting: a free "Safe Mode" was added after launch that removes hostile monster encounters entirely while preserving the complete story, directly addressing the gap between players who want the ideas and players who want the survival tension. That's a rare, direct acknowledgment from a developer that a specific, recurring criticism had merit.

Reading the completion data

The achievement curve is notably shallow for a horror game, and that's meaningful in its own right. The most common achievement sits at 68.2%, and even the game's final story milestone still reaches 31.1% of the entire player base — an unusually high completion rate for the true ending of a story- driven game, reflecting SOMA's tightly linear structure and relatively short runtime. Most players who start this game see it through to its conclusion, which is itself a quiet piece of evidence for how compelling the story keeps people moving forward.

9 out of 10. SOMA remains one of the most intellectually ambitious horror games made, carrying ideas about consciousness and identity that few games in any genre attempt as seriously. It loses a point to an honest, unchanged criticism: for a consistent minority, the survival-stealth mechanics built around that story don't hold up to the same standard, becoming predictable rather than tense across a playthrough. Frictional Games' own Safe Mode option is the clearest evidence that criticism was heard — and it's worth using if you're here primarily for the ideas SOMA is built to deliver.