Before starting Until Dawn my hopes for the game weren’t very high. I thought it was going to be a half-baked and campy interactive movie filled with unlikable characters and cheap jump scares. However, it turned out a lot better than I could have imagined and it now stands as one of my favorite horror games ever.
SOMA has now been out in the wild for 10 day so it felt fitting to write a summary of how things have gone so far.
The day has finally come. What started out as a vague idea back in 2010 has finally become an actual game. It’s been quite the journey to get here, and we’re all really proud of what we’ve achieved. SOMA is now available on Windows, Mac, Linux and PS4!
I’m going to answer three common questions that we’ve seen all over the internet.
After almost five years of blood, sweat and tears we can finally make the following announcement:
SOMA, our upcoming sci-fi horror game, will be released on the 22nd September this fall on PS4 and PC.
After much blood, sweat and tears we can now inform you all that SOMA is finally in the Beta stage! This is a huge thing for us and easily the biggest milestone prior to the actual release of the game.
So what exactly does that mean? First of, it isn’t the same as Alpha. SOMA was in Alpha mid-March this year, and since then we’ve made loads of additions, changes and fixes based on feedback and our own evaluation of the game’s state. The pre-pre-Beta that happened a few weeks back was our final big test of that work. The game’s current state, pre-Beta, is a milestone in preparation for the proper Beta, basically the full game without the final polish, which will happen a few months into next year. The pre-Beta marks final our chance for us to evaluate a number of crucial elements in the game.
Today is the day SOMA reached Pre-Pre Beta, which marked the first time the game could be played from start to finish.
Alien: Isolation is an interesting game. It is the latest entry in a lineage of games that I refer to as horror simulators. It does an excellent job at creating tension and uses a lot of the knowledge built up over the years to great success. But, because it has such a laser focus on a certain type of play a bunch problems arise and other parts of the package suffer. It is a great game in many ways, truly excellent really, but there are some fundamental problems. These lead to, for me at least, a devastating flaw: At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie.
So I recently saw this reaction video to Alien Isolation and I thought it showcased a few interesting problems with horror games. These are not issues that are specific to this game, but that plague horror games in general. We’ve had these problems in all of our games and are currently trying avoid them as much as possible in our upcoming game, SOMA. So I’m not trying to take a shot at Alien Isolation here (I’m looking forward to playing it!) but the video demonstrated these issues so clearly that it’s worth focusing on it for this article. That said, let’s move on to the two hardest problems in horror.
