There’s a particular brand of horror that doesn’t claw at your skin, but burrows behind your eyes, drilling into your sense of identity until even your reflection is suspect.
SOMA, the 2015 underwater techno-nightmare from Frictional Games, is that brand made flesh or rather, made circuit board, data chip, and drowning neurons.
On the surface, SOMA seems like a spiritual successor to Amnesia, but the real terror here isn’t just what waits in the dark corridors of PATHOS-II — it’s the slow-motion vivisection of what it means to be.
Simon Jarrett — a man whose mind is scanned, uploaded, and doomed to infinite digital purgatories — is the unlucky Christ figure in this deep-sea crucifixion. Jared Cohn breathes him to life with a tragic naivety that curdles into existential horror. Catherine Chun, his guide, is no less broken — a disembodied voice clinging to her last embers of humanity as they chase an impossible dream: to launch the ARK, a digital Eden for the ghosts that were once us.
What SOMA does so viciously well is tear open the promises of transhumanism. In PATHOS-II’s decaying steel tomb, the WAU — a parasitic AI — hijacks bodies and consciousnesses alike, building an abomination zoo out of broken men and corrupted machines. It’s a primal metaphor for the horror of not dying, of the corpse that keeps twitching because the wires won’t let go.
We watch Simon Jarrett stumble through sunken hallways, each new fragment of truth driving another nail into his sense of self. Is he the original Simon? Is he the copy? Is there any difference when every version thinks it’s real? Here, the player is the monster too — forced to decide which poor soul deserves oblivion, and which will drift in a digital sea of eternal half-life.
In SOMA, the ocean isn’t just setting — it’s psyche. A crushing abyss, black as oblivion, hiding horrors that look more and more like us the closer we get. There are no final jump scares that tie it all up neatly. When the credits roll, the only thing left to confront is our reflection on the blank screen — a fractured echo of Simon, asking: What if you’re just another copy, too?
