Soma

SOMA is smart and scary science fiction. Not all of its ideas work, but it's worth playing for the story alone.

It may not stir the hordes of wailing YouTubers looking for the next best haunted house, but SOMA succeeds at crafting something much more meaningful than jump-scares.

The makers of Amnesia ease back on the horror, ramp up the philosophy and strike a satisfying balance between narrative and gameplay.

A masterpiece of audio and visual design, SOMA is atmospheric, cerebral, and occasionally frustrating.

SOMA may not be as scary as Amnesia, but it is without a doubt a stronger game

A disturbingly different take on interesting sci-fi concepts let down by a slow start and disappointing monsters, but worth it overall.

Playing cat-and-mouse with monsters feels formulaic at this point, but Soma's engrossing subsea environment and intriguing narrative keep the entire experience afloat

Soma tells an affective tale and carries the horror genre a few steps forward. Had Frictional shown the courage to shake off tradition entirely, it could have carried it further still.

While it is an enormously satisfying and well-crafted game, SOMA never managed to convince me that its themes and plot were in tune with its more traditional first-person frights. It scared me and it gave me cause to think about some of the issues raised, but now that I'm done, I doubt it'll stay long in my mind, or plucking at my nerves.

SOMA gets everything right about the the survival horror genre. It's like someone created the perfect video game mixtape -- a little bit of abandoned underwater atmosphere from BioShock, detailed environments a la Gone Home, and (of course) the frenzied monster mechanics from Amnesia. Even if you dislike non-combat-oriented games, I dare you to give it a try.