I never played any of these games but the first one looked pretty scary from the videos i've seen of it. I might have to download it, it is fall after all and i'm in a mood to be scared.
Sci-fi horror usually focuses on relatively silly premises like "what if the monster gets out" or "what if we open a portal to hell." SOMA really rises above those tropes. It's legitimately unsettling to have a game confront you with troublesome implications of future technology that you had been subconsciously avoiding.
But SOMA? Really, really great game. I'm considering repurchasing it on PS4 and replaying it in my home cinema setup for even more immersion. Though knowing the story beforehand probably takes quite a bit out of the experience.
If you're 5 minutes in and worry that you've figured it out and aren't impressed, don't worry, you haven't seen anything yet.
I think that's mostly a problem of expectations. TDD focuses on being a horror game while A Machine for Pigs is much closer to a horror-themed walking simulator. If you expect Amnesia II out of A Machine for Pigs then I can see how you would be disappointed but that doesn't make the game worse it just means using the Amnesia name might have been a bad choice since the games are in different subgenres and thus target somewhat different audiences.
I'm definitely interested to hear about similar games - I was never able to find anything that quite compared. Amnesia looked quite dated and unpolished by comparison after playing SOMA and I couldn't quite get into it.
I recently had another pleasant hard sci-fi surprise, though: Horizon Zero Dawn. I didn't expect it to take the backstory (or even the main story) seriously, but it did, and it did a brilliant job of it.
Obduction, The Talos Principle, Alien Isolation (some combat), INFRA (creepier than expected)
And of course there were similar games going back in time, e.g. Realms of the Haunting [2] and i'm sure you can find many others.
[0] https://unbirth.frictionalgames.com/
Although maybe the reason is that I find the Penumbra/SOMA setting to be much more believable and therefore unsettling.
After SOMA, I'd say they are good at sci-fi, period. Even with its horror elements removed, SOMA has some interesting scifi situations.
I do agree though, for what it's worth they have two projects in development right now so maybe one of them is more scifi.
Personally I prefer A Machine for Pigs over TDD for that reason too but I was always under the impression that it was mostly The Chinese Room's creation and that Frictional's involvement was limited to the more technical and publishing aspects.
But it ended up being one of those experiences that you keep thinking about for a few days afterwards. And it's a rare video game that I think would have lost its impact as a movie or a book, despite not having much gamey stuff to do (it's practically in the walking simulator category).
The philosophical questions it brings up may not be anything new, but the game does an excellent job of putting the humanity in them and making you really consider what it would feel like to be in the circumstances of its characters -- not just the playable ones or the ones they interact with directly, but the ones you find audio logs and transcripts from.
Edit: I should also note that I played The Talos Principle shortly after playing SOMA and was struck by a couple similarities they have. Talos is a much less story-driven game, you can almost ignore the story and just focus on the puzzles if you please. But playing it right after SOMA I couldn't help but enjoy how it almost covered the same type of scenario from another -- perhaps more optimistic -- angle.
There was an uncanniness to the Talos robots and the terminal entries which was really creepy to me though, I found them really unsettling at first.
What works for me is that it's a genuine scifi story, even with its horror motifs removed -- some people even prefer it that way! It's a nice scifi story with interesting existential questions and compelling characters. I like how key aspects of the ending are foreshadowed by previous events, and how it's completely consistent that the main character remains blind to the implications.
I was really, really impressed by SOMA.
SOMA feels very by the numbers horror-survival at first (think: Bioshock, System Shock, etc), but this begins to unravel after a while. The first few situations seem standard, you think you have the plot figured out, and there is one escape-from-the-monster situation which is infuriatingly difficult.
However, I'd say if you give it a chance you'll discover it's not really in the survival horror genre -- some people play it with monsters disabled! -- and is in fact an exploration of consciousness and the sense of the "self". And quite interesting, too. There are some pretty poignant moments I wouldn't expect from a videogame.
I know every game likes to say this about itself. I, for example, found the plot twist and self-proclaimed "deep" plot points about Bioshock very unimpressive. But SOMA feels closer to something like A Mind Forever Voyaging in my opinion...
SOMA was disappointing. It wasn't bad, but I don't think of it as horror, and its story and characters were the weakest in the lot. But maybe that's just because I'm too familiar with sci-fi covering the same things much better and with better characters, and there's even a non-fiction book analysis of a future which assumes the central tech comes about that's deep enough in exploring implications to put the sci-fi to shame on that metric.
I'll agree Penumbra and Amnesia don't have world-class stories either, but what they do have is told well with better characters, the horror aspect is better, and I more enjoyed the rest of the non-story elements that make up a video game. SOMA easily wins on graphics and slightly less clunky control, if it changed nothing else but its main character it may have even won me over, but as it is I can only call it not bad...
I agree that that was a weak point but not because it's unrealistic for Simon to be surprised - that continuity of Simon did after all jump along with every copy so he did not really experience the same thing before. Being so focused on getting on the Ark I find it quite believable that Simon would not think too much about that he would also be staying on the sea floor.
Forcing that reaction onto the player was a mistake though. I think it would have been better use of the medium if Frictional had not added the Ark ending and instead left the player stranded under the ocean with nothing to do and leaving you to come up with your own reaction.
For me that ending didn't take away from the rest of the game though.
> the horror aspect is better
As weird as it is to say about Frictional's games, the actual horror aspect is the least interesting part to me. I guess that also explains why I'm a bit biased against TDD. I do agree that the Penumbra games have great characters though - Red is one of my all time favorite video game characters.
Self-delusion is one of the major themes of SOMA. Simon and Catherine partake. I can understand how it came across as annoying and lazy writing, respectively, but it's not. Well... if the writing was annoying or lazy, it wasn't for those reasons.
As for the book comparison, I also think that's slightly uncharitable. Books go far deeper because the written medium facilitates doing so, but interactive media have their own unique benefits: they can force you to make decisions, prohibiting the kind of lazy fence-sitting that's so easy with passive media. I wouldn't object if someone found the book analysis more valuable, or vice-versa, but without a specific disambiguating goal in mind I don't think it's fair to judge one by its strengths and the other by its weakness.
There's some effort to port it to VR, I can't even begin to fathom the kind of feelings that could emerge from such an immersion (pun intended, the game sets stage on the ocean floor).