Somerville (PS5)

Somerville is an on the ground, personal look at a world in the midst of an alien invasion, but not with the Hollywood gravitas that such a concept can often lean into. In fact, the lead character essentially misses most of the big dramatic moments you might expect, able to witness the start before he is essentially left for dead and awakens in a world where the monolithic spacecraft still hang in the sky but little sign of other survivors remains. While things will escalate later down the line, the early moments of walking through the remains of an invasion you have little context for are Somerville at its atmospheric and narrative height, and unfortunately it’s not a path it’s going to stick to as struggles to find deeper emotion through its story-telling choices.

Somerville’s opening involves the sudden and unexplainable disruption of the simple home life of a man and his family in their humble home in the countryside. Trying to get his wife, young son, and the family dog to safety doesn’t go well when attacks are raining down from the sky, but it ultimately proves to be a figure in strange alien armor that truly changes his life as he is zapped by the foreign technology and seemingly dead. When he does awaken, his family is gone save for a commendably loyal dog who seems to be the only one who didn’t leave the man for dead, but pressing out into the world with his companion, the unnamed man sets out to not just find his family, but any sign of other people who are able to survive in this world under the sky filling alien space craft and their almost robotic ground troops.

Sadly, this story of survival made a few choices that keep this plot from having much emotional resonance. Seeing the gloomy abandoned spaces that imply what happened while the lead character was passed out do have a small effect and can look fairly striking even if many aren’t particularly creative representations of a world after an almost apocalyptic panic, and there are few stories told environmentally or otherwise that make good use of what you uncover as you explore in this narrative focused puzzle adventure. There is no dialogue or text used for the story telling, and the scenes that do try to say a bit more are often missing emotional resonance because of an inability to create much of an emotional connection with the plot. The overall quest to find your family feels more like it is just a supplementary piece of a basic push for survival at first and there isn’t a lot of time spent in this five hour experience to show much love between the characters even before you factor in their lack of expressiveness. The game typically uses a rather zoomed out camera to facilitate its 3D movement but that means characters can’t show much emotion, and even when it does close in, the people are not put in many situations where their movements convey their thoughts well. There’s a spot here or there that will make a decent attempt at it only for things to feel like they’re quickly reverting to an emotionless survival narrative, and with a good deal of the plot’s weight seemingly hanging on the desire to reconnect with your family, it doesn’t do a good job of spurring strong emotions in you since they quickly abandoned the father at the start. If anything, the dog is perhaps the best handled part of the unspoken narrative, expressing a fierce loyalty by remaining by its seemingly dead master even though it would be so much easier for it to survive on its own, and moments where you fear for its fate feel like they hold more weight than anything with the wife, child, or alien invasion even though the game doesn’t spotlight the dog’s more resonant role to the degree where it would come across as the intended focus.

Somerville’s wordless story is the main focus of the adventure and thus it ends up a bit of a harsh blow to its enjoyability. It feels like there aren’t many deeper themes considered for this basic tale of reuniting in the face of adversity nor are there moments that feel like they test that concept or really make a statement on it. The ending does at least feel like has something to ponder even if its concepts feel like they crop up in isolation rather than being some natural progression from the broader adventure, and while there are moments you can see where the writers tried to make something that could be sorrowful or sweet, the work to build up to them or frame them properly is lacking. The game does feature multiple endings as well, although it’s highly unlikely a player will be able to pursue the ones with more substance or meaning due to how the clues towards reaching the alternate conclusions are not only things it might be difficult to pick up on initially, but by the time you do, you might have already passed by earlier important ones since you did not yet have a clear understanding of their value or context. The better endings do exist beyond this extra layer to the experience that is at least intriguing in its concept if not necessarily its execution but also none of the endings truly inject the needed depth to help the visual story-telling reach a more effective and impactful level.

Somerville’s narrative does feel thin on meaningful moments, but it could have at least been an acceptable level of context for a game if it had focused more on its gameplay side. Unfortunately, the interactive side of this narrative adventure also feels like it lacks deeper consideration as well as having some actual technical issues to boot. The primary means of overcoming problems in your path to finding other survivors is utilizing a strange energy that entered your body when you were zapped by the alien armor. Now, whenever the lead character grasps a source of electrical light, he can emit energy from it that interacts with nearby extraterrestrial objects. The monolithic and angular look of the alien tech is actually a sign of its modular nature, your light able to do things like cause parts of a structure to lose solidity or later become solid once more. At first used mostly as a means of removing roadblocks, later you will be asked to think a bit more about how to get light sources where you need them or intelligently only break down some of the nearby alien objects rather than just mindlessly eliminating it all. It doesn’t evolve too far though, pointing lamps at things without much struggle unfortunately common, and segments that lean almost entirely into the puzzle-solving feel like they’re stealing time from potential story-telling without offering too much of value in return. A rather long trek through a mine as well as a return to early areas near the adventure’s end in a way that doesn’t offer much in terms of plot significance or puzzle variety certainly bogs things down, but there are moments that are a bit more clever or involved that means it doesn’t feel like a concept that entirely lacked legs.

What does definitely cause some issue though is the game’s choice to give you 3D movement even when your progress is often fairly linear. Already I mentioned the zoomed out camera angles, but the extra walking space is often wasted or unimportant while also leading to issues in detecting when you try to interact with an object. The game will mark important objects with yellow paint, this immersion breaking choice often the only reason you can tell a specific pile of debris is what you’re meant to interact with in an otherwise busy area, but sometimes it almost feels like it was done to compensate for the fact sometimes you’ll try to grab an object and it doesn’t work properly. There are times when the main character will refuse to reach for an interactive object, other times he might start to then glitch a little to the point he might teleport on top of it briefly, and sometimes you might think an important tool can’t be utilized because the game’s hero simply won’t grasp it unless you stand in the exact right spot. This can make some simple or straightforward puzzle-solving you already figured out suddenly complicated as you feel you might be doing something wrong when it’s truly the game’s fault, and having the camera pulled so far out can make it hard to notice the little interaction problems, leaving you confused over what was clearly meant to be a quick and easy interaction.

There are some other sections of the game such as trying to sneak past alien troops that at least work fine despite being basic, although sometimes when you’re made to run it can be rough since your hero chooses his movement speed yourself and it can be hard to accommodate for that sudden shift. Somerville is not really difficult though and the only extras to find are the clues towards the alternate endings, but it also ends up feeling rather hollow because both halves of the game feel like they’re counting on the other to make up for their simplicity. Somerville was made by half of the team that worked on the game Inside and clearly took some ideas from it in terms of indirect story-telling and even the general gameplay flow, but Somerville also feels like it wants to have a deep story without being willing to put in the necessary steps. The player isn’t given the fuel needed to ignite interesting discussion or theorizing, and then the action leans too much on the light puzzles that aren’t iterated on enough to keep you engaged.

THE VERDICT: Somerville wants to be a humble plot about a regular man caught up in the wake of an alien invasion, his quest for survival and urge to reunite with his family understandable but too basic of a concept considering the story never really pushes that idea any further. The characters and situation lack much depth save a part at the ending that you can’t really anticipate since the crumbs leading up to it are not given due attention nor do they feel like they set up a thematic backbone for the journey. The look of the world can be effective even if the pulled out view of it often causes issues when trying to interacting with objects, and with the light based puzzle solving already fairly basic much of the time, the actual issues with detection before visibility compounds them make it hard to care about what you’re doing in this unfortunately unambitious effort to capture an everyman’s reaction to an alien invasion of Earth.

And so, I give Somerville for PlayStation 5…

A TERRIBLE rating. I very much tried to convince myself the game was only Bad since its failings are often an issue of traveling a very basic route in terms of design and narrative structure, but it can be a struggle to finish even this fairly short game because it does little to provide a solid motivation to continue. The story doesn’t spend time building up investment nor does it feel like it’s saying too much even if you take the time to ponder its course, and with some sections like the mine leaning on the fairly plain light puzzles or object interactions that might not work the best, it can be hard to care about what lies ahead. Once you’ve seen there’s little hope for the plot and the game starts lazily retreading earlier ideas in what feels like a misguided look back on an already short and fairly empty journey, you just want to get to the end and hope there’s a satisfying resolution only to run into the issue that the game did little to communicate what you should do to pursue its alternate endings that at least all had some small point being made. I find myself surprised to say that Kong: Survivor Instinct might be the better game when it comes to tackling such a subject matter. Kong made the world interesting to look at thanks to more pronounced visual representations of what it’s like to be somewhere after a kaiju attack, there are people to find with small stories about how they are reacting to trying to survive in the aftermath, and even though its action and navigation can get repetitive they at least do iterate at a decent enough pace. Somerville bills itself as an emotional game with deep story ideas to ponder and uncover, but it decided against direct communication and still feels like its world can only imply very basic ideas. Again, besides some themes limited to the ending, the remarkable and unflappable loyalty of a dog feels like it is probably the best statement the game can make and it only feels partly intentional, the game more concerned with the human side and sadly shoving the dog aside at times to pursue its empty examination that a guy who is already trying to find somewhere safe to live would probably want to find his family along the way too.

Between Somerville and One Last Breath it feels like I’m coming off overly harsh against wordless story-telling in puzzle platformers that pull clear inspiration from Inside. It is not an inherently flawed style of conveying a story, but even if Somerville had less technical issues and puzzles that better held your interest, it shares the real core issue with One Last Breath. Both games feel like they don’t have enough to say to make their background visuals truly impactful, the environmental story-telling just reiterating a sort of immediately gleaned idea with no greater complexity or creativity to the statements being made. Rarely can you even feel why this game specifically was made, it not feeling like it has much to say or much of a conceptual space to explore, Somerville perhaps just an effort by developer Jumpship to keep riding on the format that saw their previous home company Playdead achieve success with Inside. While Somerville won’t be too hard to complete if you do give it the time of day, those hours would be better spent with many a game that feels like they had some clear direction on what they want to say or do.