Nightmare Fuel / SOMA

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

YOU DIED

When a game is created by the makers of one of the scariest games ever made because they thought it wasn't scary enough, what do you expect?

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• The premise of the game is this and a Tearjerker. After visiting a researcher working out of a sketchy-looking lab, the player character awakens apparently 100 years in the future, where something happened to create an After the End scenario, and it quickly becomes clear with the lucid robots that still see themselves as human that something has Gone Horribly Wrong.
• The nightmare Simon experiences at the very beginning of the game partially reliving the night of the accident that killed his friend (and crush) Ashley ends with a black screen, the sound of the crash, and what sounds like either the squeal of brakes or someone screaming in pain.
  • A newspaper clipping in Simon's apartment reveals that Ashley survived the initial impact but died from suffocating on her own blood as it filled her lungs.
• The sunken CURIE research vessel is filled with this. Along with being the very first place you encounter a monster that is a mutated human, several rooms are also filled with static-filled transmissions. If you listen closely, they're the final transmissions of the CURIE's crew as they watch the comet impact the planet, and describing the entire world being set ablaze as they fruitlessly try to contact anyone else.
  Hopper: The sky is pitch black with smoke. The ocean is dark, incredibly dark. Uh, in the distance I can see land. According to navigation - it's Lisbon and the coast of Portugal.
  Radio Operator: Any signs of life? Over... Hopper?
  Hopper: It's on fire. Everything is on fire. The flames, they're reaching all the way into the sky. It's unreal.
  Radio Operator: Any signs of life? Over.
  Hopper: No, nothing but a massive firestorm covering the continent.
  • One of the first transmissions you come across is just people screaming in terror being played over and over again. It's not hard to imagine that's all CURIE heard when trying to contact the surface as the comet was about to impact the planet.
  • To add on to this, images of the destruction are shown on the CURIE's monitors as these recordings are playing.
• The hostile robots are pretty spooky. They are completely surrounded in shadow aside from their many glowing eyes, make horrible distorted growls, and are frighteningly fast. Worse yet, it seems that they used to be very helpful and friendly, with one of the workers even having Ugly Cute drawings of them.
  • Actually, only the first enemy you face in Upsilon and the first underwater section are robotic. Every single other enemy after that? Humans and undersea wildlife, horribly mutated by structure gel and cybernetic implants.
  • In the new Safe Mode implemented by Frictional themselves, the enemies no longer attack you. They just either keep on walking, run away from you, calmly follow you or just... stare at you. You decide whether this makes everything better or worse. It also does not completely neuter them, as they will still attack you if provoked (though still cannot kill you outright), so don't get too comfortable around them.
• In the Site Upsilon Comm Center, you can call the other sites. Some of them will have nothing but static for you. However, two of them, Theta and Omicron, will actually answer. From Theta, a person will say, "There's something better here...it's here," implying whoever's at Theta is better off than you are. While at the other, Omicron, a man will tell you to kill yourself, because there is nothing left to live for. Then it cuts out. It really makes you dread what might possibly be going on over there and what you might run into later.
• Right before you enter Omicron there's a puzzle sequence that needs to be completed to run power to the entrance, but before you can finish it you need to use a password for which there are no clues to be found. But as soon as you check the other terminal in the room, a third option gets added to the menu that previously only had two items listed, described in broken machine language. Selecting it results in a blank screen that gets flooded with the four-digit code you need. Is it Ross trying to help you, or is it the WAU trying to trick you into assisting its Assimilation Plot?
• Once you enter Omicron, things take an even sharper turn for the weird, and not because of all the headless corpses. The computers will flash static with various messages directed at you. All while playing eerie music that sounds like the suffering cries of a lonely whale.
  We suffer
  An eternal nightmare
  Stop the WAU
  Destroy the WAU
• The encounters with Ross that begin once you've explored Omicron. Is he a real entity or is he some form of hallucination? Why does he know things about you? And if he's actually a figment of your imagination, how did his suggestions get implanted in your cortex chip?
• One creepy moment is if you backtrack around Omicron. That headless body in the dive suit that was leaning near the door when you first entered Omicron? It has somehow moved to a bench halfway across the room, as shown in Cry 's play through. And some of the bodies in the hallways are missing from where you first saw them...
• Another creepy Omicron moment occurs when you find a (dead?) man lying near some stairs, partially absorbed by the Structure Gel, as Simon has to use the Energy Pal on different panels. When you return to the same spot later on, the man has disappeared. He never shows up again.
• Overall, Omicron just has this feeling of unease to it that pervades the entirety of Simon's trip there. From the headless welcoming party he finds at the anex to the washed out, drab colors of the building even when it turns on, Omicron really just feels dead and abandoned. At least mockingbirds and some survivors (despite their horrific conditions) give other areas of PATHOS-II some semblance of 'life;' the only things left moving in Omicron are a dead ghost thing and a robot girl just as terrified as the player is of what's going on. Add to that the messy details of the Carthage conspiracy and the last few logs of this husk of an installation and the player will be feeling uncomfortable, quiet dread through much of their time there.
• That freaking giant anglerfish near the end of the game. It's extremely fast, screeches loudly and often you'll only know that you're about to get eaten when you glance up to see an enormous gaping mouth full of huge teeth bearing down on you. It also serves as a giant Schmuck Bait, as you are required to follow the light in order to head safely to the TAU facility, but given that you crawl through a dark cave and find a distant light by the end of it, it's positioned in front of you to the point where you won't notice the green light you're supposed to follow is to the right, and the 'light' in front of you actually belongs to the giant anglerfish, waiting for you to get close enough to devour you.
  • It's hard to see in-game, but a closer look at the anglerfish reveals that it has a huge human face merged into its head.
• The sea spiders in the caves can be this if you have arachnophobia.
  • The caves themselves are a claustrophobic nightmare. Not only are you in a narrow tunnel with spiders everywhere, it's easy to get lost in there, and it's your only reprieve from the fact that you're in the middle of the abyssal plain with corrupted wildlife everywhere and a powerful undersea current ready to blow you into the unknown. And if you're particularly unlucky, the anglerfish might chase you back into them and start pursuing you through them like a minotaur.
  • And those spiders might provide some rather unpleasant flashbacks to Penumbra, for those who played that game.
• When you start to reach the once inhabited sections of PATHOS-II, you see what's become of the crew. In Theta, WAU has practically assimilated all of the facility staff, keeping them all barely alive through invasive life support methods. In Omicron, you find out everybody is missing their heads, and later learn that WAU basically blew up their heads to prevent them from finding a way to kill it. The worst is at Phi station, where it almost seems as though the WAU incorporated the aesthetic of undersea life into the design of the absorption by that point.
• Jin Yoshida, the reanimated corpse wandering around Tau is particularly nightmarish due to the way he moves. Not only that, but he's a very difficult foe to deal with because if he gets you the first time, chances are that he will quickly come back to your location mere seconds after you regain consciousness, allowing him to attack you a second time and kill you before you even have a chance to limp away and find a hiding spot.
• There's also the cyborg girl hanging around in Omicron, the only entity left in the place that can actually move seeing as everyone else has died of exploding head. You need to retrieve the battery pack to progress, and it's just sitting there next to her. And she absolutely will not move. She won't be distracted by any noises, and only reacts to Simon's movement, something many first-time players fail to realize. And no, she won't move on her own too; she's too busy crying and sobbing to herself, something all the other mutated monsters do not do. And what happens if she is alerted? "Get away from me!" She's fully aware of what has happened to her, is in deep despair over it, and knowing that the WAU would force her do it, warns others to stay away from her for their own safety...talk about And I Must Scream. Even worse is that after you get a hold of the last item required for the suit, you'll somehow find her downstairs. No matter what you do, she'll start sprinting after you as soon as you enter the hallway to the Dive Room.
• All the people being kept alive by the WAU. Amy Azzaro, one of the first you find, has been hooked to a bunch of tubes and artificial lungs, but it's relatively mild compared to what you can stumble upon later. You will be looking at a bunch of withered, wheezing bodies that may still be somehow alive, and one person at Omicron has the whole upper part of his head blown apart and mechanical tendrils worming through his body. He's still breathing. And the ones you find at Tau are even worse than that, barely even passing for human.
  • Though the worst one might be the one that's not even fully visible at Tau. You just find a blanket with a hand and foot sticking out at the bottom and a variety of mechanical stuff having torn through the blanket, all with blood. And while you can't see him breathing, you can hear him moan and sob...
• Dying will give you several images flashing rapidly through the screen, several of which are faces with structure gel pouring out of them. Slowed down here, warning for Body Horror.
• This game serves up some serious Fridge Horror that will keep many a player up at night in the form of how the Brain Uploading works. Specifically it isn't actually uploading, but copying; your consciousness won't get transferred from body to body, but will instead be copied over from one body to another like copying a file between two folders on your computer. You're then left with this existential nightmare; is the you that got copied the real you, or is the you that came to life from the copy the real you? Are they both the real you? How the hell would you even be able to tell the difference? And what's worse, what happens if one of the yous decides the other needs to go away? Would that be considered murder or suicide? This game's basic plot thread is an absolutely labyrinthine nightmare of ethical conundrums, and none of them have a happy ending, even less so depending of your concept of the soul.
• At the very beginning of the game in Toronto, you can read a description of Munshi's brain scanning process in a drawer at the clinic. They create a scan of the human brain, then they can safely experiment with various treatments on the simulated brain before finding one that is optimal and applying it to the real damaged brain in question. From that and from the recordings of the post-scan human Simon we hear at Theta, we can infer that there were countless copies of Simon being created for the sole purpose of being experimented upon.
• All of the underwater sections are incredibly nightmarish, particularly the abyss section, but the Final Boss takes the cake for sheer fright value. You're launched out of the crumbling Site Alpha on a sudden current and deposited on the sea floor, with the path to Phi barely visible in front of you and only some dim lights to guide your path. It's actually not that far... except the Leviathan is now actively hostile and pursuing you. This submarine-sized Sea Monster, unlike anything the game has prepared you for so far, constantly roars and drifts through the darkness, making unpredictably random passes at you. The path is dotted with crevasses and hiding places, but they barely feel like they could protect you from a regular enemy. Your only hope is to stay on the path, ignore the titanic shape you know is hunting you through the darkness, and run.
• Terry Akers, full stop. The fact that he went mad, consumed huge quantities of Structure Gel, went even more insane as a result and carved out his own eyes is bad enough, but when Simon encounters him in Theta he's mutated into a hideous, misshapen, tumour-covered abomination with a ridiculous amount of strength and speed, able to beat down doors and easily outrun Simon, and lets out an ungodly scream when he's chasing after him. Also, don't let his blindness fool you into thinking he's a pushover... he has excellent hearing, and can even hear the sound of Simon's flashlight clicking on and off. The sections where you have to sneak around while Akers patrols the area are some of the tensest in the entire game.
  • Entering Akers' office at Site Delta gives the lovely sight of his removed eyeballs, lying on the floor in a puddle of blood. And yes, they can be picked up.
• While not in the game itself, Miracle of Sound wrote a song inspired by SOMA called "Ditto," a gritty, unsettling industrial/electronic track with eerie Word Salad Lyrics revolving around the concept of Brain Uploading, having multiple selves and the existential question of whether the "real you" is your original self or the clone, accompanied by lingering shots of the dilapidated PATHOS-II complex and heavy Jitter Cam.
  Stare through the mirror of the self (Divide the zero) / Reflect the face of someone else (Divide the zero) / Divide the zero down / Sunder and multiply me / Divide the zero down / Sunder and multiply me...
• Some of the concept art in general can have shades of this - particularly the concept art for the Robot Head. The skin references used appear to be from the corpse of an actual drowning victim. That at least one image is taken instead from a film FX artist's website doesn't take the edge completely off, considering the realism of the finished result...

Promotional Material

• Mockingbird shows Imogen Reed interviewing a brainscan of Adam Golaski uploaded onto the body of a Universal Helper, immobilized in a rare example of robotic self-mutilation. After "Golaski" becomes impatient with Reed's questions about his ability to perceive his surroundings, she gives up and tries again later - bringing the real Adam Golaski. "Golaski" is unimpressed with Golaski's "prank" until he asks the Universal Helper what his father's last words were. The robot answers correctly, prompting Golaski to leave the room out of extreme discomfort.
  Imogen Reed: Alright, let's try something else...
  Universal Helper: YEAH YOU BETTER FUCKING LEAVE!
• Vivarium shows Imogen Reed experimenting with an absurdly large monitor and control console, implied to be used to simulate virtual worlds. When it suddenly shuts off, Imogen clucks her tongue and says "I think it just died on me." Suddenly, the machine turns itself back on and shows an image of Reed slumped over dead in her chair. As it starts making a loud boot up noise, Reed panics and rushes out of the room, calling for the machine to be "contained."

Transmission

• Martin Fisher gets crushed to death by the extreme pressure of the ocean. The WAU is more than happy to bring him back from the dead...and he is pissed.
  The weight of the sea...the WEIGHT OF THE SEA...
• The WAU starts speaking to Adam Golaski with the voice of his late daughter, as if to taunt him for leaving his family behind to die when the comet struck Earth. It then begins replaying long-thought-suppressed memories from his brainscan, reminding him - with a recording of his wife's tearful police report - that he used to abuse his wife and daughter. Suddenly, his short temper takes on a much darker meaning.