YMMV / SOMA

• Adorkable:
  • Simon speaks with charming awkwardness, lives in a crummy apartment littered with geeky memorabilia and doodles, he had an unspoken crush on Ashley and is implied to develop one on Catherine, and... well, just look at him.
  • Theta flashes throughout, but being asked what she'll do inside the ARK has her go through a safety checklist before Simon asks what the first human thing she'll do is.
    Catherine: Oh... Watch the clouds roll by? Does that count?
    Simon: I'd say so.
• Alternative Character Interpretation
  • Catherine. Was she a truly selfless person who operated for the greater good of saving at least something of the dying human race, no matter the cost? Or was she just manipulative towards Simon, thought she knew better than everyone else and the stress that shuts her down at the end was due to her true self finally showing up?
  • Further on the subject of Catherine, was she just "quirky", or was she actually psychopathic? The game actually seems to hint at the latter quite strongly as she has trouble connecting with others and as she becomes more desperate to launch the Ark she is happy to do some very immoral things. She also seems completely unfazed by the extreme suffering of the Proxies and Mockingbirds. Perhaps most pointedly, she deceives Brandon Wan's brain upload and then cruelly tells him that he's just a simulation before shutting him down. This wasn't actually necessary, and caused him to suffer needlessly. On the other hand, was she simply under a lot of stress and didn't see the copies as human?
  • Some players are convinced that the actions of WAU may be ultimately as good as Simon and Catherine's, and that even if it has no consequence on the actual ending, choosing to not destroy WAU may be the better choice. The results of WAU's attempts at making the last of humanity live on are certainly horrific, but looking back you can notice it was getting better at them, resulting in Simon, a fusion of organic and robotic that ultimately had the capability to destroy WAU itself. And WAU has copies of the same minds stored in the ARK. What may be better, a chance that humanity will be revived on Earth one day, in a very different form but still able to adapt and evolve, or being forever stuck in an immutable virtual paradise? Keeping the WAU alive may just allow both at once.
  • The WAU began evolving into the bizarre entity we know when the comet hit. Is this just because it was adapting to humanity suddenly being an endangered species, or was it somehow altered by something on the comet?
  • Many PATHOS-II scientists committed suicide immediately after their brain scans had been completed and uploaded to the ARK. Was it because they believed Mark Sarang's theory of continuity, or had they crossed the Despair Event Horizon after the comet impact ended the world, leaving them with nothing to look forward to but the promise of an afterlife on the ARK? Both?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Despite its Escher-esque design for a 22nd-century ship, the CURIE is actually based on a real-life FLIP ship, shown on a few posters in the ship's bridge.
• Awesome Music: Mikko Tarmia's soundtrack is spellbinding, both in terrifying flight sequences and tear-jerking contemplation.
• Best Level Ever: Many fans consider the final stretch across the seafloor to Site Tau to be one of the best sections in the game. At this point of the game you find out that the structure gel the WAU creates has severely mutated the sea-life, creating plenty of Paranoia Fuel, that is well justified, since through the area you have to avoid a gigantic angler fish, that WILL catch people off guard the first time since its light is very much like the robots that have led you across the seafloor earlier in the game. Overall the area has a dark and foreboding atmosphere that it takes full advantage of.
• Breather Level: All of the treks across the sea floor count (with the exception of the path to Tau detailed above), but Site Delta is the most traditional example. It features no enemies or lethal hazards, and is mostly serene rather than terrifying. The visit marks one of the shorter segments of the game, consisting simply of getting a transport running and finding a bit of optional information foreshadowing the next major threat you face, Terry Akers. And it comes right between The CURIE and Site Theta, both extremely challenging areas riddled with threatening encounters.
• Broken Base: Even a lot of positive reviews note that the game's horror aspects are a lot weaker than its story. How much of a problem this is tends to depend on the reviewer. One professional reviewer described SOMA as being "less scary" but "more haunting" than Frictional's earlier titles.
• Contested Sequel: As a Spiritual Successor, while many agree that SOMA is much better than Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, some feel that it still lacks compared to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, mostly due to SOMA not feeling as well-paced as The Dark Descent, the monster designs not being nearly as memorable, and the game overall not having as much of a dark and foreboding atmosphere as The Dark Descent. That being said, most can agree that SOMA is a great game in its own right.
• Delusion Conclusion: Some Let's Players - like Kim Richards - initially chose to interpret Simon's unexpected voyage to the future via a brain-scan as a hallucinatory journey into his own psyche. As it turns out, the Simon you play following the scan is actually a digital copy downloaded into a robot body almost a century after the prologue; the real Simon died decades ago. In another case, when Catherine reveals the existence of her Artificial Afterlife aboard the ARK, other players began interpreting the game as Simon's experience within the ARK.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Even the sweetness of the Bittersweet Ending is pretty bitter, when you think about it: The remnants of humanity survive in an apparent paradise, yes, but a simulated one with all the constraints that that implies: presumably the world cannot be changed in any meaningful way, mechanisms for reproduction do not exist (outside of creating completely artificial personalities) and there is no way to escape the satellite. Rather than provide hope for the survival of the human species, a handful of human personalities are given long lives inside a virtual Gilded Cage for perhaps a few thousand years before the satellite gives out and they all die. Perhaps the WAU really was the better option for some form of perpetuating humanity.
• Ho Yay: There are hints that Catherine was in a romantic relationship with Imogen Reed, based on her reaction to the revelation that Simon was inhabiting the latter's body, as well as some of the conversations heard on blackboxes.
• Moment of Awesome: It's hard for a game like this, where you're constantly being hunted, to have moments of sheer bravery and epic heroism, but two members of the Pathos II crew try their damndest.
  • Amy Azzaro just watched her friend and workmate, Carl Semken, die before her eyes by a malicious robot. How does she respond? She shocks the machine to death. This is one of the few times anyone takes care of the WAU's monsters, the only other time involving multiple Theta site crewmembers ganging up on one Proxy. And while the Proxies are certainly faster than the clunky robots, it still means a lot that little Amy was able to topple one.
  • Brandon Wan decides to be a hero and, while the rest of the Theta survivors escape to the shuttles, destroys the lift and breaks the stair door console, trapping Akers and some Proxies, temporarily, with him, alone. He then made as much noise possible while running to one of the rooms, locked the door, made more noise just to call out the monsters, and then slit his throat, preventing them from capturing him. And while this didn't stop the Theta crewmembers heading for the shuttle from avoiding a grisly fate, it did give other crewmembers time to get out and head for Omicron.
• Nausea Fuel: The effects that overexposure to the structure gel does to humans is... not pleasant to look at.
• Player Punch: SOMA is an unrelenting beatdown of Player Punches.
  • To progress through the game, you will have to cause a lot of machines great agony. Many of which aren't actively malevolent and are lucid enough to be considered human.
  • Robo-Carl: you can't get to the Comm Tower without either cutting the power to the whole section, killing him (and unleashing a hostile robot), or throwing a switch near him, making him scream constantly. Neither of these is good.
  • Since you discover Catherine in digital form relatively early in the game, it's easy to forget that she had a physical form, too. Which you eventually discover, having not only died trying to ensure that her life's work was put to use, but having been murdered by her own colleagues.
  • Meeting Sarah, the last living, uncorrupted Human in the Tau station, and finding out that she is barely alive and on life support.
  • Any time the Brain Uploading/Brain Copying element comes into play, it's guaranteed to be one of these. First comes finding the audio logs the human Simon made leading up to his death, and having it really sink in that you're playing a robot with Simon's mind copied into it. Then comes a massive one in Site Omicron, wherein you begin playing another copy and have to choose between murdering the previous copy of Simon, or leaving him to wake up locked in the site alone forever. And then the ending delivers the biggest one of all: Simon and Catherine successfully copy themselves onto the ARK, but the copy of Catherine on the Omnitool and the second copy of Simon are left behind in Pathos-II - and Simon's ensuing rage starts an argument that overloads the Omnitool, leaving him alone at the bottom of the sea.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: The player can attempt to complete the game without touching non-essential WAU nodes (resulting in no healing). The game reacts to this one by providing a 3-characters from a code.
• Shrug of God: Thomas Grip's attitude on whether leaving the WAU alive is humanity's best chance. He honestly didn't consider the question and thinks Both Sides Have a Point.
• Signature Scene: The suit transfer scene two thirds into the game.
• The Un-Twist:
  • Played with. Due to the setting and interactions most will guess the playable Simon after the intro is a robot. However, unlike other examples, the twist is revealed early on, and part of the plot involves Simon struggling to wrap his mind around the whole thing.
  • It's also patently obvious to most players that Simon is going to be left behind in the ocean and only a copy of him will board the Ark after the first instance of this exact same thing being revealed. Doesn't stop Catherine from leading on both the player and Simon into thinking that it's a straight-up transfer.
• Vindicated by History: While initially having a somewhat mixed reception compared to Frictional's other games (especially due to being much less directly the kind of horror they were known for at the time), the game has seen a steady growth in popularity in the years since its release, which has even been confirmed in a blogpost by Frictional Games, and is even viewed by some as holding up even better than their breakout successes in Penumbra and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, both of which were widely influential on a rash of indie horror games following in their footsteps and improving on them.
• The Woobie:
  • Catherine: She actually had to be encouraged by others to stand up for herself, and she's not liked by the other staff. Brandon Wan's journal notes that she makes him uncomfortable, while Dr. Masters' profile on Catherine states that she is “weak in character, the perfect victim to be domineered and pushed around by others.” She feels enormously guilty over the Apocalypse Cult that springs up around her ARK program, causing many scanned subjects to kill themselves right in front of her. She tells Simon that she "knows that she's not an easy person to like," and that she just "thought her colleagues trusted her" when referring to how her colleagues killed her in a panic. Tragically, her lines heavily imply that her last thoughts before she was killed were of total isolation. Even as an AI, it appears that she still continues to hold those negative thoughts as she tries to befriend Simon in spite of his initial mistrust and outright calling her 'disgusting' for his Brain Duplication incident. And then right at the end when Simon curses at her for not being transferred to the Ark, she 'dies' once again with the knowledge that Simon hates her.
  • To a different extent, Brandon Wan. Despite being a bit of a jerk, Catherine and Simon repeatedly upload his brain scan to various simulations in order to coax the security cipher out of him, with Catherine even pretending to be his girlfriend Alice within the simulation to trick him. It gets even worse when you find out the fate of the real Brandon. He nobly sacrificed himself to get the survivors of Theta out of the station and away from the proxies, and asked them to tell Alice that he loved her as his only request. The fact that everyone he was trying to save died anyways does NOT make it better.
  • Brandon's woobie status is made even more extreme in that Catherine weirdly gloats to Brandon's simulation that he isn't real after he gives the info needed, causing his last moments before being shut down to be filled with horror. This is probably the most strangely sadistic thing Catherine does during the game.
  • Simon himself, very much so. Every version of him, except for the final copy that gets uploaded into the ARK, either dies or is left alone at the bottom of the sea, forever. His original human self dies of a brain injury from a car crash where his close friend was killed, his first copy is either killed by his next copy or wakes up alone with Catherine nowhere to be found, and his second copy watches the ARK take off without him, and in despair lashes out at Catherine. Then he has to watch helplessly as she splutters out of existence, without giving them a chance to reconcile or say goodbye. He is left alone, buried at sea, forever. The last we see of him is him desperately begging Catherine not to leave him.

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