Somerville (2022)

Somerville is a real disappointment because it starts so strong and then completely collapses under its own weight.

The opening 30 minutes are genuinely impressive: a mysterious premise, a dense and moody atmosphere, and a powerful, immersive soundtrack. For a while, it feels like the game is building toward something meaningful and memorable.

Unfortunately, from roughly the midpoint onward, the experience goes downhill fast. The story becomes increasingly confusing, unfocused, and ultimately boring, and the finale is especially bad,lazy, absurd, and almost comical in how little effort it shows.

If you choose to tell a story without dialogue or text, you need to truly master visual storytelling. That is hard to do, and Somerville simply doesn’t pull it off. If you can’t execute that approach properly, you shouldn’t commit to it at all.

On top of that, many of the gameplay mechanics are poorly communicated and far from intuitive, which often leaves the player stuck without understanding what the game expects. This leads to unnecessary trial-and-error and repeated sections that add nothing of value.

With proper polish and better technical refinement, the game could have been noticeably better and probably 30 minutes shorter, since much of the playtime is currently inflated by pointless repetition.

And finally, the most ridiculous issue of all: HDR support exists on Xbox and PlayStation, but not on PC. That’s simply unacceptable in 2020s PC gaming. It strongly suggests that the developers either ran out of time or stopped caring toward the end.

Overall: a promising start ruined by weak storytelling, poor design decisions, and a lack of technical and creative follow-through.

Been watching this for quite long, long before release. That’s because the game was developed by one of the co-founders of Playdead, the studio who made Limbo and Inside. Two games I really loved! I saw some teasers about this new game and got intrigued. When it finally released in 2022 it got some mixed reactions. Been on my wishlist since then and never played, until it released for free on PS+.

The game has no dialogue, the story is telled through actions and the environment. That is one of the aspect where the game don’t get to me. It starts kind of strong and you understand the story and what it feels to get separated from his family. Later on it gets less clear and confusing.

I have som issues with gameplay as well. The controls is a bit clunky, some interactions is a bit frustrating. I would love more platforming elements. The puzzles were decent but could be more engaging and varying.

I would say it was a disappointment overall. I had higher expectations but on the other hand, it got some mixed reviews so I maybe lowered my expectation because of that. Still, I thought more of it.

Rating: 🌲🌲🌲

It's been a year since I played this so this will be a mini-review because I don't remember it all too well, but maybe that says something in itself - I usually need a lot longer than a year to forget this many details about a game.

I do remember finding Somerville absolutely gorgeous. It had sincerely emotional points, it did an excellent job of creating character motivation and feeling purely through non-verbal cues and visuals, and there are some truly interesting ideas and concepts scattered throughout. I think people are too harsh on this game, but I did find the ending underwhelming, though I liked the lead-up to it - the best way to describe it would be that it felt like you were doing something huge and wonderful and impressive, but then nothing much happened afterwards.

It's a decent game with good moments that wants to be great.

Also, let me pet the dog.

I had mixed emotions after that game. Somerville has a spectacular visual style and great sound design (I rarely pay attention to the sound, but there it was really well implemented), and it was enough for me not to drop playing until the very end.

Like Limbo and Inside there is no texts or dialogues, so the whole narrative is told by visual means. Honestly, I didn't fully get it (especially those superheroes-like soldiers and some kind of scientific experiments... what was that?), and while the whole atmosphere is great, the story felt vague. Five different endings totally don't help to understand anything.

Another big disappointments are clunky controls and camera. It felt like playing with huge input lag, and it failed several puzzles for me. Because of camera I often clinged to different edges and walls, so annoying.

Overall, I don't regret playing Somerville, visually it was worth it, but probably I would have preferred to watch this game, because gameplay-wise it is too unpolished.

I’ve played Somerville after a couple of big patches were out and addressed some of its main problems, so I didn’t have as hard a time as the ones who played it before that. What I came away with, sadly, was that some of its issues go beyond the reach of any patching. They are fundamental game design flaws that keep this 2D side-scroller from the co-creator of Limbo and Inside - easily my two favourite side-scrolling puzzle-platformers of the last 15 years - from becoming a truly memorable experience.

The main problem with Somerville is far and away the camera. It is often terrible and almost always too distant from the character. This means that quite a few times you get things in front of it blocking your view, and there’s literally nothing you can do about it other than move far enough for it to go away. On top of this, and also related to the camera, the game has a transitional moment issue. When you’re aiming your analog stick to move to a screen with an opposite camera angle to the screen before, the second you step into it your character starts moving back the way it came from, because the game simply doesn’t register that you should continue moving the way you were. This is almost shocking to see in a 2022 game. I mean it’s something that has been solved in the overwhelming majority of games for 2 decades now, yet in this game it gets in the way more often than it should.

But the problems in Somerville don’t end here. The other main issues are character movement and interaction mechanics: movement feels quite sluggish and slow to register prompts (side note, your character also can’t run for 10 seconds without sounding exhausted); interactions can feel janky and often force you to repeat the same action until the game decides to acknowledge it. Last but not least, the puzzles in Somerville, which are one of its principal gameplay elements, can at times seem quite unintuitive and, what is worse, poorly tuned. Some of it comes across as obtuse, since it requires incredible suspension of disbelief (e.g. the character sometimes can’t even go up the height of a literal step in order to reach a certain place, which is bonkers). One of the things I hate the most in puzzle-heavy games is when you know exactly what to do, but the game’s mechanics aren’t competent enough to allow you to do it logically.

However… there is one big saving grace in Somerville, however, and that is the vibe it conveys, something I happen to be an absolute sucker for (and that Limbo and Inside, for example, did superbly). As mechanically rough as the game may sometimes feel, it is also conceptually great, boasting an impressive and intense atmosphere that makes it stand out in a very distinct way. Even though they could’ve still taken it up a notch in this regard, Somerville still offers an ominous, cryptic world with an intriguing sense of mystery. The dystopian sci-fi visuals fit the theme of the story (another thing I’m partial to) remarkably well, and the narrative, vague as it may be, gives you just enough to keep pushing you past its technical hurdles to reach its climax. There are a couple of emotionally loaded moments in this game I genuinely didn’t expect, and the several endings you get depending on what you decide to do give your playthrough some particularity and character.

Looking back, it’s a real shame that Somerville feels so mechanically undercooked. It could’ve been so much more than it was if only it had spent some more time ironing out its kinks. As it stands, it’s still an easy recommendation for anyone who, like myself, values atmosphere and tone above most everything else. Sadly, this game has enough serious problems to be placed in the genre pantheon alongside the past greats that came from the same mind. 7/10

Couple things:

• What got added, compared to Limbo and Inside, by allowing this to have 3D movement? I feel like it just added more ways for me to fail certain sequences, without really adding anything compared to moving in only 2D
• How many mysteries did the story need? Did it really need both a mystery about who the 'good guys' are, and who the 'bad guys' are?

I dunno, I just wasn't satisfied with this game like I was with even Out of this World, even though that one is more frustrating. I feel like Somerville was missing a little something that connected me to the game. Maybe the feeling of disconnection started in the beginning where you start as the kid and then become the Dad who you play the whole rest of the game? What was the ludo-narrative purpose of that? I'm not sure; I'm not sure they thought about it.