Why are games like Soma so pretentious when compared to Pathologic or The Void? Is it bad writing...

Why are games like Soma so pretentious when compared to Pathologic or The Void? Is it bad writing? I played Soma and would give it a 5/10. Kind of boring, not into walking simulators and… well I thought it was just kind of stupid. I know walking simulators are barely games in the first place but what did you think of the idea/story/concept behind Soma? I could just be missing something.

Having only seen a snippet of the former and knowing nothing of the latter, I’d say because SOMA’s a walking simulator designed with “Isn’t our story so deep?” in mind and the other would be an actual game, maybe?

Yes, actually most people that played Soma missed something.
There's a specific reason why Soma feels incomplete and pretty disjointed: the finished plot is vastly different from the original idea in many places.


Pathologic has more actual gameplay but the overall plot of the game is TREMENDOUSLY pretentious.
It's a theatrical russian play on a metaphorical stage where every character, situation, location and so on are just symbols in one giant metaphor.
Literally the only reason some people on Holla Forums don't realize it is because they haven't played the game themselves/are too fucking stupid to get anything/can't get past the language barrier (the devs didn't do a good job trying to make it comprehensible for an english audience, so the last one is reasonable).

You can't do fucking anything without idiots calling it "pretentious".
Guys, a developer may be humble about his game and still write about metaphors and symbolism. Maybe, I dunno, he LIKES that stuff and is not doing it to be called deep?
Jesus.

I wouldn't call pathologic pretentious. Soma is.

Have you even played Soma?
The people who made it clearly have no concept of what the fuck they're talking about, the characters in-game keep calling themselves and other robots "sentient" even though an actual scientist would NEVER use that term and even being somewhat versed in A.I. would allow you to know this.

I wouldn't call Soma particularly pretentious, but I'd agree with your 5/10 rating. 6/10 at most.
Some people say the walking simulator is the modern version of 90's point'n'clicks, but I don't think that's universally the case. The old point'n'clicks were usually heavily driven by a cast of characters, and player agency mostly took place in the form of interactions and dialogue with those characters. This is also true of Pathologic.
Soma, Firewatch, and any number of other walking simulators have a very small number of characters, and a lot of time spent collecting audio logs and documents and other "lore" items, more in the tradition of Myst/The Seventh Guest, Shock games, Dead Space, and the like. The problem is that, whatever you may think of those games in terms of quality, there is significantly more actual game built around them.
So it seems to me that there's just something fundamentally unsatisfying about trudging through a linear story, passively observing carefully ordered clues and moments and having relatively minimal agency in what few interactions you have with the sparse cast of characters. It brings up the question of "why is this a game," and I can't help but think that people who really enjoyed Firewatch and Soma are just people who don't read.

The gameplay is in conflict with the story it's trying to tell. Forgiving that it treads on old sci-stories but done even more poorly, it's Clock Tower but without the scare factor. The idea itself is scary but the way it's implemented isn't.

There are these obvious questioning your action moments that are really just coin flip choices that don't have much lasting impact later. It's whether you want to be a dick or not to get to the next objective. Death is downplayed because of the mechanic where you get knocked down one time and could take about one more hit before you are technically dead. This breaks immersion because it's really just a race to get to the next checkpoint as you try not to get clothesline by an unseen force and heal at those alien pods healing stations.

There was not enough horror elements to make what your doing have weigh to them. Wouldn't it be cool if you could hear audio distortion of screams as people come to the realization of their situation? There just seems to be a lack of fully utilizing the games world to translate into interesting gameplay moments. What if you get hunted by your own copies trying to erase you thinking that your the duplicate? What if those terrible actions you did to those crew members had consequences later or changed the behavior of the few remaining people that you met, changing the path the story takes place?

Soma the game was all about the ideas and it didn't even use them to its full potential. That is the real sad thing about Soma that it feels like half the game it could have been. Well, at least it wasn't you just walking around to watch clips of things happening like Everybody's gone to the Rapture.

there's your answer
MC was a dumb motherfucker, he better have had brain damage to justify him being that retarded

How the fuck is Soma pretentious especially compared to something like The Void?

Is this some kind of consensus cracking where retarded opinions are forced upon the board?

It pissed away plenty of potential with the MC alone.
I was willing to put up with most of it until the first copying happened. I knew, I fucking knew how the end would play out with the Ark the moment I saw that. I wanted to believe it would not turn out how it did, but it did.
So I felt like I was walking around for another couple hours for fucking nothing. Looking at shit scenery and boohoo the last human alive and then not so alive anymore.
It's like using teleportation to get from A to B but in real time and you have to be there throughout it all, holding down the stick to walk.
I would've preferred to actually watch it in movie form than have to walk myself.

All in all, it tried to pass as something it isn't and chose the wrong medium for it.

That's about every "deep" game ever. Soma is still less pretentious than average.

Nigger I don't give a shit about Soma's quality. There is almost nothing as pretentious as The Void. This is coming from someone who likes the game.

The game takes place hundreds of years into the future smart one. If you paid close attention to the dialog, you will notice that the people and language from the future has evolved from our current present day language. Like that one time the female cellphone voice companion says "Oh I forgot your people were religious" or something like that.

But no. SOMA is not pretentious. Which is by the way the lowest possible fucking argument anyone can call something and get away with. The story itself is very interesting but the reason it kind of sucks is because it hamfisted the liquid robot sentient AI shit into the already very complex idea of what it means to be conscious. The writing is really simple and doesn't have any recurring styles of writing that would make it "pretentious". Very straightforward story.

What about "That dragon cancer" ?
I thought that took the cake for most pretentious by now

Wouldn't know
Never touched that shit.

Father basically used his son's cancer to make sheckles and shed fake fucking tears at the game awards as it won some faggy award

It takes place 96 years from now.
You could not have picked a worse person to try and pass off that bullshit to, I'm a linguist. The language hasn't changed at all. Cultural changes =/= language changes.

pathologic and the void are also pretentious gameplay less garbage.

Both Pathologic and The Void have gameplay mechanics complete with failure states. They are more of a game than Epic Yarn or Sim City.

They're less pretentious than That Dragon Dildo Cancer and Gone Homo, you just have shit taste user.

Let me guess. Did you fail LING101?

that's really not a fucking accomplishment.

Okay how about the fact that the idiots thought that killing yourself would be the same thing as waking up on the ark?

The memory clone is a seperate conciousness from the genuine article. Killing yourself just ends you. you dont' become the clone. The real you is lost forever.

This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain.

So is having shit taste, go play them and get back to us with a thorough analysis.

How do you pass that as pretentious though? It seems more like a psychotic decision. Kind of like how religious extremists tell you to submit to their imaginary friend.

How convenient that you play as a thing without a brain for the majority of the game then.

No, I would not call any of the characters sentient except for WAU improved brainscan copies. Especially the mentally deficient retard since he's not an actual futuristic brainscan he is instead the prototype brainscan that all AI are based on.

when the closest thing you compare them to is western indie garbage you really aren't selling anything here kid

It's logically the same thing as the bioshock infinite time bullshit. They're trying to talk about things that they have no fucking clue about and they bring nothing to the table.

I'm not religious either, but Jesus fucking Christ, could you tip and harder?

I feel like I'm reading a post straight out of /r/atheism

Do you even play video games you faggot?

N A R R A T I V E

Exactly, you switch bodies two or three times and the dumb motherfucker is still mad at the end. The game's puzzle are too easy for it to be engaging and the story is simple. The only good thing was the setting.

are you using two different ips to post in this thread?

I am amazed there are people here actually defending this walking sim.
The story nor the writing are even good. The characters are idiots, the phone chick contradicts herself constantly ("it's just a robot, it doesn't have feelings!") and the MC never gets that you can't switch consciousness despite it being explained to him several times.

That's really pulling at straws there user.

I had no idea about the theatre metaphor until I reached the true ending with haruspex. By all accounts I should have gotten it with bachelor but I guess I was too drunk to understand what the fuck the powers that be were talking about.

She's just using the MC (can't remember his name, he was the worst character for sure) to get the ARK into space. Catherine doesn't give a shit about the MC. The MC is a retard, a useful retard who can't come to terms with the idea, so he tries to create the "coin flip" scenario to cope, only for reality to hit him hard on the head. You just play from the perspective of the copies of him later on, until the last one. You're also forgetting he's literally brain damaged and a prototype AI.


Rub a couple of brain cells together, rather than grasp at straws yourself. He's stating that neither of them are Indie games, which they aren't. Epic Yarn is a fucking Kirby game and Sim City has been a Maxis (Sims) staple since 1989.

I'd say the game is a 7/10 story wise, with a great concepts and setting, but a failure to deliver on utilising them to it's best like

said and a 4/10 gameplay wise (for what it is, nothing is really wrong with it, but there's nothing to it, more interesting horror designs than Amnesia at least). For basically a 5 or 6/10 at best. I wouldn't deem to call it pretentious, it's basically like a pretty good commentary on how people would react in their situation. Examples would be cult-like behaviour of the suicidal (Jonestown), pychopaths (Akers) and sociopaths (Catherine) and idiots (The MC). One big theme that shines through is everyone is in denial in some way.

Pathologic is much better of a game and more pretentious in narrative, and The Void is good but definitely tipping the scales of pretentiousness.

Wacky cartoon characters telling you straight out of the bat to ignore all inconsistencies because it's just a game, man, isn't pretentious?

Read the post.

Soma is one of those games that are actually BETTER when watched as a lets play, because the gameplay is such shit.

Notice how the rest of the thread didn't comment on it.
And there's people that keep calling SOMA, a basic as fuck sci-fi story, "pretentious".
A simple sci-fi story is more pretentious than RUSSIAN ABSTRACT THEATRICAL PLAY.
Jesus fuck Holla Forums is composed by absolute retards that have no idea what "pretentious" means.

"pretentious" is now "i didn't like the story" or "i didn't like the devs/game".
Same as any other goddamn term on this board, every single term eventually becomes "i don't like X so i'll call it Y".

This here is key. The story in SOMA is simple as fuck but they tout it as something SO COMPLEX, MUH EXISTENSHALISUM. That is why it's pretentious.

And the whole thing about Pathologic being a play, well it's not like it was shown directly to you at the fucking beginning of the game or anything.

Or did you think that what the tragedian outside of Eva's house said about being an observer was just fluff? It's spelled out from the get go.

You've got it backwards.

I kinda enjoyed the themes SOMA tried to go for but executed poorly.
For example the AI who's directive was to keep its crew alive and the most efficient means was combining their organic bodies with machine keeping them in agonizing hell for decades or even centuries never letting them die

I wouldn't call SOMA pretentious at all, a better term would be "mild". Instead of going for shock value they went for a more meditative, contemplative atmosphere. I'm not sure if I would say it's a walking sim, because it does have obstacles and at least an illusion of failure. If you really want pretentious you should fucking "experience" Everybody's Gone To The Rapture where there is literally nothing of value.

What irks me the most is that Dear Esther was clearly labeled as an experiment, not a game, and future copies of it like Firewatch pretend to be actual games worthy of attention. A game like SOMA is still a game with certain mechanics, good or not, and its a disservice to it and similar titles to call it a walking sim when there really ARE walking sims you should scorn.

Well done, you've managed to say one of the biggest loads of bullshit I've heard on this board in awhile.

No, its true I played the first 5 minutes of the void and all you do is walk :^)

The Void is shit because I can only pick one waifu.

Walking simulators need to die k?

Actually you play through half of the game in the robo-wired corpse of a lesbian.

Do you?

...

Well according to Holla Forums any game that tries to tell an interesting story is "pretentious".

It's an overused term, synonymous with "I'm bored why do I have to read all this stuff". Which is fair but you should have done your research.

I feel like this thread has some serious proxyfagging going on, why the fuck would anybody defend this shitty walking sim?

Why do butthurt fags always resort to this nonsense whenever a game they like is called something negative?

And its not even this thread, who would have guessed he was a massive faggot?

How can you fuck up a concept so badly?

The biggest letdown of Soma was the protagonist. Simon was an imbecile, and even though there was vague justifications in the plot as to why he was an idiot that still doesn't excuse the general stupidity of the character.

Then again, if we consider him as a stand-in for the normalfag and his limited intellect and ability to process information then Simon is a very meta.

Computer scientist here, an AI which acts 100% indistinguishable from humans is for all intents and purposes considered sentient.
Your own brain is just a biological machine too, only the complexity generates consciousness.
That is, if you adhere to a Physicalism, which is the rational choice.

What are niggers then?

It's simple for us, it's mindblowing for normalfags that thought it's gonna be a scary spooky game, like Pewdiepie likes to play, just the right thing after streaming episode 6845 of Minecraft!

I think he's referring to the term "sentient" itself, it's not interchangeable with "consciousness".
I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know, but consciousness is a more complex term that encompasses sentience among other things like awareness.

Good point, thanks - in my language it's only one term.
Although I think AI can achieve consciousness, too. Imo, qualia are also just emergent features of a sentience that is sufficiently complex.

It's called reading comprehension, user.

Everybody stopped caring about professional game reviews after they declared their audience dead. Only way to trick normalfags into buying games is to shill them everywhere and hope they mistake it for word of mouth.
Because the shills are also normalfags.

I played Soma out of morbid curiosity. I loved the accidental ghost-in-the-machine drama they seemed to advertise, but the Toronto-borne protagonist was a whiny baby even in the face of reality. There were multiple instances that explained why he was there and why it happened, but he refused to accept it and kept whining.

He saw how transferring his brain data didn't kill the other body, and he freaked for no real reason.

Then when they were shooting the brain data onto the Ark launch, he whined when he didn't actually pass out and wake up on there instead, and killed his digital screen girlfriend in anger. To me, that's the opposite of character development.

Pretentious means putting on the airs of something you are not. If Patholigic does RUSSIAN ABSTRACT THEATRICAL PLAY well then it isn't pretentious. If it does it poorly, and thinks more of itself than it actually is, then it is pretension. I have not played Pathologic. I did play SOMA, and found it not only pretentious but also boring.

Maybe if you a toddler or Richard Dawkins.
Conscious experience and neurons are qualitatively different. One cannot be the cause of the other. There is no way. This is like saying the idea of the number two is caused by atoms. It is just retarded. These are qualitatively different. A computer that imitates a man will always be merely imitation. The soul exists. God exists. Jesus Christ is God and your Savior. Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand you physicalist reprobate. Kill yourself, KIKE.

Sage for biting bait.

What the hell happened to this place

Someone already posted that unfunny reddit-tier review.