Just finished SOMA and thought it was very good. What are your thoughts on it Yea Forums?

The outcome would always be the same. One mind is transferred and one stays in the body. The game just gives you control of the one that stays that time.

Its a neat idea and really makes you think about what is considered "life"

cringe walking simulator with babby's first existential philosophy, Penumbra was infinitely superior

Storytelling isn’t as cool, but philosophical conversation trees with an AI are really fun to do.

It was never a 50/50 chance. The entire game was experienced from the perspective of Simon 3 (Deep Diving Suit Simon), and most of the game was an implanted memory.

fucking hated it and stopped playing after an hour

Unrelated game from SOMA exploring similar themes from a different perspective.
It's a puzzle game set across serene landscapes in a digital world (think SOMA's Ark).

Takes after games like Portal and Myst

>there's two sides of a coin so there's no coin flip
if a consciousness duplicates there's no distinction between the new and old version, that's the point

I cried at the ending

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>The entire game was experienced from the perspective of Simon 3
I don't think it's that, I think it just transfers your perspective from Simon 1 into Simon 2 and 3 because there wouldn't be a game otherwise and probably also to fool you into thinking the same thing Simon does about the "coin flip"

Penumbra had all the same problems as Amnesia and SOMA. They tossed the baby out with the bath water by axing combat mechanics completely after Overture.

Yes but if you duplicate your consciousness, the duplicate isn't you even if it thinks it is. The point is that you can't transfer your perspective or "self" even into a copy of yourself, the copy is still functionally a separate person from your perspective

The thing is, if you're consciously experiencing something in real-time, you can know for a fact that you will NOT be the transferred consciousness when the transfer occurs.

>when the transfer occurs.
There is no transfer, you're just making a copy of yourself. If you copy a sheet of paper, they aren't both the same sheet of paper, and the first sheet can't magically become the second sheet

Though once the transfer occurs, there will be a version that has those exact same memories of getting in that chair and thinking of themselves as the first version.

I'm not saying there's a difference. One mind is in another location and one stays. The protagonist is too dumb to realize this even though he's done it multiple times.

It definitely IS that, because that's the entire theme of the game.
You can't tell the difference between being an original or a copy, but the game is very explicit about the player being a copy right from the very beginning.

Right, but that version only has memories. If you make the decision to copy your consciousness, and you've got your finger on the trigger, you can be 100% certain that you're not the copy because you are not experiencing a memory at that exact moment. Memories and current consciousness are structurally distinct from each other.

I don't think the first 3/4 of the game is a flashback, particularly considering there are distinct flashback sequences showing things Simon 1 did in Toronto

Whether its a flashback or not is irrelevant (also, the flashback sections were WAU hallucinations from the gel network at Delta). Your memory of the first 2/3rds of the game are effectively identical to Simon's (fake) memories of the same experience.

>The protagonist is too dumb to realize this even though he's done it multiple times.
It's not about him being dumb, it's that from his and the player's perspective he's still the same Simon even though by the end of the game you've played as four different people. Each time Simon makes a copy of himself the Simon you were playing as is left behind and you're playing as a new person that thinks it's Simon

Why would it be a memory and not just a perspective trick on the devs' part

Wait so there was no coin toss when it came to Simon being copied to the diving suit either? Damn I'm retarded.

When you "become" Simon 3 you can still hear Simon 2 talking to Catherine asking her if it worked

>The protagonist is too dumb to realize this even though he's done it multiple times.

The protagonist was being willfully ignorant; the idea that his consciousness could transfer over was the only way he wouldn't live forever in an eternal nightmare at the bottom of the ocean, and Catherine was perfectly fine with not correcting his misconceptions until the very end.

Would have been better WITHOUT the monsters and with more existential horror instead. The best parts of the game have nothing to do with the WAU creatures, but of course monster-hide-and-seek is about all they know how to do. If they put out another game with that at its core, I think it'll come off as dead-horse beating.

I think the monsters played a vital role in portraying the setting as hell-on-earth. The only way the ending can be poignant is if the player wants to escape as much as Simon does.

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Boring game get fucked

From the player's perspective the coin flip works because you're obviously still playing each time he makes a copy, and each successive Simon thinks it works because they're exactly the same as the last Simon and the last one is never around to tell them otherwise. The one time two Simons are awake at the same time, the newest one loses his shit and either leaves the old one behind or kills him

The monsters are existential horror and tied to the themes though. The WAU, its loose definition of what qualifies as preserving life, whether or not you think the Earth should be left behind to whatever the WAU does to the life it can reach including ocean life.

Minor fun fact: If you listen closely to the datastreams of the proxy prisoners in the Delta basement (the people stuck in the mangled flesh), you can hear their hallucinations - the WAU is streaming their hopes and dreams to them while they're trapped in comas.
>one scientist is at a press event after he discovers alien life
>another person is performing a piano recital in front of thousands
>the security chief is fixing an airplane with his dad.

The WAU is trying its hardest to make everyone well again but it fucks up so badly because it's not very smart

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The WAU really isn't all that bad, it's just following the programming it was given

Is there a recording of this on youtube?

Besides the ending, I think the best part by far was the ride down the elevator into the abyss. Simon wondering if the copies have souls and if they'd exist in the afterlife, if there was an afterlife.

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>let the earlier simon wake up without catherine there
>he has 3 days to go fucking insane
wew, mercy kill was honestly the best choice

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>afterlife
literally shit we have no control over so no reason to ponder it other than to waste time

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Sad either way really, Simon 2 was only alive for like 10 hours

I got this for free with PS plus a while back. Should I play it?

youtube.com/watch?v=2HBUy6GIBkY

youtube.com/watch?v=2HBUy6GIBkY

Not the case if you believe your post-life fate will be affected by your behaviour

It's an interesting experience at least, not scary so much as incredibly depressing

It's a smart game, and it has a great script. It's worth playing. The criticisms against it are completely valid but they don't prevent you from experiencing the real payload of the game, which is its ability to poison your hopes and dreams.

Not sure why it's even being mentioned here since Talos Principle is an entirely different game with its entirely own gameplay mechanics that has more in common with Portal except replace the humor with philosophy and post-human melancholy and the locations with beautiful ancient ruins. Soma is more like Amnesia and maybe a bit BioShock. Both are worth playing though I prefer TTP.

To be fair, the scientists at the time fell for the same type of logic that Simon thinks up. A fair number of them also believed that if they died immediately after or at least shortly after their scan, then they would "resume" their life in the ARK with no loss of consciousness.
While Catherine didn't seem to believe that, it's not that crazy for Simon to have thought it. Smarter people than him believed something similar.
What I want to know is how Simon 2 (the Simon that wakes up in Upsilon) came to be. His scan was loaded into a cortex chip that was jammed into the diving suit (and the dead body) of Imogene Reed. But what I don't get is who put the chip there in the body, and how. I forget why Reed was even there, but she presumably had her head when she went. Did the WAU somehow manage to do it? It's never show to have any ability to directly manipulate physical space. It also doesn't seem to have control over the mockingbirds it creates. So how was it able to grab a cortex chip, jam it into the neck of Reed's corpse, and then upload Simon's brain scan?

If I remember right the WAU is why Simon 2 woke up, something about it uploading brain scans into random receptacles and seeing what happened

The WAU probably had the corpse jam the chip into its own head. Keep in mind that anything infected by structure gel can be controlled by the WAU.

Also
>It's never show to have any ability to directly manipulate physical space
It is to a degree, like the first actual person you see that the WAU is keeping alive with those freaky artificial lungs, it seems like it just tentacled its way into her body

Maybe. That seems pretty likely I guess.
I wonder why the WAU used Simon's brainscan in the first place at that time. Was it out of other scans to use? Or was Simon an experiment. I think even Catherine says he doesn't look like a typical mockingbird.
But that would sort of imply that the WAU is changing what it wants. At first it was making the vivarium, a sort of proto-ARK that could contain all the humans and require the bare minimum of power and supplies. Then it was also making mockingbirds, but they're very imperfect and don't seem to work well. Simon 2's body in comparison is very "stable" so to speak, and he didn't even realize he was in the suit at first. I dunno, just interesting to thing about. Maybe the fact that the WAU seems to have given up on the vivarium idea is proof that it's not a good idea, and so Catherine is wrong about the ARK being the best way for humanity to survive.