That being said I'm still settling in from travel and jetlag - so nothing too exciting for this week. What I can offer is some small discussion of stealth within SOMA (and by extension Amnesia and other horror games by the developer Frictional Games). Overall the game is great, but the approach of the stealth within this game is much more in line with hindering the player experience than enhancing it. You have to get past these blocks before the enjoyment of the game can come into play.
SOMA broadly can be seen as a step inbetween the horror genre and the "walking" simulators. Walking simulators such as Dear Esther or Gone Home are largely pushed by the player's discovery of each audio log or information which slowly brings them to an understanding of the world. In short an investigative game, where the mystery is figuring out the player-characters role in the world, but also what exactly the world is. The horror genre is a bit more traditional, being scared by the atmosphere, but also being chased by all sorts of grotesque figures. Another example of this mashup can be seen within Alien: Isolation which provides more gameplay variation in it's stealth and later combat.
Stealth in SOMA largely is due to monsters patrolling areas in which you have to do various tasks, or monsters guarding certain doors. Stealth is based upon the fact that the monsters have low visual perception, but high aural perception - running, walking and crawling all make noise, but you can always just freeze and wait for the monster in question to walk past. Where this breaks down is that the stealth largely turns into a waiting game, that is dictated by the monster's AI. Trying to move past these monsters draws attention to you, even if crawling, and making distraction noises (such as throwing an item) is much more likely to reset the monster's path to walk right by you rather than to push it further away from you. The level design too of narrow corridors makes choke points for the AI to bounce against, so you can be waiting for a while. Prior to the later levels there are open areas in which the AI can be circumvented, but for a large part of the "challenging" sections the player has to wait a while.
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| Said small corridor |
Or!
Alternatively the player can choose to run past the monsters to their key objective to make use of the health system within the game(which operates on a a two hit system, you get hit twice you die. However on the first hit the player-character goes unconscious while the AI resets somewhere else on the map. With this in mind many of the stealth sections can be circumvented through making the most of the game's health system.
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| Artist's impression |
The reason that this stealth system feels flat is due to the waiting nature of the gameplay. Although certainly a valid option for many stealth games Metal Gear Solid, Hitman: Blood Money, Splinter Cell, using it as one of the features of stealth-horror genre makes the game feel a little uninspired. The use of objects to throw to distract enemies is a great one within games, but the fact that the footsteps of the player can quickly nullify the distraction ends up making the gameplay sections a hindrance to the otherwise engaging plot. Applying more options for the stealth (combat, or more abilities to distract enemies), or providing alternative means of hindering the player (making further gameplay more difficult) might be two options worth exploring for making SOMA's stealth more enjoyable.
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