Recent reviews by somguy9

~contains minor spoilers past the first paragraph~
If you liked Little Nightmares 1 you will almost definitely like 2. It's very much in the same vein, although this time it has more fleshed out gameplay, story, length, and most importantly, scares. This game will absolutely stick with you in the same way some of the best atmospheric horror games do. Even the soundtrack is incredible and haunting. Some of the tracks are still stuck in my head days after I completed the game (and in a good way).
Important thing to note is that playing with a controller is HIGHLY recommended. Some parts of the game are intended to be played with twin-sticks, and thus are a massive pain to play with keyboard + mouse.
All in all, a great sequel to the first game, and an improvement in every conceivable way.

All above still stands, however the game is not without flaw. There are a few issues I have with the game, primarily in the gameplay aspect of things. Mainly the fights with the new slam mechanic are occasionally quite frustrating. While you don't have to be very precise with the angle you slam your weapon with, it isn't very forgiving either. Often, if you screw up even one slam, you're pretty much screwed. In fights against multiple foes in a sequence, it's incredibly frustrating to keep returning to the checkpoint before the fight starts, and then having to fight all of them again. There is one fight near the end of the game which is complete and total garbage, and it's basically luck-based to get through it (I'm pretty sure most people know the fight I'm talking about). To be honest, I'm also quite iffy on the fights in general, as it's the complete antithesis to the gameplay in 1, and most of the gameplay in 2. You're taught to run or hide from threats, not confront them, from the very start of the game. To then be launched into multiple arena-like fights against multiple enemies just doesn't really gel well. Then again, so many concurrent stealth/escape sections in the game would be a massive bore (a trap many indie/AA horror games fall into). At the very least, the game strikes a nice balance between puzzle, stealth, escape, and fight sections (and occasionally blend them seamlessly together).

I also feel the "co-op" action between Mono and Six is kind of under-utilized. There aren't really any substantial puzzles in the game that actually take advantage from the things Mono and Six could do together. Usually, Six works as little more than a bump in the road, where you have to remember to open a previous door before continuing, as the next door requires two people to open it. In stealth sections where she is present, she may as well not be. Enemies don't spot her even if she's out in the open, and I even found her blocking my way on several occasions. What if she could distract enemies during stealth sections? Maybe have more branching paths through levels where, at specific moments during those levels, you could call out to her and she'd do specific actions in the map (that's another thing, the "call" function does practically nothing outside of the scene where it's introduced and one scene at the very end). On a side-note, although the devs missed an opportunity to make the game two-player co-op, at the same time I'm thankful as co-op is pretty much per definition a story-killer. Especially in a game such as this where the story is very well-crafted, it'd be a shame to have players no pay attention to it because they're too busy with hijinx.

Most of the puzzles in the game are incredibly simple. I think there were only maybe one or two puzzles in the game where I actually had to think or look around more than 10 seconds before knowing exactly what I needed to do. Obviously, it's a tricky balance to make the puzzles be engaging, but to also not make them long or difficult enough to break up the pacing of the game. The tension you would feel if you're in the same building as some horrible creature would deflate completely upon realizing that the creature won't enter the room you're in because it's a puzzle room, and in most parts they pulled it off quite well. Other parts, though, not so much. At some points it becomes very clear that the puzzle you're doing right now is basically padding the game time, being nothing but a chore. At that point, either make the puzzles actually engaging, or make them shorter.

I also have one minor complaint, although I'm not sure if this complaint would be universal. The secret ending to the game (which you unlock after you collect all of a given collectible) is kind of lackluster. I pretty much already knew about the main thing it implies long before I even completed my first (non-100%) playthrough, through fairly heavy-handed details in the game that point towards the same conclusion. For the rest it's intriguing, sure, but in my opinion it doesn't really give enough new information about the world of the game or the characters that it warrants needing to replay the entire game and getting all the collectibles before being able to see it.

These issues are minor, but still quite frustrating. All-in-all though, this game is still highly worth your time if you're anything like a fan of horror games. In my book, it's currently an 8.5/10, although if they'd make the fights a bit less frustrating and more forgiving it would easily pass the 9/10 mark.

It's pretty rare to see Junji Ito-inspired games. It's even more rare to see Junji Ito-inspired games that are actually enjoyable to play.

WORLD OF HORROR is a roguelite turn-based horror game taking heavy influence from Junji Ito, H.P. Lovecraft, and more. Despite this heavy influence, all of the art, as well as the stories in general are completely original, and of pretty high quality. In short, every campaign consists of five short mysteries you have to solve (again inspired by the short nature of most stories written by both Lovecraft and Ito), before you proceed to a final challenge which is relatively short. There's also an endless mode which gives you the ability to endlessly play the small stories.

Qualitatively, the game is great on all fronts except for a few grammatical and spelling issues in the text. Its main problem comes from the game's length. Despite all of the mysteries having multiple endings, you will probably have seen all the game can offer within 10 hours, which in my opinion brings the game closer to a proof-of-concept rather than a finished game.

Regardless, I'm excited for the full release of the game, which is currently planned somewhere this year.

Honestly a must-buy if you have a VR headset of any kind. The only downside to the game is that it's somewhat of a hassle to get custom songs to add beyond the admittedly small amount of songs either in the base game or locked as DLC. Literally the only bad thing about the game.

I am kind of conflicted on this game.

On the one hand, there's a lot of potential here. You can see, while playing the game that the team behind it knows what they're doing. For a very early version, many parts of the game are already very streamlined. The designs, while somewhat generic, are very well-crafted. Pretty much any building can tell you what it does after just a glance at it. Not only this, but the game looks beautiful as well.
The AI, generally speaking for how far I've come in the game, is a LOT better than what you would expect to see (heck, I'd say it's even better than some in fully released AAA games). The gameplay is a bit shallow, but it already is enjoyable enough to keep me hooked through hours of gameplay. There are little details added in a lot of aspects of the game that really show the creators of this game have expertise, and above all enjoy creating this. Things like paths slowly showing up over time as your peeps repeatedly walk over it, many of the visual flair in the game camera/perspective, the interactions between your peeps, and a lot more.

However, the flaws are plentiful. Currently, the gameplay is incredibly shallow, not only making it somewhat boring for people who are very deep into god games, but also hurting replayability (a vital component to ANY god game in my book). I would love to see some actual stats and how exactly some things influence other things. Due to all of this information being obfuscated, managing logistics is kind of a nightmare.
The tech tree in its current state is kind of a mess. Not unfixable, but still very oddly put together. It's almost satirically anachronistic, which kind of seems odd for a game that intends to simulate life (as the title says). The 'pacing' of the tech tree (and by extension, the pacing of the game) is also very strange. It feels as though you instantly jump from the neolithic to the modern era, with nothing much in between. Again, this isn't unfixable, and I'm quite sure the devs are aware of this and plan to add more to it.
The game is also unbearably slow, especially when you start off. Most of the time, you're just waiting for things to finish construction, or for your resources to get produced, or for tech research to finish. This is all pretty standard for God games, but the main problem comes from the fact that the game currently only has a highest speed of 1.5x. If I were to show this game to you, you would think 1.5 is the default game speed.

In the end, I can only recommend this to you if you are willing to spend 25 bucks on a very much unfinished game, albeit with so much potential to rival the likes of KSP and Factorio. The game is somewhat enjoyable, but currently offers little in comparison to the price you pay for it.

I, for one, am quite excited for the wild ride ahead in this game's development, and am very curious what the end product will look like.

Now for some storytime about why I finally decided to just uninstall this game and angrily (/rantily) write this.
I was doing one of the liberation missions for the south-eastern most area, the one with the airport. It starts off well enough. The mission was absolutely boring (Get in plane. Take off plane. Fly for 2 minutes. Land plane. Taxi for 2 minutes. Go inside hangar. Kill three dudes. Get in car. Get to ATC tower. Activate six points around the airport within 2 minutes. Go back to ATC. Wait 2-3 minutes for hack to complete, with occasional lads spawning around you. Get in car with escortee.).
But anyway, after all of that, it was now time for the escape. For some reason, they decided that it was a good idea to not only have permanently respawning helicopters (with rockets) following you, but also to make the escape point a 10-15 minute drive from the airport. With roadblocks everywhere in between. Without a minimap. Also the escape point was in an un-liberated area at this point of the game.
So I avoided all the rockets and dudes on bikes and in cars. The lady escortee was absolutely terrible at aiming the turret, and was basically as useful as a pile of bricks in the back seat. I went off-road, since I thought it would have been faster (I was wrong). Then I slowly turned around, and the car caught fire because of a continuous barrage of helicopter rockets. No biggie, at least the escortee got out of the car (unlike in JC3) before it exploded. We just go back to the road and get another car. Hahahahah nah f*** you. The escortee doesn't follow you, and instead waits for you to deliver her another car. So I have to grapple back to the road, get another turret-humvee, drive back offroad, wait like half a minute for her dumb AI to get in the car. Turn around, car again is almost exploding due to the continuous barrage of rockets, and finally get back to the road. I stay on the road, and get to a series of bridges. Now, I'm willing to bet that they thought this area would have been really cool. There were road-blocks forming convenient ramps, and jets flying overhead dropping bombs just shy of you, making the entire thing slightly cinematic (if it didn't look like crap, that is). Anyway, I reach the end of the bridges part, and find another roadblock with two roads walled off with plastic walls, and the third having a ramp. Feeling adventurous, I decided to just plow the humvee through one of the plastic walls. Hahahahahah fat chance. The physics glitches and I get launched about 10 meters in the air, into the water next to the road. Now I was completely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ frustrated. I get out of the car, and of course the car hasn't exploded yet so the dumb escortee doesn't know to get out.
Reminder, there's still a helicopter continuously raining hellfire on top of my head. I take it out, a new one spawns literally five meters from the last one. Fine. I use the grapple tether to pull the car out of the water. Sucks that it's getting on its side but oh well.
Now here comes the kicker. The helicopter rains down some more rockets, this time making it enough to let the car catch fire (aka explode within a few seconds). The escortee gets out of the top door, as the car is on its side,

drumroll

and gets ragdoll-launched fifty meters away from me into the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ocean. She dies. Mission failed. 20-30 minutes down the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
Quick rundown: This game is terrible. It's broken. The physics don't work. The AI is abhorrent. The gameplay sucks. The divide between mission and side mission is incredibly vague and not at all explained. Everything that was in the last game, they somehow made worse. The airdrop system is needlessly complicated. The gunplay sucks, and is still most of the gameplay. The vehicle mechanics suck. THEY REMOVED THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MINES. The UI is awful, with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ menu controls to boot. There's no minimap, even though it's impossible to see how far away you are from an objective or marker. The game crashes quite often. The game looks terrible. The game sounds terrible. The story is retarded. The VA's didn't even try.

♥♥♥♥ this game. It should die in a hole. If you want to play a Just Cause game, just go for 2, and maybe 3 afterwards. This piece of ♥♥♥♥ isn't worth your money, time, or effort.

(There are no spoilers in this review)

Lucas Pope is a great developer. His last game, Papers Please (pretty much made by him alone), was beyond a doubt one of the best games ever made. So, he had a lot to live up to in his next game. I still remember downloading the 15-minute demo four years ago on my crappy iMac and being completely blown away by the simple idea, and even the scope of what Pope would say he'd do.
Now, four years have passed. A lesser developer would leave the idea at that, just an idea with a 15-minute demo. But not Lucas Pope. He used those four years to the greatest extent possible, just to deliver ANYTHING that could live up to Papers, Please.

So, does he deliver? That question I find hard to answer.
He definitely made out on his promise. He built a game, that adhered to the outlines he thought up four years ago exactly to the dot. He forged an interesting story, together with an incredible method of story-telling. The music is terrific, and the graphics, even if they are very humble, are very elegantly integrated as well. Playing this game, you can tell he put his damndest into getting this game out, every single second of the four years that have passed.

That's not to say the game doesn't have its flaws. Like many other indie-games, the gameplay is just one goal (in this case, solving the mystery of what happened to 60 individuals and document it as such), which doesn't change much over the game. Sure, there are a few twists done to the gameplay, to spice it up a little, but in the end it's pretty much just flair to rule out the monotony of the gameplay. So the six or seven hours you spend in this game is pretty much just doing one thing, working to one goal, with the main thing keeping you interested being the story.
Then how good is the story? Well, I'd say it's great. It has some twists and turns here and there, and definitely could keep you interested for the entirety of the game. The problem arises from the fact that the storytelling only takes up about half of the time you're playing the game. The other half, you spend thinking about the story and trying to solve the mysteries. When you've witnessed all the scenes there are to witness, all that's left to do is read up on the scenes, try to put the puzzle-pieces together, and revisit old scenes to look around for missed details. As you fill in these blank spaces, boredom might start to creep up. The only thing keeping it back is those checkmarks you get when you have correctly filled in three of the fates, which aptly makes you think you're a bloody genius.

Aside from that, the game just feels... Late. As I said before, I was blown away when the demo dropped four years ago. Back then, games were kind of getting over-saturated. AAA games were already knee-deep into familiar concepts, each becoming more monotonous as the last, and Steam Greenlight was starting to turn the front page into an endless drivel of same-y Unreal/Unity/FPS-Maker indie trash. Anything that would go out of the norm to be something greater would be a godsend.
Enter Lucas Pope, shining down like an angel (religion jokes) from heaven. Papers Please just received a ton of rewards last year, and was still fresh enough in memory to still be mentioned in weekly top-10 videogame articles. He came with a brand-new original idea for a videogame at least as terrific as the last, and much more ambitious to boot. It would involve mystery, murder, drama, time-travel. It would be a story told in a way we have never seen before. It would be the best videogame ever made.
But then, days past. A couple of journalists made articles, and a couple of youtubers made videos. Days became weeks, weeks became months, months became years. The game, together with its peculiar name, faded into obscurity (I myself have to admit I eventually forgot completely about the game as well, until it suddenly and without warning popped up in the Steam Store). In the meantime, unconventional storytelling in videogames became a bit more popular, as well as solving mysteries through time-travel. Videogames developed. New platforms were brought out. The world changed around the project, and the project didn't. Had the game been released a year later, while the memory was still fresh enough to not surprise us too much, I would say for certain that it would be seen on the same level as Papers, Please. But now, I'm not so sure it will get much attention at all, beyond some small circles.
(Obviously I can't say for sure plans stayed the same between 2014 and 2018, and there almost definitely have been changes made over time, but I can say with certainty that the product we have now is very much identical as the one Pope imagined back in 2014).

In the end, the game is a spectacle. It's a short feast for your eyes, as well as your brain. To call it art would probably be the best description for it. The quality of the game, and Lucas's craftsmanship in particular are truly on the same level as Papers, Please. Some details and ideas in the game truly come out of left-field, and leave me awestruck with my mouth hanging wide open. Perhaps this is a game that needs time. Maybe it won't take the world by storm, as Papers, Please did, but perhaps it will be a slow burner. A personal story, moving along from person to person. The game certainly is worth it.

Sound - 10/10
Graphics - 10/10
Gameplay - 6/10
Story - 8/10
Enjoyment - 6/10

Overall - 8/10 Recommended

Jurassic World Evolution is a pretty good game, albeit with a lot of improvement possible. I recommend it full-heartedly, especially if you are a fan of the Jurassic Park franchise, or even if you like management games.


THE PROS:
+ The game looks absolutely stunning, with only a few hiccups with draw-distance here and there, it's definitely on the level of a AAA game.
+ The gameplay is alright, and even the slow bits of it won't bore you enough to quit the game, with the addition of photography and driving/flying around your own park being enough to satisfy your needs in the downtime.
+ The voice acting is great, and pretty much includes most main characters from the recent Jurassic World reboot (from Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm to Chris Pratt as Owen Brady). They actually sound like their characters, and with the great dialogue they make it's a good addition to the game.
+ The dinosaurs themselves are great. When you incubate and release your first dinosaur, you actually feel a slight attachment to it (especially if you name it). Although this attachments kind of drops off when you progress in the game, it's still very apparent every time a dinosaur dies, and you have to manually arrange to transport it out of the park.
+ The events that can happen, like dinosaurs getting angry and escaping, or someone sabotaging your park to allow said dinosaur to escape, are all very fun additions that make the gameplay just that slight bit more interesting, while still remaining very much in the spirit of the franchise.

THE NEUTRALS
~ Jurassic World Evolution isn't a theme park builder. Although I would have liked for it to be a theme park builder, it's a lot more to the side of a management game.

THE CONS
- Frontier isn't very good at making a hard management game. Looking at RCT3 and Planet Coaster, they are a LOT better at making games where you make parks look good, than they are at making games where you make parks work good. This is very apparent in this game. I feel a lot of the aspects to managing the park are simply not complex enough, leaving me wanting for more.
- The way they made maps in this game is kind of... off. You can't start up a completely empty square park (yet), and simply HAVE to play in the career mode to also play the sandbox mode. They made it so you have five parks you unlock progressively throughout your career, with each having specific unlocks like buildings and dinosaurs that you can't unlock with just one park. Aside from that, they have a park that you unlock relatively quickly that functions as the sandbox. It has no restraints on budget, so you can build away. The problem arises in the fact that you have to unlock all the buildings and dinosaurs from the career islands FIRST, before you can use them on your sandbox island. It's kind of logical, but at the same time, why not just let us play the sandbox mode from the start?
- The maps are also very small. Although I haven't yet played on the final island of the game, I've always had room constraints when building the parks. This DOES add a challenge to the managing aspect of the game, but at the time you actually have to manage space, you already long since unlocked the next park, making the challenge unnecessary. Aside from that, the maps only take up a fraction of the whole island, and seeing the rest of the island outside the boundaries of the park leaves me wanting to build there. I don't really understand why the parks can't just be the entire island. Even the sandbox park has this problem.
- The terrain editing and situations surrounding it are kind of iffy. There aren't barely as much options to edit the terrain as Planet Coaster, and it's very irritating to try and find JUST the right spot to build a building on very slightly bumpy terrain.
- Guest interaction is basically nonexistent. In-game, they're basically just ghosts that walk around your park. You can't click on them to get info. Satisfying the guests is also way too simplified. The three things you have to satisfy them on is Satisfaction, Capacity, and Safety. How to satisfy them?
SATISFACTION:
Build more shops, and increase the people that work at said shops.
CAPACITY:
Build more hotels, that's it.
SAFETY:
Don't do ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like aggravating dinosaurs by putting fifty of them in a cage, and build a helicopter station.

...I wasn't kidding when I said Frontier is kinda bad at making complex management simulators.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT:
Make the management more complex,
Add more ways to be creative with your park,
Make the maps bigger,
Fix the terrain editing.

Even though it seems like there are a lot of cons, in my opinion the pros definitely outweigh them. I'm glad Frontier picked this game up at least, as I think they are the perfect dev for theme park games. If only they had more creative input.

If you like relaxing games where you can just turn your brain off, listen to some music, while you just do some stuff, then this game MAY be for you. Note the "MAY". Now, I only have eight hours in-game, but I can definitely tell you that there are a few points in this game that are kind of enraging. I can compare this with the game "Rymdkapsel", released a few years back. In that the goal is simple, expand your space-station to get to the four monoliths, while at the same time defending yourself from intruders. The game was minimalistic, a bit overpriced, but enjoyable for a quick buck, though you probably get bored of it sooner or later. In that game, the just of it is to expand your base to be able to support more people, to expand your base to support more people... and so on, much like in Planetbase, although it's more defined. As in, now the expanding part and the people part are more complicated! Hurray. Another comparison to make is the fact that the AI is god-awful. In Rymdkapsel, you could expect it, since the people are literally just rectangles, so you expect them not to have a brain, which makes it a fair challenge. In this, where the people are actual 'people' (and robots), it just makes the game much less realistic as a whole if one of your colonists decides to go out of the base to take a piss or something in the middle of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thunderstorm. Sure, there is a room you can make with which you can sound the alarm which forces the colonists to stay inside, but for ♥♥♥♥'s sake, it isn't that hard to look outside the bloody window and see that there is death waiting outside, is it. For the robots, maybe, to go outside is fairly logical, but for the colonists? No. Another irritating thing is that the airlock cycle can only support one colonist (or robot) at a time, going in AND out, and the AI would stack up on the door in an orderly fashion and would go in order of the first one to arrive at the airlock to the last one. So, let's say you have a colonist outside that is almost out of oxygen, and desperately needs to go inside, but the airlock is stacked up with people and/or robots going in/out to do construction or some other ♥♥♥♥. The AI doesn't re-order itself to let the person desperate for air in first, and there is no way at all to do it manually either. If you are in this situation, the colonist is most likely to die. Next to that, there is a priority system in this game, as in, you can choose which construction has the general priority over the others. You can't make a queue, which I would have liked, and half of the time the construction prioritized gets ignored anyway.
So, basically, the only challenge in this game is either the retardation of the AI, the occasional intruder that comes in and probably kills everyone in your base because the AI doesn't understand that the thing that person's holding kills people, and the unfortunate event of a meteor crashing straight into your base. Next to that, the game is shallow. Like I said, the only part of the game is to expand your base, to be able to support more colonists, to expand your base more, to support more colonists, and so on. That's it. You do that until you achieve your goals, like "build 10 robots", or "get a total of 100 colonists". And when you get enough goals gone, you move to the next planet, where there are even more intruders and meteorites. The grand total of planets is 4. 4 Planets with slightly different color schemes and varying difficulty. Oh boy.
Of course, there is the Steam Workshop with custom challenges, which are basically just the same as the normal game only often easier or harder.

Unless you are the sort of type that just likes to replay old games a ♥♥♥♥-ton, or just likes to relax and play, I honestly can't find it to recommend this game. If you like this sort of game, then you are free to buy it (although do it in sale, since the 20 euro pricetag is imo way too high for a game this shallow).

TL;DR : Yes, I recommend it. You should definitely buy it, and if you don't like horror games, just buy it for the story.

SOMA isn't a horror game. You may or may not disagree with this, but at this point, a "horror game" on the Steam store is basically just a mess of jumpscares, woven together on a thread made by simple assets you can buy at any asset store. Sure, a few jump out as being good, even great, like the recently released 'Albino Lullaby', but in comparison, that amount is so small that it's basically nonexistent. SOMA is most DEFINITELY better than any of those wanky 'oh no it's a spooky girl that comes out and WOAH A JUMPSCARE!' kind of games, that basically have no point in them. SOMA is even deserving to be compared to Bioshock, and in my book, even remotely deserving to be compared to works such as those are a straight 7/10.
Synopsis and such
SOMA is a game where you play as Simon Jarett, your average canadian from Toronto, who sadly lost his girlfriend in a car crash and also had a brain concussion or something during that. Doctors in a medical facility have invited Simon to do an experimental brain scan, which may or may not help his condition. However, during the brain scan, you suddenly wake up in a desolate underwater facility, with seemingly no human contact whatsoever except for some weird robots thinking they are human. Your only hope is a woman you heard over the comms who tells you to come to 'Site Lambda', a different part of the facility you are in.
A deeper look into the story
What makes the game so special in comparison to all the other horror games on Steam (next to its massively built up hype, which was there for a good reason. I'll get to that in a sec), is that it isn't just a horror game. It doesn't rely on jumpscares or just pure gore, but it mostly relies on its philosophical ideas. Oh yes, there is a lot of philosophy in this game, of whether what you do is absolutely neccesary, and if whatever you do is right or wrong. If you liked Spec Ops: The Line for its story, you will most definitely like SOMA's story. In it I could even sometimes relate it to Neon Genesis Evangelion, with its themes for psychoanalysis and other deep stuff. All around, the story is incredibly deep and explores a lot of ideas that makes you think extremely deep about what you decide to do in the game. In many parts of it you, as Simon, retrace the steps of previous workers at the underwater facility Pathos-II, making it extremely similar in terms of style to the Amnesia series, where you kind of retrace in your own steps.
Here is where we get into the gameplay bit.
SOMA's gameplay is incredibly similar to the Amnesia series, with the puzzle solving, mostly involving your input into machinery or computers, and most of what you have to do is heard through audio recordings (which were notes in Amnesia: The Dark Descent), and also you getting chased around by monsters every so often, which isn't very surprising, as they are both made by the same developer (which is most of the part why it was so hyped up). However, in my perspective, the high frequency of a monster popping up kind of lowers the game's score in total, as it is basically like as if you are reading an amazing book, but an annoying child would interrupt you every so often, wanting to play hide & seek with you. Now, I'm not gonna lie, I was scared ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at quite a lot of points in the game. It's just that sometimes it works too much, and I honestly don't want to progress the story any further if I need to run past that one monster again. Next to that, the way the monster hiding sequences are handled are almost identical to other games made by Frictional: Run away if it sees you, throw objects to distract it etc. In my opinion, I think it would have been better if either the horror throttle was pitched a bit more down, or if a completely new horror technique was implemented. I loved this technique in the Amnesia series, but it hasn't aged very well. So yeah, the gameplay, although enjoyable at times and genuinely scary at others, is a bit repetitive.
Now to the visual aspect
The game is visually appeasing. All the assets are well-made and detailed, making the entirety look like you are actually immersed into the story, being in a decrepit *SPOILERS* future *SPOILERS* underwater base, overrun by seaweed and corals and such, and really reminded me of the visual aspect of Bioshock 2 for some reason (probably involving the coral). The only bad thing about the visual aspect, is that some visual effects are nauseating. When you are either close or looking at one of the monsters, your screen goes all static, and when you get hit once, your screen goes all haywire and is unclear as ♥♥♥♥. Especially in the later areas of the game was I irritated by this. And although there is an extremely well thought-up narrative reason for this, it still doesn't make it less eyehurting.
Sounds n such
The soundtrack is great, and there can't really be said anything about it because, well, it's great and atmospheric, and I don't really see anything wrong with it. I guess it's pretty dynamic because it's pant-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tense at some times, and tear-sheddingly beautiful at others (like that song in the end, bloody beautiful).
All in all, is SOMA a good game? Did it deserve the hype it got? Should I buy it?
Yes, yes, and heck yeah!

I honestly am confused as to how this mish mash of different game mechanics are put together to make a game as good as this. If you don't want to read the whole review, here's a shortened version: Buy it. It's well worth the price.
Pros:
- As original as it can be
- Great graphics
- Deck building, providing a different experience every time you play
- Combat is good, basically the same as in the Batman Arkham series
- Choose-your-own-adventure style gameplay
- Has an endless mode
- The transitions are amazing
- Sometimes has a bit of morbid humor added into it
And much more pros that I don't even bother to type down since there are so many.

Cons:
- Gets a bit boring after about an hour or two of gameplay (but that's in my opinion, may differ per person)

So yeah. It's a great game. You should buy it. Right now.