In Somerville's attempt to differentiate from Limbo and Inside, players are left with a moody, wordless story lacking technical finesse and head-scratching puzzles that define the genre's best.
Somerville is at its best when dialing up the action.
That’s a strange sentiment for a title that hinges so delicately on its association with Playdead, the developer behind Limbo and Inside.
What I enjoy most about Playdead’s games are their devotion to world-building and crafting logical scenarios–puzzles or otherwise–carved right out of the world they are placed in. Inorganically inserting a chase sequence or big reveal would strip these gameplay moments of their impact and weaken the overall package.
Frustratingly, Somerville doesn’t always understand what makes a wonderful, intelligent, organic puzzle. It doesn’t make the most of the empty spaces between powerful, loud moments. But worst of all, it has a tendency to be a little broken.
Developer Jumpship has a solid foundation for a science fiction classic. Somerville eerily opens with a family’s night drive home accompanied by a dramatic piano track. The wife, husband, their child, and dog watch television until falling asleep on the couch with the glow of the screen the only light. Unknown tension rises as players take control of the child seeking food or escape, completely aware that the shoe is about to drop.
The crescendo of drama cascades into an alien invasion that leaves the husband unconscious in the home’s basement. He wakes with an alien power, his wife and child gone, and the loyal dog waiting.
Throughout my experience with Somerville I would patiently soak in the atmosphere as the camera would pull back from the father, revealing the scope of the alien invasion or punctuate the drama by zooming closer in. Often the palpable sense of production and direction takes hold and the feeling or mood Somerville was aiming for shoots true.
Yet this game is sparse, laid bare by the limited use of mechanics and narrative. Puzzles are not commonplace in Somerville and often found in the variety of moving or manipulating a singular object to enable progression. The alien power granted to the father allows him to influence electricity and light to dissolve alien technology. Grab an electrical pole and the light shining from it will remove the glowing red and black barrier. At one point you can tilt a lamp in multiple directions. Nothing too elaborate.
Physics-based encounters populate most of the game and a few of these instances will have surprise deaths where players think they’ve figured out the solution before a second or third unknown step spells doom. Checkpoints are graceful enough that huge chunks of time are never lost.
However, the major difference with Somerville is that action takes place in 3D environments instead of familiar two-dimensional planes. Perhaps Jumpship’s justification for this shift was to make its game feel more advanced that Playdead’s work, or simply make it another factor of differentiation. But the lack of a Z-axis was never the issue with Limbo and became less of a problem with Inside‘s layered backgrounds.
In Somerville, the ability to move around the foreground and background is enticing until, of course, there’s little reason to depart from the obvious main path. Honestly, this more advanced method of explanation does not bear too much fruit. After the game’s opening sequence, players are expected to run left down a dirt path. But the ability to move far into the background of an open field yields no secrets and no point. The same applies to a forest zone and the basement of a shopping center.
Somerville seems to work worst when it isn’t completely funneling players down a set path with little opportunity to act upon curiosity. As a player who tends to scour every possible inch of a playable space, I was let down by the game’s pathing. Worse yet, it isn’t always clear where the father’s feet can firmly touch solid ground and what he can interact with.
As disappointing as this may be, I firmly believe that a handful of 3D spaces truly work well to be as expressive as possible within the confines of the game’s narrative. A handful of times I was reminded of the excellent Little Nightmares series and its imposing dread and wonder.
Somerville is a bleak game, not just in tone but in atmosphere. I found myself enraptured by much of its recently demolished landscapes and the number of setpiece moments players are caught up in. The slow burn of walking towards a music festival that is devoid of any traces of human life is one of the creepier environments I’ve explored in recent memory. It’s just too bad that the opportunity to do something creative outside of its visuals is lost on players trying to manipulate lights.
Purplish-pink storms will blow tents and umbrellas around. An alien goo will pulse with vivid blues and surround the father as he treads it. Gray skies are infested with monolithic spaceships burning with stark lights in the background. Players who hate games lacking vibrant colors will not be sold on the dreariness of Somerville. While I love a game that tries to deliver something different, I do wish the flat greys and blues of the world had more richness.
Certain elements of the game pop, especially its extraterrestrial ones. But, much like its 3D environments, the visuals can get lost in a familiar soup of itself. Regardless of if the game takes place during a rainy day in an overcast city or not, its textures and graphics can look blown-out and one-dimensional, diminishing their moody appeal.
And I think when the game wraps up in its final, odd 30 minutes, things finally come to a head. Somerville is truly stunning in many ways but varying elements continue to work against it. When the game released in November of 2022 on PC and Xbox, I remember hearing of its technical shortcomings. I thought that a year later on PlayStation 5, those would be ironed out.
Players will find themselves flitting out of existence or clipping through all manner of objects and environments. Sometimes an interactable object just doesn’t want to respond or the lights won’t properly dissolve alien matter like they should.
One of the game’s final segments had me constantly walking away from the camera holding out the father’s hand to activate his alien power… multiple times. Despite feeling that I had a genuine grasp of what was going on in the game’s narrative, the lack of mechanics over the course of the game and the lack of real signposting as to what was going on and where I was supposed to go had me feeling aimless. Sequences can feel drawn out for no particular reason, whether they are initially breathtaking or not.
I wasn’t sure what I was actually doing or what impact I was making on the state of the world. I loved the faithful dog that peed on a tree and would disappear then reappear. I gripped my controller at desperate moments of life and death. But at the same time I would ask out loud, “Why is this happening?”
There’s a definite appreciation I have for these nebulous games rife with mysteries that have no definitive answer. It makes the experience more engaging having to parse out meaning through limited screen time. But Somerville is just not a tight enough experience to make the most of that type of expressionism.
A brisk runtime acts as a balm to the hindrances but not completely. But because I’m fond of this style of game, I think I have more tolerance for it than most. Yet even more polish and tightening of mechanics aren’t going to add deeper puzzles to the game of expand the story at all and I think that’s where Somerville really needed to excel in order to compete with its brethren.
Somerville is a noble attempt at matching the style and eerie substance of games that came before it. As a first-time effort, Jumpship stuck the landing on creating engaging moments in time for an intimate narrative. But a lack of memorable connective tissue means that players have little reason to dwell in this world and ask bigger questions. With perhaps a bit more time and polish, the studio’s second attempt can be truly remarkable.
