Few things have messed me up, and upset me, as much as Frictional's Soma. I chewed over its ending for months after completing it and even now, a decade later, I'm still not sure I'm entirely okay with it. Any of it. So Ontos being very firmly pitched as a 'spiritual successor' to its story of brain scans, consciousness, and identity, is like a big red flag I want to wrap myself in; rolling around its folds to see what trauma it can inflict on me this time.
Creative director Thomas Grip claims Ontos will push Soma's ideas and philosophical themes "even further than we’ve ever gone before". Which is a lot like saying 'we're going to drive this splinter deeper under your fingernail than anyone's ever reached'. Without spoiling too much, Soma was technically about trying to escape from an underwater base and save humanity, but it took place against a background where all of humanity was gone and the player character, Simon, and most of who you meet, are all simply digitized brain scan recordings running in machines and other devices.
The only me is me
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So far, so sci-fi. But what Soma did, and what Ontos is hinting at doing, is really digging into the existential horror behind this idea. When you can make an exact copy of your brain and just run it on hardware, what does 'you' even mean anymore? Soma starts with the original human Simon stepping into a scanning machine, and the copied scan waking up in a different machine 100 years later, completely unaware anything has happened. The game is littered with machines running scans of various people who either won't, or can't, understand what's happened to them. Technically not them either, just a recording of them.
In Soma the two extremes of how to deal with this are expressed throughout by Simon and his companion, Catherine. Simon never entirely grasps that he is a facsimile of a dead man's brain so exact that even he can't tell the difference. While Catherine has long accepted she's just one version of 'Catherine', duplicating her way to hypothetical freedom that previous versions will never see. This is best expressed at a point in the story where you can only progress by upgrading to a new body, and to do that you copy and paste Simon's brain scan over. It's something that he is very not okay with once he wakes up as a new copy of 'Simon' in a new body, realizing the old version sits unconscious in a nearby chair.
It's a horrific theme that the game riffs on repeatedly – you can choose to leave the previous version of Simon running, presumably to wake up later and piece together what's happened. Or you can 'kill' him by deactivating him. Other situations see you rerouting power by pulling the wire from a robot who pitifully cries 'I needed that' as her lights go out; or activating a generator that fries another robot, who screams in agony, completely unaware they're not human anymore.
However, as horrible as these moments are, it's something that Soma only really processes through a fairly linear story progression. You never get to choose most of these outcomes, only experience the results of the choices made for you, and Ontos' reveal trailer so far suggests a metaphysical body horror nightmare that will dine out on the ideas Soma only showed you a menu for.
"What is existence really? Surely a question without an answer?" Stellan Skarsgård intones solemnly as the first trailer shows you talking to someone's consciousness running on a server made from a wall of rat brains. "I can explain what's going on," it crackles through a speaker as 70 little tails twitch in time to the words. Then there's the human head on a stand – jaw stripped away, eyes darting in panic; clearly little more than a living brain container thanks to a network of tubes running into where a neck should be. After all, if you are running brutally reductionist experiments on the human consciousness you don't need any of that other pointless body stuff.
Elsewhere, some sort of machine seems to be able to create simulated realities for consciousnesses to inhabit. Whether that's for scans, something to plug yourself into, or both, it mirrors another Soma beat where you run a simulation to question a person's brain scan for info you need. Having gone into the scan voluntarily, they very quickly realize they're come out on the wrong side of it and, in scientific terms, freak the fuck out.
Again, you don't really have much say here into how you treat this simulated person in Soma other than trying to create a world where they don't immediately panic and break. But it's a moment that suggests where Ontos is going, with Grip explaining the game will consist of "nuanced and complex [experiments] with many potential outcomes and solutions".
That's the part that worries me a little. Soma was more of a passive ride past its ideas and themes, and that was distressing enough. Ontos, on the other hand, sounds like it's going to take a much more hands-on approach, which potentially sets the scene for one of the most disturbingly unpleasant games ever made. And I don't just mean that in the sense of 'oh hey, a cool horror game', I mean in the sense of 'it's under my skin and I can't wash it off, crying in the shower' nasty.
Monster maker
For example Grip highlights that players "won’t be chased all the time by monsters". Instead the tension will come from the decisions you make, “am I making the right decisions here? And if I’m not, what will the consequences be?” he adds. Playing God with simulated minds was borderline traumatic in Soma, even when all you could really do was 'press button to continue story' then watch it all play out. I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with Ontos' promise to let me get more hands on, and really roll the results of what I've done between my fingertips to feel the slick texture of its ramifications.
From what's been revealed, Ontos will be heavily focused on a range of experiments and situations encountered throughout the game. The repurposed moon base hotel it takes place on has been divided up between different factions and people, all investigating the mysteries of the mind in various disturbing ways. Most worrying here is the idea there won't really be any 'right' solution to anything, just what feels best from a range of possible outcomes and solutions.
I still think a lot about that choice to deactivate 'old' Simon in Soma after copying his mind to a new body. I know, as 'new' Simon, that deactivating and killing the previous him is the right thing to do so he never discovers what happened before dying alone and abandoned. It's absolutely the right call. But I also know that I wouldn't want that done to me, and the two minds at that point are still basically identical, so… is it okay if you're applying a choice you don't want done to you to a different version of you?
Soma showed how disturbing these sort of thought experiments could be, just having them put in front of you to chew on. I mentioned the ending before and again, without spoiling it, it upset me viscerally for months and I had no say in what happened. The thought of being culpable in Ontos terrifies me in the best way possible. It's one thing to hide from a monster, but it's another thing entirely to become one.
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