“It doesn’t hurt,” said Catherine, smile reassuring.
“I heard. It’s the coin toss I’m nervous about. I really want to end up on the other side, you know?” Bass’ voice was cracking up, almost in tears.
They sat in silence for a moment, Bass breathing carefully.
“I wish people wouldn’t think of it like that,” said Catherine.
The second-most harrowing moment in Soma doesn’t even register as horror on first playthrough. It’s just a brain scan, after all, and even though the situation is sketchy (you’ve just realized your “doctor” David Munshi is actually a Ph.D student working on his thesis), there’s no apparent danger.
“It’ll hurt about as much as getting your picture taken,” Munshi reassures you.
When you wake up to find yourself in the derelict remains of an underwater facility, then, you’ve got more questions on your mind than existential dread: “Is this some kind of joke? How did I get here?”
The more you develop an understanding of what’s actually happening in Soma—that life on Earth has been wiped out and you’re not really Simon Jarrett, but the consciousness of Simon Jarrett occupying the corpse of a crewmember in a soon-to-implode apocalypse shelter called Pathos II—the more that initial brain scan takes on a crushing sense of mass.
At its core, Soma is an unflinching examination of what might happen to human consciousness when everything has faded to black. What is the self? Is there a soul? Can a machine with a consciousness be considered a person? Can the continuation of a consciousness still be considered a consciousness at all?
The questions have become great fodder for in-depth interpretation, but it’s not the questions themselves that give Soma its pervasive sense of dread. Nor is it the Cronenbergian monsters or human-possessed machines of Pathos II, which only serve to make the game easier to read as horror to fickle Twitch viewers. Instead, it’s the way the game portrays states of consciousness—often using jarring cuts, out-of-body perspective changes, or fades to black—that hit hardest.
One moment stands out as Soma’s most disturbing: upon finding out you’ll need a sturdier suit to withstand the pressure of the oceanic abyss you’re about to dive into, you’re left with no choice but to transfer your consciousness into a new suit. You get into a machine that’ll get the job done, close your eyes, and everything fades to white.
When you come to your senses, all seems well: you’re in the new suit with your motor functions intact. But then you hear the sound of your own voice coming from a room away, and when you go over to examine your old suit, you discover there’s another version of yourself—the one you had just inhabited—still inside. You’re given the choice to either let that version of yourself live, soon to die as the underwater facility implodes, or to pull the plug on it right then and there. The choice doesn’t affect the way the rest of the game plays out.
There’s a dizzying rollercoaster-like ascent that occurs here as you, the player, piece together what’s going on. That body in the suit was me just a second ago. And yet it’s not me anymore.
You feel no sense of danger because for you, there is none. Instead, you feel bad for that other version of you. But this would imply that you’ve become a copy of your previous self, which would then imply that you’re now looking at your own self as an externalized being, and a valid object of empathy.
Pulling the plug would make you merciful, wouldn’t it? Or would it be murder? Suicide?
Your very existence begins to feel unnatural. Alien. Each of the hundreds of thoughts that bubble to the surface reeks of profound wrongness.
This jarring moment of transference, where we close our eyes and awaken to a new reality, is something even Soma’s characters are obsessed with.
Pathos' Intelligence Analyst Mark Sarang calls it “Continuity”: the seamless passing of consciousness from one physical chamber to another. Optimistically, Sarang convinced a good portion of the crew that by ending themselves, each crewmember on the Pathos could give themselves a 50/50 chance to wake up in a safe, happy consciousness uploaded to the Ark database soon to be shot into outer space.
But it doesn’t quite work that way. A consciousness can be copied, but never transferred, so only the facsimile would experience paradise, while the person ending their own life would stay behind. We’re forced to witness this firsthand at the end of the game as we launch the Ark and all its locally-stored brain scans into space, only to realize we’re still underwater, doomed to be crushed deep beneath the ocean.
What’s interesting about the recurring concept of “continuity” in Soma is that it’s essentially a triple entendre. By dictionary definition, it implies a continuation of the human consciousness, but in techspeak, engineers use the word to describe a business’ “ability to maintain acceptable levels of service following a short-term event that disrupts operations.” It’s a fitting descriptor in Soma, as the game’s sci-fi elements tend to shroud the urgency of apocalyptic events in cold technical jargon. In Pathos-speak, the act of passing human consciousnesses to an offworld data warehouse isn’t a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the race; it’s asset protection.
The third implied usage applies to cinema, where the common technique of continuity editing is described by film theorist David Bordwell as “the practice of breaking a scene into matched shots in order to highlight character action and reaction.” Continuity editing is what makes scenes in film feel like uninterrupted stretches of time instead of cut-together bits and pieces, and it’s often placed opposite “discontinuity editing,” which uses more disruptive edits, like jump cuts, to make onscreen action feel jarring or further removed from reality.
In the early 2010s, Brendon Chung’s short indie games Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving posited a fascinating idea: that discontinuous jump cuts could become a formal device in videogames the same way they had in film. His early works have since fashioned Chung into a Jean-Luc Godard or Yasujirō Ozu-like figure in the game development space, and game directors have spent the better part of the last decade obsessing over the potential applications of continuity and discontinuity in the videogame medium.
Experiments in discontinuous jump cutting run the gamut; from the 10-minute heist game Fitz Packerton; to Necrophone Games’ Jazzpunk, which uses cuts for comedic punch; to Before Your Eyes, which uses a webcam to track a player’s blinks—transforming the eyes into a controller and stretching “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” jump cuts to their limit.
One question has accompanied all of these experiments: Why not just make a movie?
"I think there is a suspension of disbelief that occurs and I think you feel closer to what's happening,” said Jonathan Burroughs, co-director of 2019’s jump-cutting narrative indie game Virginia. “Walking around the room and controlling the camera is enough, I think, to break that down as opposed to sitting in the auditorium or the cinema and watching something prerecorded."
On the other (better-funded) end of these jump cutting experiments came an odd fetishization of cinematic continuity, which peaked with 2018’s lavish God of War reboot. That game aspired to mimic the look and feel of “one-take” films like Russian Ark by cutting all loading screens and shadowing its lead characters with a third-person camera, all in the hopes of imbuing the game with a persistent documentarian feel.
“You’re gonna get a sense of immediacy and connection to these characters, an unrelenting feel, to the adventure that you can’t get in any other way…” said game director Cory Balrog of the choice.
Both sound bites come across as fluff. It’s easy to claim that a game with no cuts is extra immersive or that a game with jump cuts is better at evoking a vague sense of temporal or emotional dissonance. But save for the melodrama of its scripting, God of War 2018 feels no more urgent or expressive than any other story-driven third-person narrative game of its stature that includes load screens, cuts, or fades to black (Helblade: Senua’s Sacrifice comes to mind). In practice, games like God of War use the concept of cinematic continuity as an aesthetic sledgehammer rather than a means toward achieving some more ambitious narrative or thematic goal.
What’s unique about Soma is the way it eschews these borrowed paradigms in favor of one that is specific to games, purposely evoking a sense of continuity even in its most outwardly discontinuous moments. The fade to black of the game’s initial brain scan, despite “jumping” the player from one time and place to another, feels continuous because to the player, it is. The image on the screen may have jumped, but our experience of the scene has not.
Movies can’t do this. Because the viewer is a passive spectator, any discontinuity can be discerned as a creative decision in real time, the prevailing question being: “What is this cut trying to accomplish?”
The player, on the other hand, is not a spectator, but an active participant, and therefore does not process events with any sense of observational detachment. The only reason why we can fully grasp the disturbing implications of our body switch is because we’re forced to experience it firsthand. Because we inhabit the scenario as it happens, we’re confronted with its quandaries all at once, making the mere act of waking up feel like opening the floodgates to a deluge of sickening ethical burdens.The truth that Soma brings to light is that videogames cannot achieve discontinuity because they are, by their very nature, continuous experiences.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away,” reads the epigraph at the beginning of the game—a Philip K. Dick quote.
To show mercy or to recuse oneself of responsibility; to act in self-preservation or to ensure the survival of human consciousness: there’s nothing inhuman about the decisions a player is forced to make while playing Soma. It’s the continuity—finding ourselves at the other end of the rabbit hole—that feels wrong.
After Soma’s credits roll, we’re spat back into Simon’s body, only this time, we’ve reached the Ark, and everything seems like paradise. There’s a babbling brook. Rays of light shine through oak branches. It’s a utopic scene if we don’t think about everything that’s come before.
But this is the beauty and the horror of games—we make this all unfold ourselves. When we call heads, it will always be heads. When we call tails, it will always be tails. And no amount of cutting, no matter how abrupt, can stop us from reaching the other side.
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Joshua Calixto writes about technology and culture. Find him on Twitter @hitherejosh.