Soma is not a game about suicide, though it features many. Soma is about survival. Protagonist Simon's mission, to launch a virtual reality world (called The Ark) populated by brain scanned AI versions of real people into space, is about a kind of immortality or at least a longevity. Simon spends most of the game enduring: pushing against tidal currents at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for an AI-infested monster to pass their eyes over him. Simon's disembodied AI companion Catherine is consistently at odds with him. They must endure each other. Simon is dim and earnest, but he is also tenacious, refusing to give up on his (and Catherine's) continued existence, even when faced with constant obstacles and compounding existential crises. But, like all of us, death and transformation await him.
Suicide is often condemnned, often romanticized, often misunderstood, but it is accurate to say most suicides seek a kind of obvilion. A gay christian kid doesn't kill herself because she hopes for a more tolerant world on the other side. The physical world is where God and heaven are, and they cannot be borne. If hell exists, I'm already there. If nothing exists, it would be preferable to this. Continued existence means continued suffering.
While Soma is not really about suicide, it is interested in its grim arithmetic. What is the point where our collective will to survive becomes grotesque? Soma's world appears hellish to Simon (and to us), having hopped here from the relative normalcy of the 21st century. In its version of the year 2104, a comet wiped out the vast majority of surface life. Soma's underwater bases (collectively called Pathos-II) were shielded from the impact, but all inevitably face miniature apocalypses that kill nearly all of their human inhabitants. Surviving in Soma's world means living in a way that is unimaginable to every human being alive right now. The Ark itself is a desperate attempt to create some continuity, to ensure that some version of me gets to live a normal life.
But there are more transformations still. The gooey, alien, station-wide AI WAU takes over human bodies, but also preserves them, creating the game's monsters+. At one point, when Simon is caught, a monster plugs him into the wall. The WAU builds a virtual reality from his memories. Throughout the game, Simon finds many shredded, zombified, but still breathing bodies attached to the WAU. As Simon gets closer to the AI's heart, more bodies appear as robotic constructs. While Simon trudges toward the Ark, the WAU builds a similar machine all around him.
There are differences between the Ark and WAU of course. The Ark is cleaner, disturbing in its own way, but more computational, less wild, less alien. The experience of The Ark, shown for only a moment in the game's afterword, is like, well, a cozy, idealized videogame. The WAU’s virtual reality is dank, dark, incomplete, and not fully human. The illusion it crafts, featuring Simon's dead would-be-girlfriend, is not as pleasant or continuous as the Ark. But its existence implies that the WAU has much the same goals as Simon. The WAU, just like its human creators, is desperate to survive. Like the Ark, it tries to give its human hosts some means of living on.
In this light, the WAU is a rabid metaphor for an evolutionary drive to survive. Soma generally assumes that people want to keep living, even at the cost of deluding or harming themselves. Soma explores this through Simon’s choices to murder (or, more generously, mercy kill) some of Pathos-II's remaining deluded souls. In the game's first area, he encounters the still living Amy Azzaro plugged into a wall, breathing with a pair of lungs manufactured by the WAU. Simon can choose to leave her, conscious and living but unable to move, or pull the plug and watch her body turn limp. Every other choice is a mirror of that very first one. In contrast, the majority of the suicides in Soma are off-screen and are committed out of some urge toward survival. Numerous Pathos-II personnel kill themselves before Simon finds them, but most do so believing their souls will pass on to their continuations on the Ark. They don't commit suicide to die, but rather contrarily to live++.
Simon's decisions are mostly philosophical (a brief look at the games Reddit page or YouTube videos with titles like "SHOULD YOU KILL THE WAU" bears this out). What's more, they'll haunt you, whatever choice you made. What gives you the right to snuff out these lives when they didn't ask you to? How could you leave them in that state of suffering? Nevertheless, each individual choice is just that. There are no alternate endings based on who lives or dies, no tally of mercy versus murder. The ultimate fate of humanity, or the tragedy befalling one Simon Jarrett, are unaffected. There is a sense of smallness in this. Whatever Simon chooses, the world will not mark it or remember it. In a cosmic sense, it does not matter at all.
By my count, the one suicide to occur on screen is Sarah, whom Simon dubs the last living human being+++. She asks Simon to pull her life support after he takes the Ark off her hands. This is the only person Simon can kill who outright states a wish for death. Thus it has an inevitable character. One gets the feeling that if Simon won't do it, Sarah will pull the plug herself once he leaves the room. Though she has yet to reach thirty, Sarah appears weathered, starving. This death is technically a life cut short, but Sarah does not approach it that way. It is calculated for a suicide, usually an act of distress and spontaneity.
Soma's tenor is atheist. Simon briefly considers a heaven, which he imagines is populated with himself and all the other construct Simons, and finds it as horrific as oblivion. The Ark itself is a religious reference, and has some resonance with Soma's underwater setting, but its creator Catherine doesn't make much of the name. It's more a shorthand to illuminate the concept than a deriving aesthetic principle. Johan Ross, the resurrected AI technician who urges Simon to kill the WAU, has both a bobblehead of Nietzche and a laughing Buddha on his shelf. Soma's suicides take the idea of a continuous soul for granted, but don't seem to base that on any particular religious tradition, rather on a set of relatively spontaneous musings from Pathos-II crewmember Mark Sarang.
I raise all this because although Soma is a serious and emotional treatment of death, it steps over what my relationship with death has been defined by. Most suicides and suicide attempts I know resulted from the long tail of oppression. Live long enough in a world that wants to kill you and at some point you will start to believe that world. But Soma's post-apocalypse is one without direct identitarian oppression. Sure, interpersonal conflicts blow up to existential scale and individual people debate serious questions about what life means now. But those conflicts can have no institutional weight, because there are no institutions present. Life on Pathos-II is unbearable, not because of its society (though there are plenty of tensions between various crewmembers), but because it is the only society that remains. There is nowhere else to go, no home to return to, not even a government or an economy to oppress.
Soma's future is also free of any serious belief in an afterlife. None of Pathos-II's crew members are overtly christian or Muslim. None seem to have any faith in reincarnation. Sarang believes in a soul, even one that transfers from place to place, but there is little indication of a hereafter, and certainly not one with heaven or exaltation. Perhaps a comet wipes clean such notions of importance, but in my experience faith is resilient.
It would be trite to condemn Soma because it does not represent or replicate my life++++. It is not a weakness that the game only tertiarily deals in religion and oppression. But it does make the game's posture of universal consideration of the big questions ring hollow (at least for me). Simon is not an allegorical figure or a symbol. He is a dopey everyman. He asks the big questions out loud, not exactly for our benefit, but because he is wondering and wants some kind of comfort. However Soma moved me (and it did), I could not relate to it. Because all my life, in one way or another, I've longed to die.
This is perhaps why the WAU does not horrify me as such. It is simply something new. Living on as a single, conscious being sometimes strikes me as egotistical, even frivolous. Because we are matter, we are part of something. We decay, we die, we live on as something else. The WAU strikes me as just another network of that kind.
Simon and Catherine believe in their continuation. Though neither of them are religious, they choose to have faith in the Ark. The network of stations in Soma is like a pilgrimage. The journey Catherine and Simon take is one of faith in a common cause, downward stations of the cross, leading to ascension. Pathos-II is also like a body. Organs strung along with veins and intestines, one machine kept alive only on life support. This dualism is further reflected in the two protagonists. Simon is embodied (through a combination of robot and corpse) but Catherine remains a digital construct. Simon implants her in his omnitool, carrying her soul around with him, plugging her into terminals to complete tasks, or even just to talk. Catherine is on a journey of the mind, Simon on one of the body.
Soma makes a lot of that difference—one of its primary questions is how much we can separate our humanity from our physical forms. It's also a difference between the two main characters. Catherine is relatively unbothered by her disembodiment. She created this tech, she understands how it works. She is sometimes disturbed by it, but also sees her copies as both tools and meaningful continuations, no matter how many times they are copied. In contrast, Simon, perhaps as a consequence of his embodiment, zealously holds on to his individual personhood. He seeks an escape that Catherine does not. So when he is a mere copy, when another mere copy gets on the Ark, he lashes out and dies alone.
However, there is not much of a difference in the end. Soma's final shot is the Ark satellite fading into the vastness of space. We are all star stuff, we will all fade into the darkness left behind by supernovas. In that way, the fate of any Simon or Catherine is the same. Whether flying on the Ark or trapped below the earth in an oceanic darkness, they will fade. The sun will expand past the earth's borders, the Ark tech will fragment and decay, maybe to burn in some dying star. Perhaps Soma means this bleakly, but I take comfort in it. Someday we will all be equal. Someday we will be made into something new.
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+. For the record, I am pro-monster. Soma is about death and thus it requires there to be an immediate existential threat, as well as more thematic abstract ones. Complaining about having to run from a monster in such a philosophical game is a bit like complaining that the xenomorph gets in the way of Alien’s worker alienation and capitalist skullduggery. The monster and the themes are one and the same thing. Thank god the game’s “safe” mode doesn’t excise the monsters entirely.
++. The supplementary short story The Coin Flip does characterize these suicides as motivated by despair. An idea spreads on the station that once your brain is scanned, there's a "coin toss" whether the consciousness you currently inhabit will transfer to the Ark or stay on Earth. Upon finding that their consciousness remains in their human body, some despair to the point of wanting to die. As far as I can recall, the game deals with this idea far less directly.
+++ A dubious title, for one has to claim any human sufficiently altered by the WAU is not human any longer. I'm a little more reluctant to declare that than Simon.
++++ Its strengths are truly personal, not ideological, as Ed Smith wrote about earlier this issue.
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Grace Benfell is a writer and critic based in Chicago. She co-edits the criticism journal The Imaginary Engine Review and co-hosts the survival horror podcast The Safe Room. You can find her and her work on her website.