Somerville (PlayStation 5)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): August 31, 2023
- Release Date (EU): August 31, 2023
- Publisher: Thunderful
- Developer: Jumpship Limited
- Genres: Adventure, Puzzle
- Also For: Xbox Series X|S
Game Features:
Contemplate the feeling of waking up to planetary scale conflict. Imagine living a quaint family-oriented existence only to have it all turned upside down one evening by highly destructive invaders. This is the premise of Somerville, a Sci-Fi adventure set in an otherwise quiet locale that forces you to adapt, survive and overcome in order to reunite with your family and prevail.
A Captivating Premise
You begin the game having just arrived at your home, and you, your wife and your child, all wearily collapse on the sofa having made a long journey. In the darkness of your home, you are snuggled together, the only light is that of the TV that has been left on flickering in front of you. The infant awakens to the TV tuning into an emergency broadcast, gets up and wanders about. You control the tot, looking around, mischievously picking up objects and playfully stacking, opening, or pulling things into use.
This opening section acts as a tutorial phase, easing you in, and setting an unnerving tone for the unravelling mystery. The mischief unveils some supernatural phenomena, and an eerily quiet and dark style of game that puts me in mind of Limbo, just silhouettes vaguely inferred, and dancing around the screen, no HUD, and a simplistic foggy layered art direction with a muted colour palette and relatively basic geometry to traverse.
As the baby you investigate a series of places around the home, eventually ending up in the kitchen. You figure out how to open up and then climb some drawers to get on top of the work surface, but you get stuck, make some noise. The camera then swaps to the main character, the father, who has just woken up. He picks up where the infant left off, seeks out the child, and tidies up a bit. This then rolls into chaos with an extraterrestrial invasion proceeding to slam projectiles into the ground outside. Trees, bridges, cars and buildings are decimated, and you try to get your family into the basement for safety, but something alien crashes through your home and lands in the basement.
This is the first point of contact. You see the pilot slumping out of the vehicle, you reach out to them to help, the screen flashes and you pass out. You wake up, completely disoriented. Where are your family, and how much time has elapsed?
You have a weird pulsating pain in the hand you used to interact with the alien pilot. Holding R2 reveals that you can interact with technology, lights and power supplies with this new power.
Investigate, Overcome, Survive
Somerville forces you to investigate, search and figure out the best course of action. The game reminded me a little of Flashback with its rudimentary moving around in the foreground whilst noticing weird, sometimes terrifying things, in the background.
The game is pretty straightforward in that as much as you have to keep moving straight, forward. There is essentially one direction to proceed in (with very minor areas you can investigate off the main path), and you have to figure out the most stealthy, least complicated, and safest way to traverse the scenery because you, as a species, appear to be being annihilated after all.
Using your new power you can harness the power of lightbulbs to remove alien debris that blocks your way. The puzzle element consists of manoeuvring the light where you want it, through tilting a street lamp, or untangling and pulling around a corded light bulb, and then pulsing your power through it to clear a path. Doing so is pretty easy for the most part, but becomes trickier when you have to avoid things falling on you as a result of your interactions.
Visually Triumphant But Short And Imperfectly Paced
Dodging massive violet searchlights to avoid being disintegrated is one thing, but realising you're being tailed throughout the adventure really plays on your mind. It's a clever little mechanic that does so little in actuality but causes your brain to fill in the gaps; like what if it gets me, what the hell is it, why is it after me specifically, and where did it go?
Visually, Somerville has a wonderful hand-animated look to it that is genuine and authentic. The lighting and environmental atmosphere are purposefully shrouded and mysterious. The various set pieces with alien hunters and hiding in a Portaloo to escape the beams have some real echoes of games from a simpler era, but it's too little and too slow-release in my unassuming opinion.
I endured the majority of the 14 chapters, only to persistently believe something bigger and more foreboding was about to happen, but it never truly did. There were just bigger places to mill around and stumble through before getting faced with a puzzle that simply didn't keep me busy long enough. I love the premise of the puzzles, but the distance between them was too long and the puzzling length too short, with little real payoff.
Later on, you discover further powers, and more information and, without giving away any critical spoilers, you get to a post-apocalyptic endpoint that still leaves you with more questions than answers. For some, this game may present an enigma, an emotional rollercoaster, and a life-or-death adventure to undertake; but for me, personally, it was all a little too laid-back and listless to really want to carry on excitedly. I found that had very little impetus to jump back in after around the midpoint of the game.
Better Suited To Casual Gamers
Somerville is a weird one for me. While it does tell a mysterious story, it has beautifully crafted visual styling, and it's viscerally interesting to a point, the method by which you get to each story beat is nothing but arduous, and sadly I can't get past that.
The pacing feels so deliberate that even the stealth sections appear drawn out to increase the overall playtime and slow down the already lengthy wandering around looking for any semblance of endeavour, which is thankfully only around two and a half hours in total anyway.
I like the emotive aspects and the creepy feeling during exploratory elements, but the puzzle segments were too trite and unbespoke to really make this game shine in itself. While I grasped the majority of the story because, by the way, there was no dialogue throughout there is a little too much assumption and guesswork required to gain a stronger connection to the game as a whole.
To sum up Somerville: it's minimalist, it is technically horror as well as adventure, but its quintessentially British thematics means that it was never going to have lush settings or a huge budget sci-fi feel. There are enjoyable moments in it, but more often than not it felt like I was doing the same actions over and over to trudge through to the next set piece, with varying levels of interest on my behalf.
Verdict
- Intriguing story to unfurl
- Physics-based are interesting
- Multiple endings to discover
- You can hide in Portaloos
- Lighting is atmospheric
- Repetitive in places
- Slightly too low-energy throughout
- Puzzles are few and too easy
- Low level of challenge
