This piece contains spoilers for the entirety of the game SOMA

You stumble down a darkened hallway, the space around you groaning with the weight of the ocean. A figure sits in a chair. It is you, and also not you. There is a switch to the right of the chair. A switch that will flip a coin, and when that coin lands, there will only be one of you. Which one will you be: the figure standing, or the one sitting, breathing raggedly, staring up at you? What side will the coin land on? You flip the switch. The coin is flipped.

SOMA is a good game partly because it never answers the questions it asks.

Refreshingly sober and contemplative for a horror video game, SOMA’s effectiveness as horror lies in Cronenbergian/Carpenteresque body mutations and the deftness with which the game presents and explores concepts that are, genuinely, horrific. A sense of dread and decay pervades every inch of SOMA’s dilapidated setting. The stylistic influences of John Carpenter can be heard also throughout the game’s score, Mikko Tarmia’s synthesised soundscapes and dissonances layering each moment with appropriate unease, awe, terror.

But for all its gracefully simple presentation, the crux of SOMA’s strength as a text is, unusually for a video game, in its writing. SOMA’s intent as a piece of speculative science fiction is to take a long, hard stare at what we perceive to be the boundaries and definitions of the human mind. What happens when our mind is copied, and exists simultaneously in two places at once? Is the copy me? Is it another person? Are we the same person? If my mind were to be placed in another body, would I still be me? The game, primarily through its two main characters, asks all these questions, with the appropriately terrified and urgent tone of someone that is forced to come face to face with them in a very literal way. Like all good philosophical thought experiments, they’re questions that make us question our inherent assumptions about everyday life, and about ourselves.

Simon’s story starts in the present day. He’s in a car accident. He suffers brain damage. He receives a brain scan. The scanning device comes down (a coin is flipped). When it comes up, he’s a hundred years in the future, at the bottom of the ocean, in a body that is not his own, trapped in a research facility (Pathos II) that has had a very, very troubled recent history. Also all of humanity on the surface has been wiped out by a comet. The other survivors inside the facility have had their minds trapped inside various maintenance robots, unaware of their recent existential shift. Dr Catherine “Cath” Chun, one of the only other “sane” “humans” left in the facility, exists only as a disembodied consciousness that you carry around and awaken periodically when the tool in which she is housed interacts with various computers. The vast majority of the game’s dialogue is between Cath and Simon, contemplating the nature of their respective new existences.

The trouble with philosophy and conducting philosophical investigation is that there are no right answers. Sometimes, there are no answers at all, and when those unanswerable questions become assumptions in themselves, exploration of them in media can very easily come off as trite and careless. Problems of consciousness, psychological versus physical continuity, the definition of self and identity; these are all incredibly troubling and interesting concepts!

But, paradoxically, they’re also the most entry-level of philosophical labour one engages in at the academic level. This isn’t to say in the slightest that they’re not worthy of examination in art or media, far from it. But try to think of this branch of bioethics as being to academic philosophy as Lewis Carroll is to the study of English literature. It’s a staple of the discipline, formative and timeless. It’s also alluded to endlessly by media to evoke a tangential notion of “descending into madness”. Video games are no exception, often with confused and fumbling results.

SOMA’s script, written by Mikael Hedberg, and its voice actors’ performances, with Jared Zeus as Simon and Nell Mooney as Cath, lend a sense of verisimilitude to the game’s discourse of its themes that is lacking in most video games of this nature. Their conversations feel natural, consequential to their arcs as characters. As Simon begins to think about his condition further, Cath attempts to brush off his increasingly frantic questioning. But he persists. He sounds out question after question, attempting to answer some himself, at times Cath assuaging his existential crises as best she can. It’s easy to see how stilted these dialogues could be in other situations, but the performances bring a candidness and emotional honesty to them that brings the grandiose themes at play down to the level of a scared young man, lost out of time , alone at the bottom of the sea.

Conversations between Cath and Simon are essentially an iteration of one of the oldest bioethical debates that exists, between true humanity existing only in the continuity of the body, and that of the mind. Simon, struggling to come to terms with his new-found form of existence, has trouble accepting that he is the same person, his mind transplanted into the dead body of one of Cath’s deceased colleagues. “You assume you've changed so much, but have you really?” Cath asks him in one of the game’s (blessedly frequent) more quiet and contemplative moments. She urges him repeatedly to question his inherent beliefs, to try, however uncomfortable, to think and reflect on what it means to him to be a human being. The cells in your body decay and die, and are replaced by new cells. Within seven years, not a single cell will be the same. Are you still the same person? Cath wants Simon to confront these questions, though it brings him pain. SOMA wants you to, too.

If it were only the written word that SOMA relied on to carry its discourse, it would likely still suffice. But every facet of the game’s design strives to engage the player with its themes. Play, after all, is the strongest tool a game has at its disposal. The player is asked several times to make value judgements regarding the psychological continuity of not only the other inhabitants of Pathos II, but Simon himself. You come across a woman imprisoned inside a service robot, lying dilapidated at the bottom of the ocean. She’s unaware of her condition, and seems relatively at peace. But she can never move from that spot again. Is it worth continuing to live in that state? Is it kinder to end her life, such as it is? Is that even a judgement for you to make? Much later in the game, Simon is presented with a copy of himself, the Body he was inhabiting not moments before, still with his consciousness inside it. Simon voices his distaste at leaving the copy alive to rot and die alone, as well as the unspoken discomfort of existing simultaneously in two places. But it is left to the player to decide the other Simon’s fate. You must flip the coin.

Ultimately, these “choices” have no significant effect on the story’s outcome. Unlike other games where these moral choices are tallied on an abacus and presented to you as a list of sins or moments of redemption, resulting in differing conclusions to the story, usually between a binary “good” or “evil” dichotomy, SOMA leaves these instances as shifts and turns of the player’s emotional journey. Irrational Games’ Bioshock, a game commonly but inaccurately used to compare SOMA against for their similar locales, presents its moral choices in such a way, and the result is that they feel hollow, bereft of impact upon the game’s discussion of larger themes (or lack thereof).

Even the act of playing SOMA is an experiment in finding cohesion among multiple copies of a single consciousness. By the end of the game, there are no less than four copies of Simon’s mind created. Three of those, depending on your actions, may exist simultaneously. The only connecting thread that lends credibility as to who the “true” Simon is, is the player. Your observation and control of Simon’s actions are necessitated by the act of playing, but does it really dictate which Simon is “real”? Perhaps, as he muses himself, the real Simon died a hundred years ago in Toronto.

The monsters that ominously stalk the corridors of Pathos II, also, are extensions of the game’s philosophically confrontational nature. They were once inhabitants of the station, twisted now into horrific simulacra of humanity that haunt Simon across the ocean floor, between glistening metal halls. Can they still be called human? If their minds are gone but their bodies remain, does that make them any less so than Simon, a mind separated from its body? “Don’t look at it!” screams Cath during one of your first encounters with the shuffling creatures, as you cower with your back to it. The mechanics of the cat-and-mouse game played with these things is just opaque enough to feel organic and confusing. Looking away seems to halt their advance, as though the very act of denying what they represent to you can stop them. This echoes Simon’s own struggle to ignore what he has become quite effectively.

SOMA is a game that boldly confronts you with its ideas. It knows what questions to ask, with just how much a tinge of hysteria, and to let the player attempt to find answers for themselves. It’s a game that clasps you firmly by your skull, glares deep into your eyes and screams “THE CONCEPT OF SELF WHEN CONFRONTED WITH CONTINUITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS SEPARATED FROM BIOLOGICAL EXISTENCE IS INHERENTLY TROUBLING” before ambling back off into the dark, heaving and jabbering to itself.