First Impressions With Somerville
It appears I am once again going outside of my wheelhouse. This week, the game we’re going to look at is Somerville. Somerville is a narrative adventure game developed by Jumpship (founded by Dino Patti, one of Playdead’s co-founders) as their debut game that has big ideas and even bigger presentation goals. At least that’s what it feels like in the first half of the game so far.
The main narrative thrust of Somerville is that you are a husband and father who must find his way back to his family after being separated from them. Sounds simple enough, but this is complicated by the fact that the main events that lead to their separation are the rapid onset of an alien invasion and the gaining of bizarre abilities from a dead, supposedly alien soldier. A lot of this is told through a mix of environmental storytelling and scripted events in the game world itself. Not a single word was spoken in the time that I played. Somerville starts off with a moment of the main family coming home from an outing, falling asleep in front of the tv, and the child waking up and wandering around. This sequence in particular is great to me because it does a good job of establishing a sense of mundanity before it gets cruelly ripped away. Easing you in and getting you settled with the world before the literal sky starts to fall. It’s a great way of establishing tone and certainly gets you invested in the goings-on. Another thing I wanted to go into was noting that this game’s art direction is fucking incredible. It used a lot of muted colours and wonderfully detailed skyboxes to illustrate that this really is an actual, factual alien invasion and you’re nobody in the grand scheme of things just trying to survive a wide-scale conflict. Even if that is a wide-scale conflict in the context of an alien invasion.
As mentioned in the opening, Jumpship was founded by Dino Patti, formerly of Playdead, whose main works of note are Limbo and Inside. And these are the main gameplay inspirations for Somerville in a nutshell. You largely play in a left to right side scrolling manner to get from one side of the screen to another. And this is where some of the most interesting things (and one frustrating thing) pop up. When the game’s intro finishes it leads to the man you control (they never say his name btw) gaining access to this weird blue energy power in his right arm. This allows him to soften terrain changed by the aliens when channelled through a light source. This energy and the obstacles in the environment make up the bulk of the gameplay. And it’s quite good, it has the capacity to serve as interesting, multilayered puzzles where you are manipulating the environment. And around the halfway point you gain access to red energy that hardens the environment, making things easier to climb and get around. You can come up with some creative solutions where you are making these light fixtures change the environment in some really interesting ways, similar to how puzzles in Limbo and Inside worked.
The downside is that there’s no clearly readable way to tell what is or isn’t interactable in the environment. Which led to times when I’d be stuck on a puzzle for upwards of 10 minutes at times to figure out if I was interacting with it correctly or not. And that sucks because the games I keep comparing this to, Limbo and Inside, had some excellent environmental design. Maybe it’s a me problem, but that’s genuinely how I feel about that. There are also times when the game ratchets up the tension by having the alien ships shoot out purple tractor beams and you need to avoid them using the environment to the best of your ability, it’s excellent, and I love it.
Somerville is a game with issues, but it’s one that I’m most likely going to stick with. Between the interestingly told story and beautiful art direction, I’m classing this under the “game where things other than gameplay shine” category. If it continues on the path it’s going on, I’m in for a treat.
