Why do people find the monsters to be more annoying and tacked on than scary?

[Employee 427]

Having just finished the game, I can't imagine why you would want to play safe mode. The monsters aren't particularly difficult to evade. They were, however, very scary to me, and had very well-designed appearances and animations. Most of the monsterless sections were actually even more scary because I kept expecting a monster to show up. If I was on safe, there would have been none of that tension, and I wouldn't have perked up at every little bump and screech in the adjoining room. I guess if you don't want to play a horror game safe makes sense, but even then it's still horrifying (They're not us Catherine! They're not us!) and almost feels like defiling an artwork. Removing part of the experience.

Point being, I think SOMA is a great horror game as well as a great story, and think that the horror aspect makes it, and is not just "irritating" like many seem to describe.

[Sticky Wicket]

I agree. The horror aspect is an intrinsic element to the story (I say this as someone who is not into horror games as a general rule).

Really the true horror aspect is in the game's disturbing themes and story that relates to the *monsters*, and the subsequent questions that raises....

A lot of the wierd things wandering around can be sneaked past and skillfully avoided. I managed to get up right close to most of them by being very careful. :D

[benfable79]

I have a great fear of "Underwater" An unfortunate phobia. Made this game much more fun though.

[benfable79]

Underwater and sharks scare the crap outa me. But I wish there was a hard mode not just safe and normal.

[Real Shabby]

I am a few levels in and am finding the monsters are conveniently right in the way of my objectives - like, literally standing still in the very next room I need to get through (after a checkpoint) to continue the game.

And some of the monsters you're not supposed to look at or they kill you, so while the glimpses I've caught have been surreal, I don't know how to admire the design when the intented play behavior is to avoid looking at them.

So far I think I like Amensia A Machine for Pigs the best.

[Bitcoin Baron]

I don't find them scary it's just a clunky monster model with weird noises coming out of it and you get shaders popping off with visual interference. Once they see you they wont stop following you until you are dead and you can't kill them. That's why they are infuriating.

[[HN]]

I'm in the middle of the game right now, and I can certainly say that these monster are clearly not scarry. Having your screen going nuts and shooting loud noise don't make them any more scarrier, it make just the exeperience more obnoxious.

[grumbel]

My issue with the monster is how badly they integrate into the narrative. I never really got a feel for why they are the way they are, why they are where they are, what they want or why they make my screen glitch. They just felt like random horror cliches inserted into the game because somebody thought you need to have a monster encounter every hour to keep things interesting.

I would have much prefered it if they had more of the robots with human minds than those monsters. Those robots were interesting, they had personality and backstory and could be interacted with in non-aggressive ways.

From a pure mechanical level I also found the monsters to be far to easy to avoid by just running past them, so I never bothered to figure out any kind of strategy against them. This in turn also removed any scarriness from them and just made them annoying speed bumps.

[Loaded Glove]

Originally posted by grumbel:

My issue with the monster is how badly they integrate into the narrative. I never really got a feel for why they are the way they are, why they are where they are, what they want or why they make my screen glitch. They just felt like random horror cliches inserted into the game because somebody thought you need to have a monster encounter every hour to keep things interesting.

I would have much prefered it if they had more of the robots with human minds than those monsters. Those robots were interesting, they had personality and backstory and could be interacted with in non-aggressive ways.

From a pure mechanical level I also found the monsters to be far to easy to avoid by just running past them, so I never bothered to figure out any kind of strategy against them. This in turn also removed any scarriness from them and just made them annoying speed bumps.

+1
Not sure I even wanna finish the game tbh. I can see why the game has such a high positive percentage, but my own oppinion is the game is very mediocre and unfun.

[triple_agent]

Originally posted by Loaded Glove:

Not sure I even wanna finish the game tbh. I can see why the game has such a high positive percentage, but my own oppinion is the game is very mediocre and unfun.

I did exactly that, quit right before the end - well, at that cthulhu-face location - due to how infuriating the monsters were. The first one that made me seriously annoyed was the splitface at the first time Ark machine encounter. But now, with the safe mode introduced official, I will perhaps eventually replay the game and finish it, though the ending is said to be kind of blank.

[Machine123]

I beat the game on safe mode and dont ever intend on playing again on a different difficulty. I dont like dying in games, in every game I play, its on the easiest setting.

[Snowskeeper]

Originally posted by Just Like Heaven:

I agree. The horror aspect is an intrinsic element to the story (I say this as someone who is not into horror games as a general rule).

I agree, and this is exactly why I'm playing through on Safe Mode, right now. Chasers aren't horrifying, to me. When a chaser kills you in a game, you are yanked out of the narrative, dumped back to some time earlier in the story, and told to pretend that everything you did up to that point did not happen. That is incredibly immersion-breaking, and immersion, for me, is what horror games are all about.

In some games, like Amnesia for instance, they are a necessary evil--although even then I'd argue they didn't add much--but in Amnesia, the monsters disappear if you manage to hide from them, or lose them once they start chasing you. From what I have seen, that is not the case in SOMA. They just keep chasing you until you die. ♥♥♥♥ that.

[Loaded Glove]

Getting away from them isn't a problem, it's just annoying to have to deal with them at all because it's not challenging in a skill based way nor does it contribute to the story, atmosphere and even tension. All it does is arbitrarily demand patience to explore more slowly and carefully which isn't actually neccessary or accentuating to the story.

[Employee 427]

Originally posted by Triple_Agent_AAA:

Originally posted by Loaded Glove:

Not sure I even wanna finish the game tbh. I can see why the game has such a high positive percentage, but my own oppinion is the game is very mediocre and unfun.

I did exactly that, quit right before the end - well, at that cthulhu-face location - due to how infuriating the monsters were. The first one that made me seriously annoyed was the splitface at the first time Ark machine encounter. But now, with the safe mode introduced official, I will perhaps eventually replay the game and finish it, though the ending is said to be kind of blank.

The ending is brilliant.

[Employee 427]

Originally posted by droid:

I beat the game on safe mode and dont ever intend on playing again on a different difficulty. I dont like dying in games, in every game I play, its on the easiest setting.

Isn't that sort of the point? To avoid dying, you don't play badly? I'm not blind, I know SOMA isn't the best example of that, but taking all effort out of surviving seems to remove the tension entirely to me.

[Employee 427]

Originally posted by grumbel:

My issue with the monster is how badly they integrate into the narrative. I never really got a feel for why they are the way they are, why they are where they are, what they want or why they make my screen glitch. They just felt like random horror cliches inserted into the game because somebody thought you need to have a monster encounter every hour to keep things interesting.

I would have much prefered it if they had more of the robots with human minds than those monsters. Those robots were interesting, they had personality and backstory and could be interacted with in non-aggressive ways.

From a pure mechanical level I also found the monsters to be far to easy to avoid by just running past them, so I never bothered to figure out any kind of strategy against them. This in turn also removed any scarriness from them and just made them annoying speed bumps.

I definetly agree you have to meet the game at least half-way, if not more, to find the monsters challenging. Luckily for me, I'm used to doing that and such a tense person that I fit right into what the game was trying to do, but I can see how many who are more concerned with moving the plot along than experiencing the "chaser" atmosphere could not.