Somerville analysis

The shadow of Inside is elongated enough to chase Somerville from the beginning, to the point of altering it completely; I do not know if many cases of studies co-founders would occur to me to clarify that their role in a game is not the one that seems to be attributed. And yet it is what happened here: the director of Somerville, Chris Olsen, has always been (also in ) below Dino Patti, behind him. The shadow of Inside is elongated, I already say, and also that of Limbo; Two unusual games and that have yet managed to gain an enviable prestige. In short, a bad shadow does not seem to seek shelter, although I understand the frustrations that arise from this type of confusion; and I agree with Olsen in the usefulness of the credit blocks in the trailers.

As it may, Somerville starts with an alien invasion that breaks the domestic tranquility of a family, mother, father, baby and dog, who sleeps (and makes disgrace) in front of TV in his room. Already in this first scene you see a type of sensitivity that later, on several occasions throughout the four hours that Somerville asks for, it is the main protagonist of the game: it is present in the camera movements and in the composition of some Scenes, but also in the design of some of the most interesting puzzles. But in this start, its skinny points are also present: confusion, lack of control, the arbitrary way to decide what you can and what you cannot do; The feeling that the rules by which the world is governed are not always the same, so the first step in each new area is to understand how some mechanics that give the feeling that you should understand now.

There is an invasion, I say, and then the father-your avatar in Somerville-gains a peculiar power: it can manipulate the light and use it to alter the environment, turning-by summarizing-some solids in liquids. This power is complemented later with the inverse, which allows you to solidify the mysterious alien fluid that you find while you run away from the dangerous creatures that patrol the environment and look for your family, missing. These two actions are complemented with others, contextual and often dependent on what the environment offers at all times, to shape the small challenges that mark the advance by the different chapters of the game.

The comparisons are hateful, of course, but Somerville does not do them much to avoid them: some of their aesthetic resources leave direct or limbo, no matter how sometimes a third dimension to the movement is added. The absence of voices, for example, works here worse than in other games in their style (if you don't want to think about Play dead, think for example, Another World) because here there are situations in which it seems reasonable to communicate speaking; The deaths when we hunt us one of the mechanical animal disturbing that patrol the earth looking They had caught me (the rule to be fulfilled to shoot the Game Over), despite the fact that the laser that the enemy had shot me had not even touched.

They are small fineness defects that are being seen for the whole game (when the physicists fail while solving a puzzle; when you let yourself fall from one platform to another and the avatar is infinitely floating in the middle of the fall; when some rocks that fall to several Palms of you kill you without knowing very well what you should have done to avoid it) and that end up assuming a ballast in a game like Somerville, that so much bets on the presentation of their invasion type the war of the worlds. Every little you cross with situations and scenes that are always on the verge of being more fascinating and powerful than they end up; Little by little, their mysteries lose strength when no substance that holds them is seen behind them.

The elegant, almost sublime, of some of his situations (one of the first chapters is set in the remains of a music festival, full of tents that, recontextualized, encourage thinking more about a refugee camp than in joy of a concert) stumbles with a series of annoying inelegance in the design of levels and puzzles. Fixed cameras do not always get along with the 3D movement or with the readability of the space in which the puzzles develop; On more than one occasion I had the feeling that a persecution ended badly not because I had committed any clumsiness but because my character had encountered an obstacle that from my perspective did not look good, or because I was not able to climb above A lower stone than the one that had climbed a few seconds before. Physics around those who rotate most puzzles work clearly better when they are simple (when you have to drop a wagon by a rail, or move a boat through the water while hiding behind it) than when they give the appearance of trying Something more complex. It is even more frustrating when you realize that some achievement asks you to use the most creative, complex ways and, in my opinion, stimulants; The necessary solutions to advance, on the other hand, are often so insubstantial that you do not know if you have done it well or if you have been lucky, but in any case you want to move forward and not think about it too much: it does not want to repeat in search of a solution Better, or more consistent.

The most frustrating of Somerville is surely that almost avant-garde ambitions are noticeable, and perhaps even the talent necessary to get them forward; Something, however, ends up stopping them at all times, shaking their correct development and making the game end up leaving a bittersweet mouth. You don't feel like messing with Somerville; You do not feel like giving it more strictly necessary to their fallen moments, and yet it is hard for me not to allow those moments to end up defining my experience with the game. In the end, I think there are more shadows than lights in this debut, in which, however, there are a few powerful images and some interesting situation; Not as many as they could see, unfortunately, and none that has the potential to impact and define in the imaginary of the video game as their great referents had.

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