Analysis of Somerville, the overwhelming War of the Worlds that has left me a great question unresolved

as if it were him cometa Halley Happening every gazillion years in front of planet Earth, a new game from the creator of Limbo and Inside appears before us. We are not exactly talking about the entire team, but what Dino Patti has led the creation of Somerville it is already a guarantee of intrigue.

The former Playdead founder split his career from the studio that catapulted him to fame to team up with Chris Olsen to create Jumpship, his independent studio. Five years later, and almost without warning, his work falls from the sky to impact fiercely. However, there are many questions to be resolved.

overwhelming loneliness

If you take a couple of glances at the landscapes that Somerville presents, the reference is clear. War of the Worlds of Tom Cruise y H. G. Wells It seems that it has been unleashed on Earth and you are right. The plot of the title is as crystal clear as it is direct, without any qualms about going directly to the sirloin.

We play a family, mainly the father, who is quietly resting at home when an alien invasion begins to take place on the planet. After a catastrophic incident, the trio of mother, son and father are separated, beginning a constant search to get back together.

There is not the slightest line of dialogue in Somerville, no trace of a single word uttered by the characters. A house brand that is inherited from Playdead’s work and that once again proves to be effective, in most cases. During a large stretch of the adventure it is more than clear to us what is happening just with gestures, postures and the visual presentation.

as if we were talking about ¡NOP! by Jordan Peele, all you have to do is take your dog for a walk in the backyard and you’ll see a gigantic spaceship far up in the sky. Disaster is just seconds away, looming from a distance, and this is a resource that the game continually exploits.

The backgrounds are used as powerful images of what is happening, with innumerable columns populating all the clouds, in a picture that is hopelessly overwhelming. The end seems inevitable and this is where the music comes into action. Mute are the characters and absent is the music, except when it is introduced with great success. There are very few scenes in which the chords begin to rumble on the screen, but are so burned into the fire that they instantly come to mind.

The clearest example of this is at the beginning. It almost looks like a horror movie, with an overwhelming bombardment of ships, intergalactic lightning and the feeling that we are a mere speck of dust in the middle of the chaos. We are hostages to the designs of a superior race.

The footprint they leave is even greater given that the father is alone practically at all times. The dog barely follows him, which is a mere companion with whom we cannot interact, and it is made completely clear that humanity has been decimated in one fell swoop. From sleeping in warm company on the sofa, to contemplating how the apocalypse arrives without meaning and without merit from beyond the stars.

Don’t hesitate, don’t waver

Although we are facing a full-fledged science fiction thriller, here our role is decisive. Throughout the little more than four hours of gameplay that it offers Somerville, we will come across different puzzles and situations to solve. Nothing particularly complicated or that requires any skill, but everything consists of knowing how to properly apply the tools that we have in hand.

And never better said, because the father is capable of emitting colored extraterrestrial energies through his arm, which is essential to advance. There are virtually no on-screen instructions, there is no HUD, and no clues as to what we should do. Everything comes by intuition, by application of logic. If the red energy solidifies a space rock, it will have to be used to create a path over a lake; if I want to call an elevator, the current that provides electricity will have to be activated.

With simple bases like that, Somerville It complicates the challenges a bit more, but never to a point where it’s frustrating or overly complex. Perhaps you have to repeat a couple of times after dying untimely, although it is nothing that cannot be solved by applying knowledge of basic physics. On the other hand, we do not forget the occasional enemy that presents itself as almost insurmountable obstacles, so the best option will be to run.

Between mechanisms, levers, boxes and flashes of energy we will find one of the clearest nuisances of Somerville: your controls. Not so much because they are not effective, but because of Jumpship’s radical decision to bet on a 3D movement for the characters. Until now, Limbo e Inside They made the protagonists move in a side scroll.

Here we can go to the backgrounds and get closer to the plane, which means that we don’t always hit the right direction that we want to give the character. It also doesn’t help that some of the chosen planes are not the best, causing more confusion to understand through the joystick where we are located. This has resulted in some bug that has left the character falling into a void, locked in a space that shouldn’t be accessible.

The weight of the story

Living in the shadow of a legacy as colossal as those of your previous projects is complicated. The impact they caused is hard to beat, since we are talking about effective stories, intuitive mechanics and an unmistakable visual aspect. In the case of the plot, I will not enter spoilers for obvious reasons, but it should be noted that there is the possibility of unlock multiple endings.

I resorted to violence -and I can read that far- and I don’t have the remotest idea of ​​what determines one or the other to achieve. Obviously, the final minutes are the most cryptic of all, becoming Somerville in a string of moments to reflect on and unravel. However, that does not exempt him from weaknesses.

A fairly long section dedicated to a cave can feel very stretched out in time and it’s a shame that we only see stone walls so often, considering Jumpship’s artistic potential. On the other hand, there is some very slight secret to discover, which I have not been able to discern, so I will wait for a clarification in the next few days on the Internet.

iGamesNews’s opinion

Yet I’m not sure what exactly to make of Somerville. It does make it clear whose son he is, so if you have tried Dino Patti’s other works and they have fascinated you, here is a new piece of candy. However, it is far from being a work that is very easily recommended and is closer to the hackneyed concept of “coffee for very coffee growers”.

It has been far from causing me the same mark as Limbo e Inside and I have yet to ponder the meaning of what exactly has happened in the finale. I managed to answer some questions, but finishing a game, movie or book and not knowing how to give an exact interpretation to what I just witnessed ends up leaving the fly behind my ear.

As always, the doubt may come from my clumsiness when interpreting and perhaps you will find the sentence after run into Somerville on Xbox Game Pass. Surely, as with Signalis, there is no firm certainty on which to stand.