Oh harmony. Just look at those long, graceful limbs. A hero who is all sticks, elbows and knees, thin, troubled, and hopeless. As he folds himself into the back seat of the car, I can imagine the mechanic in it. Look! Look at the world around him, with its slender alien spaceship in the sky, of course, firing thin graphite pencil strokes of death. But also look at the low poly landscape being destroyed, the buildings narrow and stretch upwards as if their tops are being grabbed and pulled nicely. A bean pole world where a bean pole protagonist can stealth past bean pole enemies. Some people have thought about this for a long time. It’s beautiful, strange, and coherent.
Somerville is very simple in theory. It’s the alien apocalypse, viewed from the perspective of a family — two parents, a toddler, a dog — whose lives are upended by the invasion. After the aliens came, the family separated soon, and we went out with my father to find everyone.
But I play it and other games break in. On the one hand, it’s hard not to think about the likes of Limbo and Inside, since Jumpship, the studio behind Somerville, has serious DNA with those games, and in a sense belongs to the genre they codify. You know, wordless, quirky games about platforming and ways to confuse you in cryptic horror scenarios. Somerville gives you more freedom with respect to the three-dimensional space – you can enter the screen, and you can move around, letting the level overflow in unexpected directions – but the beat is the same, and the atmosphere of desperation and sadness is the same.
However, I found myself thinking about another world too, Eric Chahi’s classic about a physicist being dragged through a wormhole. There is the same focus on standing out from the chosen artistic aesthetic, the same glitzy Euro-style sci-fi movies, the same cinematic staging, the same desire to make things look as good as possible, to be a stylish person. thing That is also a game.
what else? Half-Life, I thought: the bearded hero, of course, and the scale of the apocalypse that was happening around him, the same feeling of being outnumbered, defeated almost from the start, so the only thing you can hope to do is keep trying, Get out of your house, through the forest, down into the ground, and then what?
It’s unfair, I know, because Somerville also has a lovely vibe to it. There’s that extended, elongated art, and some wonderful set staging, from one sequence where you have to run from searing searchlights in the sky to another sequence where enemies explode around you in the dark , you run up a tower. And that’s not even the kind of action it does well: there’s a great moment in the middle of the game — it feels like the middle — where you find yourself in a makeshift hospital with one of the refugees. The pace of human recovery has slowed, and people are trying to find their way. call.
Somerville also had ideas of his own. You don’t just crawl from one side of the screen to the other, you have limited control over the alien material left behind by the invaders. It starts out as a voxel-reddish block of stone, the kind of thing Gary Numan would probably make cover art around. If you have a light source or power supply that can be used as an amplifier, you can pull the trigger to turn the stone into a thick blue voxel fluid. So maybe you can remove obstacles that are holding you back, or carve a path upward.
Eventually, pressing another trigger turns the gooey blue substance back to stone, and that’s where the puzzle really begins. Some of them are definitely ingenious, including at least one that depends on displacement. At the very least, even the tedious puzzles have the ability to shift your gaze from one challenge to the next–using yellow on interactive objects can liven up your attention.
The best puzzles offer moments of real surprise and use a wide range of items in the environment. Yet the most uninspired people are often stranded by Somerville’s surprisingly tedious work. Maybe it’s the shift to three dimensions, but the sluggish protagonist is not reconciled to getting stuck on something every now and then, and occasionally even glitches. These are very rare cases, but the sad truth is that Somerville hasn’t been a very enjoyable game for a long time: the motion feels blurry and dreamy in the worst sense of the word – one you’re wading through Dreamy, heavy, through thick mineral air.
There may be little annoyances compared to what you’re seeing and where you’re going to visit. Somerville is a visual treat, taking a low poly art style and using it to smash the world, then take you through the ruins. As a puzzle-platformer it’s fine for the most part, but as a source of visual memory it’s often a different story entirely.
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