There’s one thing that has stuck with me for more than a decade (probably). It was a very short youtube video. It was just a man and women in bed back to back. After a second it pans to the woman’s side of the bed and shes a scary looking monster demon lady. I think about it once or twice a week. Specifically when laying in bed with my lady and shes not facing me.I have no idea what its from. Youtube used to have alot of randomly terrifying content.
SOMA continues to bother me. Much more about the ideas than the actual gameplay. It’s relevant. It feels more possible every year.
It’s either that or Stingers from Satisfactory, which are zero percent philosophical nightmare and just pure AAAAAA SHITSHITSHIT
The scariest aspects of SOMA apply to everyone regardless of scifi brain transfer/copy technology if you think about it. In the years immediately following the release of the game I followed discussions about it which largely converged on the comforting explanation that the idea of a transfer is a delusion, and continuity of consciousness must be always tied to the original body. But unless you somehow rule out the idea that it is an emergent property of the information being processed in our heads, there isn’t a lot of reason to think that would be the case. A copy of you with all your memories and brain patterns has equal claim as an original. But we don’t even have quite the same pattern as a moment ago, so maybe our own claims to continuity or self aren’t as strong as we rely on them being.
It calls into question basic intuitions about the nature of our existence that people have a very difficult time bringing themselves to question, something the game pretty brilliantly depicts with its robots that are deeply offended, hostile and defensive about the suggestion that they are robots.
SOMA was amazing. It’s in my top 3 greatest games I have ever played. The ending broke me.