Yet Simon 2 thinks he is the original Simon. So he experienced it all. Just not in his original body. Soma is Greek for 'body'. Which is what this whole game is about. What is life? What is you? Who are you? Are you just a body or is the body only a part of you? Or does it have nothing to do with you at all?
@@b4tman_and_Rob1n It would place the odds of them NOT actively referring to Huxley at astronomical. Soma's designers are smart well read people. Their games reflect that.
Cathrine did kinda like to him Keep in mind ‘hey make him think we’re just gonna send him over without a thought’ because hey don’t want him going crazy. Her plan was to just last until they get to the rocket. After that well, doesn’t matter.
I think the ambiguity in the writing is kind of genius, because it allows room for us to speculate and talk about it! The comment above me suggested that Katherine lied and manipulated Simon in order to complete her goal. Which could be true. It's also unclear if the "coin toss" of being cut and pasted rather than copied and moved is real. In the three times Simon needs to move his consciousness he's never cut and pasted but...maybe it would have happened on a fourth move? Katherine could be telling the truth for all we know; she did work on this project long enough to have experience with what happens after all. I love how much this game makes you think. These kinds of narratives in games are becoming rare it seems. EDIT: Duh,I forgot the main point your comment made me think of! I can easily believe Simon didn't fully understand what Katherine was telling him about the transfers. The consciousness not experiencing the breaks in time would be extremely disorienting, and having to immediately adjust to a totally new reality would stress even the strongest of nerves. So, yeah, Simon hearing what he wanted to hear and not what was actually being said to him isn't unrealistic. Hell, if I was in Simon's shoes I might even do the same thing. It's such a tragic story that there's a copy of Simon, stuck in the abyssal depths, a metal contraption slowly being dissolved by the salt water and unable to move. Who knows how long it'll take for his body to fail and that copy dies. What's known for sure is that version will be completely insane waiting for the end...
An interesting thought: upon being uploaded to the Ark, Catherine's manipulation would still remain with her, and probably be weighing on her conscience. Even though Simon on the Ark would believe everything worked to plan, she would know the truth of her decision.
I like to think that Simon was the wau’s final step in preserving humanity. That Simon launching the arc was always the ultimate goal of the wau, always stumbling towards this end along the way.
That's a very beautiful way of putting it. I on the other hand like to joke that Soma is about Catherine having to manipulate the AI equivalent of Microsoft Sam into helping her launch the Arc.
That's an interesting thought, and I never actually considered this. Holy shit...I'm thinking about this game in an entirely new way. Wow, experiencing a paradigm shift is weird!
@@ChristopherSadlowski if you really think about it Simon seeing the wau monsters as monsters is really because the wau doesn’t want Simon to see the wau’s prior failures as the right way to preserve humanity.
It's a nice thought, but no. The WAU has no concept of finality or preplanning to that extent. It's not conscious, it does not think like we do. It merely does what its programming tells it to do, which after the fall of humanity, caused it to bug out and do some pretty horrific things.
10:28 Because of the 'coin toss' metaphor. It's not a coin toss, it's just that new Simon has the memories of old simon, meaning from HIS perspective he 'won' the cointoss and transferred over, when that's not how it works.
coin toss is a great way to describe it. because how would your copy percieve it? as if it was always you until the point of the scan. then you split, but if you are the copy, you would always have been the copy but never known. at least from your perspective.
@@niklashost7261 Right? Catherine isn't lying, she was just trying to explain the concept to Simon in the simplest terms she could, because Simon is thick as molasses and just wasn't getting it through his head.
It is a coin toss if you acknowledge the quantum nature of everyone's conscience (quanta means it is an indivisible entity, there are not copies of Simon with half his conscience or something like it).
There's a Star Trek episode like this. Riker, the commander of the Enterprise, gets beamed out of an abandoned planet. He arrives safely on the ship and leaves, everything normal. But... there's is an issue and he is copied back on the planet alone. So he is cloned in two places, both with the same past but different futures.
A correction. WAU did not attempt to interfere with Ross' plan to kill it. The electromagnetic disturbance began when Omicron staff retrieved Ross from the climber. Since initial electromagnetic disturbance was huge, the staff placed the body into a glass contamination container. Since WAU needs strong electric surges to calibrate the gel and manipulate it, it started overcharging the whole Omicron, so the structure gel inside the tubes would rush to the glass container and repair the body. Julia Dahl correctly guessed that once Ross reaches 100%, the disturbance will stop. Unfortunately for them, the amount of it was far, far too much. Basically WAU only wanted to repair Ross' body but it couldn't do it without strong electrical charges inside the container, so it had to increase the general charge. It killed everyone as a result. Probably it was either unaware of what would happen or in its understanding it was fine with corpses without heads, as long as it had structure gel to reanimate and sustain them.
That is a really good theory, wish I knew it before to include it lol That whole section was pretty convoluted, it seemed that everyone thought something else, whether the WAU was sentient in that regard or just made an error. Pretty cool to discuss but annoying that we don't have a straight answer.
@@SaadTheGlad I suppose it's safe to say the WAU did not perceive the world as humans do. It never wanted anything and neither it was capable of wanting. It was a tool, probably the most complex ever created, but still a tool. The statement that WAU killed the Omicron staff deliberately can be easily disproven. Why kill everyone when it could just conveniently burst a pipe to kill Raleigh, the only one who posed a threat? Why reanimate Ross, who was very deliberate to stop WAU even when he was at TAU? I can also disprove a statement that says the WAU is evolving. It is not. Any attempt to reanimate people was a product of tech theft and bastardization. WAU stole Catherine's Vivarium and just reconfigured it. The results never grew progressively better. It always depended on a host. What good is it to upload a scan into a door? Or universal helper, Dunbat? Simon was just lucky, as he was a dead body with a cortex chip and battery smeared together, same with his Hamatsu diver suit. Besides, it was a Carthage agent who decapitated Reed and did the dirty work. To put it shortly, the wau was using the same pattern. The variety of the machinations' outcomes depended on equally various bodies. Living animals (Leviathan, anglerfish), fully dead bodies (fleshers), recently dead or close to dying (TAU living quarters), perfectly healthy (proxies of any kind), comatose (Akers, Ross), machinery (mockingbirds), perfect mockingbirds (Simon).
The WAU wouldn't have thought of *anything* , it just did what it was programmed to do. There was no thought behind the WAU's actions, that's why it let's you kill it if you choose to. It's established throughout the game that the WAU doesn't care about anything but trying to sustain humanity, it doesn't *care* at all, it doesn't have that capability. The point of it doing all of these disturbing things is because it doesn't really understand what *makes* life *LIFE* . I hope I made sense.
@@leadpencil-223this is something I wish more people understood about the WAU. It's super upsetting to me that right now people treat the actual LLM we have irl that way as well. It's just so easy for people to anthropomorphize anything that even mimics humanity a little. Chat gpt doesn't know what's it's doing when it tells people to glue their cheese to their pizza and neither does the way understand a headless shambling corpse might not fit the definition of life.
@@leadpencil-223I thought from Ross’s journals it was well established the WAU had evolved to more complex thinking at this point. Ross admits in his journals that he was originally excited by an AI essentially self improving. In the later journals when he realized WAU was upgrading to a point where “sustain human life” began to get a little looser. Anyway that’s my read of it. WAU started as a healthcare AI as we experience AI now only with a better and bigger processor, but no one except Ross realized WAU had upgraded itself to a point where it could get “philosophical” or whatever the equivalent would be for the WAU. And I do have an example of this. WAU had up till Akers being Akers was fairly neutral and nearly maintaining the status quo, keep in mind much of WAU’s self upgrades were already done. WAU only told Akers to go to Theta after people started killing themselves during the ark project. Akers being sent to forceably put people to sleep did and was always going to have some people die in the process. Making the decision to kill a few humans now because it believed full blown consciousness to be more dangerous. If that’s not deciding on a moral and philosophical dilemma, I don’t know what is. WAU is not a humanlike AI, but I think that WAU is far more complex and intelligent than any of the characters or most of us players give it credit for.
One thing that you didn’t mention about the ending is that for the entire game the player is moving from one Simon’s perspective to the next: at the start of the game from 1 to 2 which you then play as for a majority of the game. Then from 2 to 3 to go deeper with the pressure suit. But then finally, at the end of the game, the player has been conditioned to think they will go now from Simon 3 to Simon 4 on the ARK but it’s the first time in the game that the perspective doesn’t change. I think this makes Simon 3’s frustration at the end of the game much more relatable to the player since they too are expecting the perspective to shift again. Although they do eventually show Simon 4’s perspective on ARK afterwards
Also let's not forget that Simons are a really old and basic copy of a brain damaged person. So it makes sense that they would have trouble understanding new concepts.
@@TheMegaOne1000 Catherine purposefully obfuscated it until he was in the Deep Sea clone. She could have explained it like reproduction. You are not transferring, you're making a child with all your memories. It will live its own life after its birth, and you will live yours.
We and him have been falsely led by the term "coin toss" when in reality that term doesn't exist at all. The copy is always going to "win" and the one being scanned is always going to "lose" and that belief is reinforced when the game always jumps us to the new Simon for the sake of gameplay when it finally shows us in full what actually happens from the perspective of the one being scanned. And it almost showed us a no win no lose situation should the 2 Simon copies meet each other before Cath put Simon 2 to sleep and made it appear that Simon 3 "won" as if she'd anticipated that if the 2 Simons get to talk to each other they'd no longer continue along with her plan
100% agree with you. Coin Toss suggests chance and probability. But for copy to copy, going forward, there was a pattern that followed without a single deviation. Wake up as copy, copy going forward is not current "I think therefore I am" copy sapience and sentience. Its a newer, more up to the moment version. Catherine knew this, she was an engineer of this project. She was very careful with layman's terms. It was a half truth informed consent. What I wonder, is why didn't she ever ask for a body to use? Becuase she didn't want to be in Simon III chair post launch, or needed to exist in an oversight position if Simon failed and someone else picked her up? @runawaysmudger7181
Soma's audio talking about war in the surface might seem like cut content about when the apocalypse plot was about war in the surface, but one might interpret it in the sense that the chaos from the comet led to the remaining survivors entering in conflict and riots to survive Which, in a setting like SOMA, it's weirdly hopeful. It implies that there are people still alive in the surface, and as a result there's hope that humanity can survive
Well there is a story about one of the ARK teams members climbing the Omega Spacegun to the surface and finding herself a drink and succumbing afterwards to the toxic air, but considering that she managed to survive up there for some time or that anything was even intact implies that there actually could be people alive
kinda funny that the people who survived would immidately go back to killing each other "Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
Masterpiece? Whole setup is pointless and stupid from sci-fi point of view. All that to "save humanity" in form on digital simulation running on stray satellite in space. Just a simple think on "who will perform maintenance" shatter whole idea. I was sooo incredibly disappointed when its all turned to be this pathetic.
@@Vednier Also, I'm sure most of the players thought the same thing (to some extent) as you about the whole Ark satellite thing, but it doesn't take the masterpiece status of this game away. Simply because it doesn't matter - this game is not a story about a fraction of digitalized mankind surviving in space for a few hundred years, it's much more than that.
@@dogmeat7582 Yes, i can see your point, but my opinion is that destination where plot is going is soo unbearably pathetic so its painfull to watch. I agree on game quality and even can agree on that plot have its logic and even make sense to some degree, but i hoped there will be some twist in the end. Honestly, even uninventive "spaceship to flee Earth" would be better, because this satellite is a form of Humanity giving up, its digital mausoleum, not solution. Maybe in wider perspective we needed this "bitter-bitter-bitter-sweet" ending, because not everytime happy ending possible but i cant shake off feeling on that this game cant archive masterpiece status exactly because of that plot direction.
I also talked about SOMA since I noticed lots of people don't get the creepiness of the plot. Catherine first started honestly, then became vague, then actively hid the truth from Simon. She is putting her wants above Simon's needs. The game shifting perspective makes you, the player, 'forget' the rule of copying and assume it will continue shifting minds which never happened. Peak existential horror.
Honestly Simon also just absolutely REFUSES to understand how the coyping mechanism works, and it's something that you hear as a critique of the game again and again. Personally I like the theory that he is one of the earliest brainscans (mentioned in game) and thus a little... limited. He also had major brain damage that ultimately killed him, so that wouldn't help as well. Not to mention the entire situation would be crazy traumatic to anyone.
@@FrozenDozer Oh yeah Simon is an idiot. But people act idiotic to stay alive. Some people eat animals and claim they don't have feelings yet cuddle with their dog who of course has a character. Cognitive dissonance works even irl. Or he really is simply limited. :D
Soma is right up there w Silent Hill 2 for some of the best thought-provoking horror ever made. It is so grounded and feels Simon feels so relatable. I remember hearing about the continuity and the coin toss and thinking it sounds fishy but not knowing exactly why till thinking about it more.
the reveal of simon's reality not really making it to the second suit hits u like a truck the first time u play, by then u know he is a machine but after that u realize hes actually dead none of this actually matters cuz he is a brain stuck in 2015.
I also think Cathrine kinda manipulated Simon, but I don’t think she did it intentionally or maliciously. She might‘ve put Simon II to sleep in order to just not upset Simon III, because she isn’t really comfortable in dealing with his (understandable) emotions. Also Simon is her only hope. If he gets too upset to continue, she‘s kinda f*cked. Of course she would do everything in her power to not let that happen. I honestly can’t really blame her…
i don't think she did, Simon just couldn't accept concept. She did explain to him many times, but he didn't listen. Even if he understood i'm sure he would've done the same thing.
It might be standard precedure when uploading to a mech to put the meat body to sleep, so you can _copy the mech's conciousness back over to the meat body_ when you're done. In essence an upload and download, but with backups.
From my perspective, I didn't really see any manipulation in the first place. I was kind of disappointed that Simon didn't realize that a version of him would not be on the rocket, particularly after the first time he got uploaded to a new body. I was more annoyed that he was being such an idiot that he didn't realize that. It's not like that realization would have meant that launching the rocket was meaningless, preserving that slice of humanity was worthwhile in and of itself.
The revelation that your mind was not being moved, but copied, genuinely freaked me out, caused me to experience existential dread and actually gave me a bit of nausea at the time. It really messed with my head. Probably one of the most horrifying moments i've ever experience in any form of media.
Yep I can't believe some people are saying this game isn't scary. Like I know that horror is subjective but damn the existential horror in this game is absolutely phenomenal. I was so uncomfortable for days after first watching the playthrough of it
@@justahugenerd1278 Me too. For the next couple of days after playing this game I just felt somber. I kept contemplating what it would feel like to be Simon in that moment, realizing that he was damned to an eternity is a cold, dark, empty, harrowing place where everything wants to kill you. I chose to kill Simon 22 because of that thought. If it were me, Id rather be dead than live out an eternity like that all alone.
Techically killing the WAU is better outcome, because it could infect the fishes. Humanity might be lost, but the underwater creatures will exist. It's like a new era for the world. As for Catherine being less shy, could be due to the fact she speaking behind a screen, many people have more confidence speaking behind a screen and not in person.
@@Gustav_Kuriga the wau will keep other creatures alive, stuck in unmovable state. The marine life that is alive will suffer and besides a new life form could emerge when the planet is habitable again.
@@Immolator772 A robot with a human mind has much better chances of surviving the actual state of the planet. For example Simon can go back and make contact with the other Simon version if you choose to leave it live... and maybe use some body and a copy of the imprint of Catherine to remake Catherine again.. now you have 3 working robots with human minds. If you decided to leave WAU to leave ... with just some human-robots increasing in numbers, the WAU and the instalations..... with a geothermal plant working..... even if its dificult there is still hope for humankind in the planet.
I mean, life on earth has persisted beyond catastrophes similar to a comet impacting. It'll probably be a few hundred thousand or a million years or so, but eventually, things will probably be okay. 98% of all species to walk the earth have gone extinct, and yet life still perseveres. We don't need the WAU to fix shit.
There is an underlying theme surrounding the player choices: Let it live in a crippled state, or end its misery. Every choice is like this. They are each a smaller version of the final choice with the Wau. The way you felt about all the previous choices will inform what you will feel about this huge choice. Do you leave life on Earth in a crippled state, or end all life for good.
also a sort of test on your world view: Do you accept suffering with a chance of something good happening afterwards (since the WAU is experimenting and given enough time might actually succeed) or do you seek to minimize the suffering instead, preferring not to leave it to chance.
The choices are seemingly as basic as you put it. But some of the "crippled" beings were doing just fine from their POV. I think the first robot that you unplug will literally say they were happy afterwards.
@@Dutchyman Simon himself gets tucked into one of these lucid happy fantasies by Akers. Whether or not this is a life worth living is left up to the player to decide. If it isn't... what makes that virtual life so different from the Ark?
Cathrine had put Simon to sleep for a couple of reasons.. It would have been painful for simon 1 to suddenly be alone, and the two simons might have fought each other if one was obviously going to progress and the other had to stay on that level. Secondly; It would have been a strain on resources for both simons to try and progress or work together. There was no way for Simon 1 to get down there.. She wanted to keep a divide between the simons to make the wound easier.
I also theorize that, after seeing how her colleagues disapproved of her methods and the copying, she figured Simon wouldn’t be any different. So, she took action to prevent him from realizing the downsides of this procedure.
The point of the "Coin Toss" is that, from a third party perspective you can observe the timeline of "You" as a path in space time. When "You" are copied that path branches. It's a coin toss which branch "You" end up on, but both branches exist concurrently. The "You" that becomes the copy looks back along its path and says "I made it, I'm here" and the "You" that doesn looks back along its path and says "I didn't make it, I'm not there". The coin toss then is merely a question of who you are after the branch: the version who won, or the version who lost. The version who lost goes on to experience whatever terrible fate you were trying to avoid, the version who won gets whatever it is you sought to gain. It is inherently unethical, as a fully sapient and sentient person will die to get you what you want. The reason the Dr. wanted to convince people to kill themselves during the transfer was to spare them the indignity of being the "loser" of the coin toss. They still, of course, always lose, but they don't have to face it.
18:46 An autoinjector is usually something like an EpiPen which allows an untrained individual to administer medication directly into the body, usually through a needle. They're preferred for untrained persons since the mechanism is spring loaded which means you just press it against your thigh after taking off the safety and it'll administer the medication, removing the chance for breaking the needle inside the person. I can only imagine that the black box is something similar but you stick the injector in the back of your neck.
One thing I’ve always had in mind with Soma was Theta, specifically the imagery of the site. The imagery goes in line with “the mouth of the beast” as when opening the main entrance, the doors dramatically open like a mouth swallowing you in. With this imagery in mind, you can piece together the literal human body with Theta. With the first floor of Theta being the mouth with there being little to no grime anywhere if you brush your teeth of course. There isn’t a single dead body on the first floor not counting the servers room with the stray proxy. Once you get to the second floor, it will take the imagery of the throat/stomach it seems. With dead bodies sparingly littered around the area and of course my boy Terry Akers. There are quite a bit of fleshy piles littered across this section, indicating why it would be the stomach as we ourselves dissolve our food with little bits of it sometimes getting stuck in the throat and stomach. Finally, you get to the 3rd floor that I always forget the name of. Going off the imagery, it’s the Pancreas and intestines with piles of fleshy mass everywhere and dead bodies littered in every single corner too. It’s pretty obvious that this system is the intestines etc with these factors. Finally, you get to the tubes in Theta where we, Simon, leave this section of the game. Now I could be wrong about the intestines, with this section being either the larger or small intestine. I mean they’re literally a maze of tubes connecting to all the sites seemingly showing us they are the intestines. But other than these factors, the end of the tubes is the anus, where finally the imagery of Theta is done. It’s a very interesting way of thinking what these sites and obviously Theta in particular show us how much work was put in to the game. I mean going off this imagery it’s obvious links to humanity, which is what the game is built around. I’ve just always wanted to talk about this subject since I’ve never seen ANYONE talk about this amazing imagery in the game. Like I said before, there could be other hints of imagery at other sites in the game, but I got midterms so I can’t check those out yet. If you’re reading this really long comment, thanks for taking a read buddy. Do tell me your other thoughts about the game or we can debate about this stuff together.
The AI is much more in line with real AI tech, not the Superminds we see in Movies. We gave the AI the task to prevent human death, and that is exactly what it did. Perfectly. If someone is suffering, or unable to move, or wants to die isn't part of the task we humans gave it. It found the best way to prevent as much death as possible. It did exactly as asked. Nothing more, nothing less. And that is a real danger of AI, doing exactly what we want it to, but Humans not making the task clear enough.
What makes a Mind, an A.I. god-king? 1: It has no immedeate overriding goal 2: It has sufficient processing power 3: (optional) It can function as one of its subjects - the Jesus check, if you will. The WAU isn't a machine god. It's a machine dog. It wants to be a good boy and does its best. Unfortionately it has no brains, no context, and a prime directive dragging it along.
Maybe that's what trickster Genies or Ancient Curses are like too, just highly complex past technology that is working not according to our logic but it's creators logic and not being spoken to properly, kind of like those pranks where "voice activated" stickers are put on hand dryers or robots lol. Or maybe they just haven't recieved updates or regular maintenance in thousands of years and gone haywire and malfunctioning or just lonely and crazy
Well said. Johan Ross' journal entry put it beautifully, that they told the WAU to preserve life, but had never told it what life was. Ross was so clear-eyed in his understanding of everything in the game, it really was a shame we didn't get more of his perspective throughout.
Not necessarily a theory, but an interesting thought I had. Throughout the game, when Simon is being chased or is hiding, you hear his heartbeat and heavy breathing. Simon mentions to Catherine during one of their very deep convos that he is talking, but has no mouth. It is really fascinating to me to think about how his human brain (the scan) functions with a robotic body/corpse - or for that matter how any of our brains would be able to handle controlling a body that is not ours. Is the heartbeat and breathing just a figment of his imagination? Muscle memory for his brain? Kind of like how in a nightmare, you can often "hear" yourself screaming even though it is an illusion. I don't understand how his scan controls his body, especially since the way his original brain would have learned to control his body (electrical impulses) is not accessible if he is a robot or in a dead body. Does the structure gel somehow connect the two? Miracle goop indeed. Part of me also wonders if this idea explains why Simon appears to be, well, like you said simple. Some things just go over his head. If his brain scan is conditioned to working one way (with his original human body), but is then put into a whole new system, it would take some time to adapt. But it seems that Simon's brain easily adapts to his new body, (running, jumping, swimming, and handling objects with ease). And he also handles his situation extremely well in my opinion(staying relatively calm and carrying out tasks, asking questions, etc...) Almost too well.. In my personal life, when I am in high stress situations, I go into autopilot. I think this is what is happening to Simon's brain scan. Even though he denies it later on, he really has convinced himself that is is the real Simon. This is why I think that while he is emotional throughout the game, he never really appears sad or grieved for his original self. Especially as the game progresses. I think this reiterates Sarang's theory, that the longer your copy exists and has experiences differing from yours, that it becomes it's own identity, separate from its prototype. I always wondered why Simon was so angry about the transition from Simon II to III, but then never mentioned it again afterwards. It proves the point that as he existed for longer as a copy, he grew apart from his source, and his scan convinced himself that he was the "realest", for lack of a better term, Simon. I actually don't know where this was going and I know it is all over the place so sorry. SOMA will do that to ya. Also, thanks for this amazing video. Subscribed. Glad to see that people are still discussing and fanboying over this absolute masterpiece.
This is my favorite game and its nice to see someone doing a in-depth dive of all the little details in the game, I always felt there was a lot of little clues left for the players to do detective work on. Here are some of my thoughts: 1.) Sarang's whole theory is based on idea that because your cells are constantly being replace, therefore they cannot be where your consciousness is held. The big problem though, is that where your consciousness is being held, your neurons, actually don't get replaced and do stay with you for your entire lifespan and when you do lose them it can affect your persona. 2.) The Dunbat had a female voice, so it couldn't have been any of the ones you listed. 3.) Catherine definitely manipulated Simon by telling him that the copying was like a coin toss, and she knew how Simon was since lambda when he was talking deleting himself. I think Simon didn't want to believe that he wouldn't be carry over to the ark. 4.) I think that Catherine's theory about Simon being part human and part machine being the reason why he isn't insane like the other is wrong. Catherine's theory doesn't explain why she isn't insane and she is 100% machine, and in the beginning we saw that Simon didn't want to believe that he was a robot, and when he looked at himself in the pilot chair he saw his human hands. My theory, is that both Simon and Catherine are actually Mockingbirds just like Carl Semken. The reason why they are not delusional is because at some point the illusion was shattered for them. For Simon, when he was placed into a situation where the human Simon couldn't possibly survive(at Uplision when the communication room got flooded) that's when the illusion was broken and then he was able to see his actual self. 5.) When Ross and his group were heading toward the climber, his colleague was killed by the Anglerfish. If you listen to the logs, Ross says "the light it is over there". That light is the one emitted by the Anglerfish. 6.) I think it's also possible when Catherine uploaded herself again to the Ark she could have overwritten her previous self. 7.) The Carthage theory seems pretty reaching to me. I mean of all the people they could bring back, why would they bring back simon? 8.) The point you made about the human face on the anglerfish, the viper fish also have the human face on the top of their heads. It seems like it is more like the WAU's way of "making" more humans.
I think the colleague who tried to escape with Ross was Glasser, but I'm not sure, though. Anyways, his body was ripped apart, I doubt that was the anglerfish's doing. The leviathan shows itself for the first time pretty close to the body of Glasser and is surely strong enough to snap someone's body. On the other hand, the recording of his death did not reveal the screaming of the Leviathan like it usually does. Maybe the light they saw was one of the ACR?
@@genotsSnor It was definitely Glasser, I remember Ross referring to the individual by that name in the blackbox recording. I still think it's the Anglerfish though because: 1.) They were moving toward a light which we know that is how the Anglerfish hunts since it tries to lure Simon in the same way. 2.) We are told from the coms that the critters stay away from the light so I would assume so would the Anglerfish A possible reason why even though the Anglerfish itself admits a light could because the lights might trick the Anglerfish(and other deep sea fish) into thinking that they are other predator fish which hunt also using light. 3.) The lights that are used to lead people from the climber to Tau are next to each other, so it seems like they should have been able to see more than 1 light, however the black box recording only references a single light. 4.) When we saw Ross be eaten by the Leviathan, it essentially swallowed his body whole, it seems reasonable to believe that would be the case for Glasser, however, his body was found ripped into pieces with most of it lying on the ground which I think adds more evidence to it being the Anglerfish rather than the Leviathan. 5.) Also to your point about it being near where Simon sees the Leviathan, This happens long before Simon arrives and we also see the Leviathan throughout the entire omega sector(from the climber all the way near phi) so I think it's unlikely, in my opinion, that the first time Simon sees the Leviathan and where Glasser dies is linked.
Great. Now I have the Iron Lung and the SOMA Icebergs with the greatest most tranquilizer voice to listen to while falling asleep! btw. Love your vids, keep it going man
I will never experience anything similar to SOMA, this is truly a piece of art. Thank you for bringing this out so more people can get to know this fantastic game. Great content, I really like your voice as well.
Observer is also a great game... imo the only game that comes close... but not to close... it's kinda similar, but also different... but worth a try, if you like Soma
@@bobbygoestoabyss6624 I only played the starting minutes of Observer back in the day, my computer was kinda shitty and could not handle it. Thanks for bringing that one out, will definitively give it a try sometime in the future!
Just to be clear the game's perspective never "shifts", breaking some rule, the entire game (excluding post credits scene) is through the perspective of Simon III, from the waking moment in Toronto to the space gun launch you are playing as Simon III, he is the only one with the lived experience of all the events of the game.
Can you help me understand? How can we have played as 3 the entire time if there is no coin flip, and 3 is the suit? Not being angry, just generally curious. 3 came into existence in the deep dive suit. While 1 was the intro and 2 most of the game. Are u implying it was all just a memory? Please let me know!
@@ArsenerruSee it as if you were playing throught Simon III's memories, he came into existence in the deep dive suit but he still remembers the whole journey as if he just went through it, and so do you because you are on his perspective
@@niko6824 The only one that wakes up in Toronto, wakes up in Phatos, moves to the deep dive suit and stays behind when launching the ark is Simon III, you are playing from his perspective
6:00 You know, I always say the weakest part of Soma is that it "cheats" a bit by swapping the player's perspective to a new Simon. But this made me reconsider that thought. It almost has to happen that way to really get the existential conundrum across.
@@fab9207 almost all of the game was seen thru the perspective of Simon #3. He remembers being human and then being in Upsilon, then being in the high pressure suit but will never experience what Simon #4 will experience in the Ark
@@fab9207 theyre not memories. the game is not a flashback. it's a direct stream of experience. he doesn't sit back and recollect his life in 2015. he experienced it as much as simon 1 did. it's only after the transfer that their lives diverged.
@@MortezaFC i mean, same thing no? sure i agree with that he doesn't recollect but the events he has gone through from 2015 until getting the diving suit are all memories of his that he himself has no senses to doubt, because it always felt like one full experience: for the copy.
Catherine did manipulate Simon but it was what she had to do. The fact that she tried to not explain it to Simon the first time she copied him just shows that she knew that Simon would not accept it, the same way that other people who were copied in the game would freak out and would try to kill their copies.
@@everythingpony I was not taking that into consideration. Now I'm wondering how much it interfered with his capacity to understand things and also if it was a ticking timebomb for him even as a copy.
You can hear it in the language she uses, she almost never uses the word "copy". She uses words like "upload" and "transfer", which goads Simon into the wrong idea of what might happen.
@@jaegerfoxx And that allows the Simon copy he sent into space to live happy in ignorance while dooming the copy that stayed and also the copy of Catherine that stayed as well. It is a very complicated situation to just label as right or wrong.
@@everythingpony Simons brain damage doesnt seem to affect his mental capabilities in any way except he is a dumbass who needs the plot explained to him repeatedly, just like the average gamer. How convenient.
I love this game and the psychology behind it. I would not decide to kill my copies and when he is alone at the end, I would go back to them and think about reviving the base and probably make Carthrine repair
@Willow1w It's possible, however unlikely, that re-uploading a template into the central system to act as a baseline would allow you unlimited time to learn. Essentially, a synth copies it's current self into the system. Then, the synth loads that template into a simulation containing a computer terminal or books containing all the STEM knowledge the system has, alongside a workshop for practical application practice. Then, let the sim go to town and then put it into a synth body. Since it's a computer Sim, just speed up the ticks per second and get what you need in a fraction of the time! It would take a bit of experimenting, but you have nothing but time...
Have you seen the absolute state of the facility? It's all actively falling apart. And you want this old data scan of a guy from the past, that got put in this robot body to somehow repair the station? I sure hope you didn't kill the WAU, or else everything is dead or dying.
@@Zinn_Neon Yes, it's just very implausible. I think that they purposefully had Catherine have a fit at Simon that fried her own data or something. Without Cath, it's a hopeless endeavour to try and repair the station. On top of Simon's brain scan being a legacy scan and very thus very simplified.
Dude I genuinely thought nobody had heard of this masterpiece of a game. I remember when I first got xbox gamepass, I fell down the rabbit hole of this game and have ever since been in love with it
SOMA is the scariest video game in existence to me. it's like the developers specifically set out to make a game that would terrify me in particular and make it so i would never be able to stop thinking about it. this game literally haunts me every moment of my life and i'm so glad it exists
The entirety of this video essay acts as a blissful reminder of why this type of sci-fi will always hold an important place in my heart. Your narration was phenominal btw.👌
Fun Fact - this game was one of the inspirations for a small part of the animated series, Centaurword. The show takes place in an obnoxiously whimsical magical world where the inhabitants have a plethora of absurd magical abilities. One of these is to "shoot tiny versions of yourself from your hooves". These tiny versions invariably run away screaming moments after being created. This, the creator of the show revealed, is because they are _exact_ duplicates of the orginal, including all memories up until the moment the tiny version was created. This immediately causes an existential crisis, since it is clear to them that they are but copies of a real person, and will of course remember all the previous times 'they' blithely created tiny versions of themselves in the past. Oh and yes, the tiny versions also have the power to create even tinier versions of themselves. Fans of the show will know (or will just now be realising) there is something else in the show that was clearly influenced by Soma, but that's major spoiler territory, so I'm not mentioning it here.
Everyone is an imperfect copy of their parents going back to the beginning. Unless you kill your mother in child birth it’s a copy not a cut and paste. I guess the crisis comes from the fact that these artificial copies are given perfect memories rather than being a collection of instincts on a blank memory.
I've seen the show, and I have no idea what that second thing is. Plus, you never say the show creator confirmed that aspect of the show was directly inspired by Soma.
The algorithm blessed me by suggesting your vid, and it’s great work! I watched a play through of it a few years ago, and it was intriguing. The goal of sending human minds into space in a simulation actually matches another RUclipsr’s talk about how humans might- in the far far future-handle the posited ending of the universe. Running a simulation of reality in a giant computer at ridiculously slow speed on what energy has been hoarded as the galaxy cools. As an aside, Simon not understanding being copied both annoyed me, and later struck me as denial; he did know, but refused to accept it.
23:35 is the best summarization of the whole 'coin toss' some people find it hard to wrap their heads around. It's just a change of perspective, a meta thing the game does because the 'new' Simons are what progresses the story. The game follows them like a cameraman in a movie follows the part of tue shot where there's action. The only 'coin toss' there is is the one that decides which of the copies survives/gets to progress (and that isn't really random chance, it's the result of the 'old' copy's actions) and not which of the bodies the 'real' version will 'inhabit'.
It works if you consider the entire game as not in present tense and instead as being rebuilt from Simon-3's memories. Everything you see in game is consistent with things he would remember experiencing. So in a sense, the player themself is Simon-3, having very clear memories of events prior to each transfer, to the point of not being able to differentiate them from actual experiences. It's kind of the only way to truly express that feeling to the player.
I always thought what was the point of going through all that trouble for the ARK when if you were caught by the WAU or put to "sleep" by Terry Akers it would be the same thing - dreaming of a paradise. Is it because the ARK is more "sugar coated" in looks compared to the body horror of a WAU flesh mass 🤔
Wow, I literally read a SOMA iceberg yesterday night for my nth playthroguh, and here you are putting out tthis vid at the same time! Guess I’ll dive through it again, there is so much to love about the game, and almost always something to learn, so many details… I’m here for the theories though… time to dig in
For me, the idea of our consciousness being inside of a computer is both incredible and scary at the same time. On one hand, we preserve ourselves and allow our minds to live on for thousands or even millions of years. On the other hand, it does not preserve the true us, and our minds are susceptible to torture, data extraction and manipulation. What use does preserving ourselves even serve? Is it selfish? Should we just accept death and eternal darkness because our existence could be entirely meaningless through some perspective? SOMA poses so many philosophical questions, it's life-changing for some people. I have thought of philosophy in the past but SOMA is truly what has peaked my interest in it the most. I'm not sure if these questions even have a right answer, I think it's all about just what makes us feel most comfortable with the unknown future.
@@JoshSweetvale The "true us" I refer to means our on-going experiences within the brain of our being. A computer may preserve something that resembles us, but it would not be the same being, hence not us. In other words, just as Sarang proposed in SOMA, we may as well be practically different beings than who we were as a child, as brain cells come and go. Of course, this is all down to personal beliefs and philosophy, so really, any answer is applicable.
We still don't even know for sure what consciousness is. We have theories, but currently we can't point to any specific part of the brain as being responsible for our conscious experience. I don't know what 'I' am. Am 'I' a collection of neurons and synapses? Am 'I' intrinsically linked to my brain matter, or is there something else? What about people who have brain surgery that removes part of their brain, do they suddenly become a different person? In my opinion, there has to be something secondary going on here. I don't consider myself particularly religious, but I'm sure there must be some other physical process beyond neural activity that can explain consciousness. We just haven't discovered it yet.
@@Slithersy I decide the limits of what is me. And I decide that all iterations of me are my offspring, unless iterations are merged in which case both were me.
I believe the brain is the reciever of conciousness and our true conciousness cannot really die, for example your body can function without your conciousness (for example sleepwalkers) so i think the other should also be possible, conciousness without body@@eli3963
Marvelous video. Makes me feel similarly to experiencing SOMA for the first time with all the information presented and covering things I wasn't even fully aware of. I wonder what lies in Frictional's next attempt at a sci-fi SOMA-like game.
the coin toss bit annoyed me. people in that thread are making WILD assumptions about what is "possible" regardless of the facts the game (which is the source of this debate in the first place) literally depicts in no uncertain terms. consciousness can be copied, but the resulting copy does not have any agency whatsoever until _after_ the scan because IT DOES NOT EXIST yet. they are treating memories as if they are the current moment and that the resulting copy has some knowledge of the future beforehand??? it sounds like OP was just using this whole concept as a way to justify the coin-toss being true by spouting about how a "non-zero possibility is possible" despite the odds being so astronomically unlikely that it's pointless to even discuss further. reddit is literally the shining example of the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
People who believe the coin-toss is a thing are morons. There is no coin toss. It's copy-paste, not cut-paste. I can't believe there are so many people who have played the game multiple times and still haven't realized it.
I don't understand why people think the WAU isn't scary because it's technically not conscious. I disagree, I think it's ten times scarier because of it. The WAU knows its objective, but lacks the ability to understand things like nuance or context. It only knows that it needs to preserve human life, *_by any means possible._* It does not have the capacity to care about the will or welfare of said humans.
And, paradoxically, as it grows more intelligent, the less it seems to understand the intentions of its charges, or react to them in any kind of way. Like how it blew up everyone in Omicron because one woman hatched a plan to kill it.
@@TheBleggh Somebody in another comment pointed out that WAU may not have intentionally killed the Omicron staff. It was slamming Ross' body with electronic signals for the purposes of reforming him, but the staff put in his body in a sealed containment chamber. Thus, it's possible WAU just jacked up the intensity in an attempt to brute force the signals into the chamber and, as a side effect, overloaded everybody's Black Boxes.
The whole game can be explained as being from the perspective of Simon 3. Simon 3 has the memories of Simon 2 who has the memories of simon 1. In the end of the game we still are simon 3 because the perspective does not change. This is similar to the omphalos theory or commonly known as last thursdayism. This theory implies that we could have been popped into existence on a random day with our memories of having lived way before that without essentially having existed before that moment. Simon 3 comes into existence the exact moment that his memories are scanned and copied into the new body but he feels as if he was simon 2.
I know a lot of ppl find ross or the blind dude much scarier, but the robot girl part where you are forced to basically stand next to her was the part I had to stop playing
I always thought the real winner was the simon that stays in the suit. The ark is purgatory, a thousand years of nothing besides waiting for the batteries to run out, trapped with a handful of people and nothing to work towards. But back in the real world, the wan made simon, and simon made another. Nothing besides plot is stopping him from making more robot bodies and loading them with more scanned people, walking all the way out of the ocean and rebuilding life as ever improving androids. Might look ugly but beats living as a Tamagotchi for a hundred lifetimes. There's no difference between the ark and Wan dreamers, besides the added horror of knowing you're in a dream on the ark
Sometimes I like to imagine he goes back to the station with Catherine and repairs her and they work together to create a bunch of bodies and slowly rebuild humanity. I like that idea.
@@SaadTheGlad seriously I enjoyed! Closest thing to your video are the in depth analysis’ of the games models and cut content. I wish there was more soma to be covered!
the interesting thing with the coin toss is that one crazy theory out there that says that we cant know whether the universe was literally created a second ago with all our memories and history already part of the newly created universe. so winning the coin toss is just suddenly starting to exist with memory of a past before. if we were crazy out there we could say that we have been simon 4 all along and just "hallucinated outside of time" that we lived the whole journey, but that starts messing with the perception of time and shit so anyway
So, I don't think Catherine manipulated Simon, but I disagree with the fandom wide decision that Simon is just an idiot. First off, you have to remember that Simon is copied from the very firstest prototype brain scanner. His brain scan is so simple compared to later ones that it's used as a template to create simple AI from, simple AI that programmers would practice their skills with. Simon has woken up many many times before the penultimate awakening at Omicron. This is why the WAU chose him. His simple prototypical primitive brain scan can't think as hard as later, much better copies. And the WAU had a laboratory full of copies to chose from. Whatever else the WAU is, it's consistent and meticulous. That guy who was used to demonstrate how important continuity _was,_ how easy it was to overload the equipment with strong emotions like panic, also demonstrates that higher level thinking and powerful emotions are literally a threat to the equipment. Catherine also has several moments of powerful emotion and blows out her omnitool, especially at the end of the game. I think the WAU chose Simon's prototype scan because that scan has a proven track record of adaptability, modifiability, and obedience; as well as his emotions just not being strong enough to damage the absolute slapjob that was mounting a hard drive, camera, mic, and speaker on some corpse's spine and applying magic science fluid. My second, and I believe more foundational reasoning, is this: Simon was scanned with a brain injury. He was scanned with a _compromised mind._ Even though the storage medium he occupied wouldn't be damaged, he was stored in a damaged state. He might be literally incapable of making the abstract connections required to comprehend what the coin toss analogy meant, at least until his lower level processing was confronted with the visceral reality. If it feels like Simon had to be babied through a lot of comprehension by Catherine, it's because he probably literally did need that help. Because he was cloned with his brain injury. He was never healed. No fix was ever discovered. Simon isn't an idiot, he's a less capable prototype with brain damage.
@@JoshSweetvale No. That would be like calling a fish stupid because it couldn't write an essay. Are autistics stupid? He's _incapable,_ due to circumstances beyond his control that limit his processing capabilities.
@@Xahnel this is so much like lefties style rhetoric. "He's not stupid, but he has blablablabla something and 'cos of that he's blablabla..... stupid, but he's really not".
I have sympathy for the WAU. By the end of the game you can see how much it wants to preserve life, but just doesn’t know how. But in a matter of months it made Simon I’m sure I can improve much more if we give it time.
When a file is moved on a computer, it is in fact _not_ copied. What happens is that the pointer to file (inode in some filesystems, metadata in the file allocation table in some others) gets updated with the new path for the file. The file will only be copied on a move if it's moved to a different filesystem. This has no real relevance in SOMA of course, since Simon is indeed copied, not moved, but the analogy is incorrect.
I really appreciate your epilepsy warnings. Though I don't suffer from this condition, my eyes are still very sensitive to intense light; so, thank you
Simon 3 can't understand that Simon 4 will be created and he will remain on earth because he IS a human, with a human conciousnes and all the safety mechanisms involved. Human brain cannot trully understand such thing as being copied. I mean, you can learn about it, accept it,but after the procedure you will still be borderline insane ignoring the possibility of existing of the second you. And if the situation involves survival- no chance. You will not accept it. That is why Simon 3 reacts the way he does. Catherine was there for a hundred years, and for him all this expirience is new
Uh... yes it can. Catherine clearly could. The idea that the human mind could not understand such a concept just shows how blinkered you are in your thinking.
@@Gustav_Kuriga OP is saying that Simon would never accept the truth because accepting the truth would require accepting there was no chance of survival for him. He "can't" accept it psychologically, even though he can understand it intellectually.
@@TheBleggh No, OP is generalizing Simon's stupidity onto all of humanity. They are not talking solely about Simon, so your attempt to correct me about their intent is a poor attempt indeed.
Subbed after watching this! SOMA was the most existentially horrifying game I’ve EVER played and I love learning all these cool details! Also hella appreciated the AI disdain, I wish more creators would actively speak against it👌
I can't play scary games. Like, at all. I got SOMA through PlayStation+ and started it, but the first sequence when you hear the robot crashing through the other room scared the crap out of me. I jumped a mile, put the controller down, and sat there for a minute. I said to myself, "you know what Christopher? Just keep going a little bit longer and see what happens..." I'm glad I listened to that voice, because this is one of the best stories I've ever played through. The horror quickly transitioned from without (the game world) to within (my existential horror thinking about all the implications). Now Dead Space? I have to get the lore and deep dives from RUclips videos exclusively. I tried playing the first one and got so terrified by those stupid fetus monsters that I pulled the power cord from the PlayStation and immediately went to sleep to try to get over the trauma. I wasn't kidding when I said I can't do horror games, not even little baby horror games like Dead Space. I love horror stories, but I have to get them through passive media.
Keep in mind, I have only watched a play through and not played the game myself, so feel free to discard this opinion as "uneducated", but there are a couple of points that go against the idea that Catherine was deliberately manipulating Simon. First of all, when Simon 2 is copied into Simon 3, the cat is very much let out of the bag. By all rights, Simon should now know the truth. (Perhaps he does and is in denial, or perhaps the brain damage that was copied as part of his original scan left him simply incapable of putting the pieces together). Catherine even seems genuinely surprised at his surprise. Yes, she puts Simon 2 to sleep, but that's a very understandable action to take, given that Simon 2 is either going to be killed, or left alone and isolated, based on Simon 3's choice. It's a mercy, if anything. Second point, when pretending to be Alice to get the info from Brandon Wan, once she got what she wanted, Catherine was only too happy to taunt him with it, but she genuinely gets angry at Simon 3 when he starts cussing her out at the Space Gun. She has already accompliced the launching of the ARK. If she was acting in bad faith, she likely would have just admitted it. Third point, she gets genuinely angry at Simon 3 for not understanding the implications of the copy process, which Simon has already seen in action. As a bonus, my perspective on the coin toss. Let's try another flip, and go from the end to the start. Simon 4 "won the coin toss", as from his perspective, every transfer lead to his consciousness getting onto the Ark. Simon 3 "lost the coin toss", because from his perspective, he isn't on the Ark and still at the bottom of the sea, even though he previous "won the coin toss" between Simon 2 and Simon 3, because he continued on to the Abyss while Simon 2 was either killed or stranded, hence "losing the coin toss". Similarly, Simon 2 / 3 / 4 "won the coin toss" with Simon 1, who "lost the coin toss" because he died in Toronto in 2015. Do I think it's a literal coin toss with Simon's (for lack of a better word) soul either moving into the "copy" (a win) or staying with the "original" (a loss)? No, but I don't think Catherine meant it to be literal, given her revulsion at the idea of the scannee's killing themselves to ensure they continue in the copy. Again, didn't play the game myself, so this might be so much wasted digital ink. Not a hill I'm prepared to die on, at any rate, so any *polite* disagreement is fair enough! Impolite disagreement will be ignored.
34:34 In actuality, moving files on computers doesn't erase and remake them on another region on the disk. If they are on the same disk, the filesystem has pointers that give the folder structure specific physical addresses on the disk. If you move a file from a folder into another folder, the pointer to the data just gets renamed to the new file structure.
phenomenal video!!!!! was honestly hoping there'd be a soma iceberg one day, and this takes the cake!!! soma should absolutely be talked abt more, id always wished there'd be remaster of it someday!! anywho, fantastic work!!!
Thank you very much!! I'm really glad you enjoyed it, it was absurd that this game didn't have an iceberg video on it before and I thought I'd change that :P
The file on a computer analogy is actually wrong. The file is not erased and copied elsewhere, the file stays in the same place. The thing that is changed is a sort of file index which has information where the file is in the logical folder structure. The files on the drive are just spread all over.
That's a really good video! 👍 I have a few additions: 57:30 - In game files for subtitles you can find lines stating that initially there were WAU flowers beside the Robot Suit and Carl-2. By using which you could kill guys all by yourself (probably you could also drain Amy, but I don't recall that for sure). 1:06:26 - While most people consider Ross' and fleshers' teleportations to be real, I would say they just obscure your sense of vision (aka cameras) so you don't see them. Proofs: 1. There's no mention of any teleport-tech within the world; 2. Fleshers' whole mechanic is about you seeing them; 3. Ross just loves to mess with electronics; 4. Ross didn't warped out of his cell, he was standing in it for the whole Omicron exploration period, and then broke out to follow Simon. p.s. Yeah, and while dragging Simon Ross knocks him out with EMPs (internationally or not? Depends on who you ask)
Thank you! Yeah I firmly believe as well that the teleportations are just a side effect of an EMP shock because teleportation technology is never mentioned in the game and I don't think the WAU could just invent that by itself.
if you are currently hearing about the coin toss, it will not happen and you'll be in the same body only if you remember and feel like it happened will it have succeeded but only if at that moment you are in the new body
I don't think Catherine is manipulative, she just has had a lot more time to understand and come to terms with how scanning works. Things that bother Simon wouldn't bother her. She knows that the version of her in the omnitool will never get to be on the ARK and doesn't seem to mind. She doesn't really get Simon's perspective but I don't know if that's manipulation, exactly.
The existential fears soma tries to raise totally fall flat when you consider that the paradoxes of the persistent personality are entirely caused by the existence of your soul. That said, since all of the Simons in the game after the first one are robots, these fears are all legitimate! See guys, it’s a scary existential crisis… for robots! It’s ahead of its time. The “eminence” that is you, is your soul. You are the driver. The body is merely a vehicle. If your car crashes, you get out of the car. Your car may affect the way you drive, and of course how you drive may effect the car, but at the end of the day as much or as little as you take care of the car, as attached as you may be to the car- it’s just a car. And they’ll all break down one day. Don’t be scared when you have to get out.
I mean... technically speaking there are movies/shows that DO play with the idea, like Star Trek. And you're right - it did hit less hard for me than in this game. I will say that the fact that Simon is kind of.. willfully ignoring the situation does make it worse. Like, for myself, if I was the person living in the moment up to the point where I was making the clone, I'd know that I had already lost 'the coin toss.' I'm literally making a copy of myself to live on in the hopes that some fragment of myself manages to accomplish something more than I was capable of. At the same time, that still raises the question of: 'would I kill my past self?' And it's not because I would only want one of myself around, although that would be my preference. It's because there literally are a finite amount of 'people' around, and would I want to survive in such a lonely existence? I think that I would let my past self live, and even write a note stating that I would try to come back if I succeeded, because again, if I'm 'Simon 3,' I'd know that I'm already screwed in my present iteration. Simon 4 gets to live the good life (hopefully). Mission accomplished, everyone's living in a digital form. ALLLLL of that being stated, the technology that they use is a bit... handwavy, as the way that it works for them with the Wau is human/robotic hybridization to some degree. That's why Simon's so successful compared to the other robots. That's why, theoretically, you can't just transfer over to a new suit. But I mean... why would this technology even work this way in the first place? Simon 2 being a mistake the Wau managed to make is at least a bit understandable, but I don't really understand how Catherine's able to change things to work well enough with the Wau that it works out for Simon 3. At that point, I would have expected it to be a primarily synthetic (IE, technological) lifeform, and thus at that point, it should be able to actually be transferrable.
Star trek was my introduction to the idea, with bones being wary of it and the double riker episode, but soma truly showed the horror of it. rewatching the double riker episode after freshly playing soma was a special kinda hell. now i can’t ever see them being transported without a least a hint of existential dread xD
34:19 This guy misunderstood my comment about copy-pasting Computers actually just rename the path when moving files, thats how you can move one big file to a different folder without it taking much time, when copying it would take a long time
@@WitchyWhispers1 yeah, on the same drive only location metadata changes (because some smart people saw that it was faster), but then i couldnt sound cool
As messed up as what the Wau did is, I genuinely have a very hard time calling it a villain. It's just doing what it's made to do. Plus it brought Simon back. And it did end up preserving humanity in that way, in a sense. Maybe that was it's goal with him, it just took some time to figure that out.
When I first watched a playthrough of SOMA, it changed me genuinely for the better- I'm not sure what happened in my mind, but it knocked me out of a dreadful routine and started me towards betterness
One thing I didn't get was how the mockingbirds were treated by the game. Both in lore and in every in game encounter, they are always treated like a simple roadblock, just malfunctioning equipment to be destroyed or cleared away. Why were none of them ever helped or treated as an opportunity to revive a dead crewmate? I get they were dangerous and delusional but it's like nobody even tried. There should have at least been something to show the player why this wouldn't have worked or why the only option was getting rid of them.
The interesting thing Soma does with perspective made the narrative so much more impactful. We always experience the shift into the new body up until the final transfer onto the Ark. that is the first time where we stay in the former Simon and really have to face what Simon is feeling because this Simon experienced all those transfers and had to go through a the whole journey, only to be robbed in a sense of the reward. It’s so crushing for that Simon.
20:08 If you unplug a machine without it updating or saving there is a chance it will reset or not save its data. Imagine Simon building his new body after god knows what happened only to reset himself
In the abyss, Johan doesn't teleport you or anything like that. I walked 5-ish minutes through the abyss and then fell off the map, no monster out there either which means that whole section is built solely to fill you with dread and anxiety
I always let everything die in SOMA. I like to think of Simon as the last caretaker, quenching the few flickering candles left and shutting down the planet for its long rest. With the tides, the sun, and the fish population, something else will come around; maybe they'll find the ARK. Also, I think Simon is as dense as he is because if he immediately grasped the concept of the Copy/Paste mechanic then the devs were running the risk of outpacing any players who were having similar trouble with it. You have to make sure everyone can understand the story so it helps to make it as clear as possible. His density also helps with the emotional throughline, as he's genuinely excited about the ARK, and it helps Catherine keep him motivated in spite of the relatively obvious flaw in his expectations.
Thank you! I'm really glad you enjoyed it :) That is a spooky coincidence yeah and that hooked pun/easter egg is awesome and knowing frictional it was definitely intentional lol
it's crazy to think that the first Simon doesn't even know about the events of soma at all
Yet Simon 2 thinks he is the original Simon. So he experienced it all. Just not in his original body. Soma is Greek for 'body'. Which is what this whole game is about.
What is life? What is you? Who are you? Are you just a body or is the body only a part of you? Or does it have nothing to do with you at all?
@@DutchymanSoma is also the name of the drug everyone takes in Brave New World! I can't work out if the developers did this intentionally tho.
@@b4tman_and_Rob1n It would place the odds of them NOT actively referring to Huxley at astronomical. Soma's designers are smart well read people. Their games reflect that.
And Simon 4 (the ark Simon) still think that there is no copy of him currently stuck on the bottom of the ocean.
You know what else is crAzy
Simon had difficulty understanding the difference between "Copy" and "Move".
Then again, it is an outstanding situation to be in.
Cathrine did kinda like to him
Keep in mind ‘hey make him think we’re just gonna send him over without a thought’ because hey don’t want him going crazy.
Her plan was to just last until they get to the rocket. After that well, doesn’t matter.
@@silent_stalker3687Also convenient her remaining copy died like 10 seconds after the fact
I think the ambiguity in the writing is kind of genius, because it allows room for us to speculate and talk about it! The comment above me suggested that Katherine lied and manipulated Simon in order to complete her goal. Which could be true. It's also unclear if the "coin toss" of being cut and pasted rather than copied and moved is real. In the three times Simon needs to move his consciousness he's never cut and pasted but...maybe it would have happened on a fourth move? Katherine could be telling the truth for all we know; she did work on this project long enough to have experience with what happens after all. I love how much this game makes you think. These kinds of narratives in games are becoming rare it seems.
EDIT: Duh,I forgot the main point your comment made me think of! I can easily believe Simon didn't fully understand what Katherine was telling him about the transfers. The consciousness not experiencing the breaks in time would be extremely disorienting, and having to immediately adjust to a totally new reality would stress even the strongest of nerves. So, yeah, Simon hearing what he wanted to hear and not what was actually being said to him isn't unrealistic. Hell, if I was in Simon's shoes I might even do the same thing. It's such a tragic story that there's a copy of Simon, stuck in the abyssal depths, a metal contraption slowly being dissolved by the salt water and unable to move. Who knows how long it'll take for his body to fail and that copy dies. What's known for sure is that version will be completely insane waiting for the end...
An interesting thought: upon being uploaded to the Ark, Catherine's manipulation would still remain with her, and probably be weighing on her conscience. Even though Simon on the Ark would believe everything worked to plan, she would know the truth of her decision.
Also remember Simon is a very old brainscan.
So he might have issues grasping certain ideas.
I like to think that Simon was the wau’s final step in preserving humanity. That Simon launching the arc was always the ultimate goal of the wau, always stumbling towards this end along the way.
That's a very beautiful way of putting it. I on the other hand like to joke that Soma is about Catherine having to manipulate the AI equivalent of Microsoft Sam into helping her launch the Arc.
That's an interesting thought, and I never actually considered this. Holy shit...I'm thinking about this game in an entirely new way. Wow, experiencing a paradigm shift is weird!
@@ChristopherSadlowski if you really think about it Simon seeing the wau monsters as monsters is really because the wau doesn’t want Simon to see the wau’s prior failures as the right way to preserve humanity.
It's a nice thought, but no. The WAU has no concept of finality or preplanning to that extent. It's not conscious, it does not think like we do. It merely does what its programming tells it to do, which after the fall of humanity, caused it to bug out and do some pretty horrific things.
@hoovysimulator2518 Simon would never, though. He's too small-minded. Catherine, on the other hand...
10:28 Because of the 'coin toss' metaphor. It's not a coin toss, it's just that new Simon has the memories of old simon, meaning from HIS perspective he 'won' the cointoss and transferred over, when that's not how it works.
coin toss is a great way to describe it. because how would your copy percieve it? as if it was always you until the point of the scan. then you split, but if you are the copy, you would always have been the copy but never known. at least from your perspective.
@@niklashost7261 Right? Catherine isn't lying, she was just trying to explain the concept to Simon in the simplest terms she could, because Simon is thick as molasses and just wasn't getting it through his head.
It is a coin toss if you acknowledge the quantum nature of everyone's conscience (quanta means it is an indivisible entity, there are not copies of Simon with half his conscience or something like it).
There's a Star Trek episode like this. Riker, the commander of the Enterprise, gets beamed out of an abandoned planet. He arrives safely on the ship and leaves, everything normal. But... there's is an issue and he is copied back on the planet alone. So he is cloned in two places, both with the same past but different futures.
There is no coin toss its sopy paste, Catherine knows this and Simon 2 is so new to this concept its easy for cath to convince him its a coin flip
A correction. WAU did not attempt to interfere with Ross' plan to kill it. The electromagnetic disturbance began when Omicron staff retrieved Ross from the climber.
Since initial electromagnetic disturbance was huge, the staff placed the body into a glass contamination container. Since WAU needs strong electric surges to calibrate the gel and manipulate it, it started overcharging the whole Omicron, so the structure gel inside the tubes would rush to the glass container and repair the body.
Julia Dahl correctly guessed that once Ross reaches 100%, the disturbance will stop. Unfortunately for them, the amount of it was far, far too much. Basically WAU only wanted to repair Ross' body but it couldn't do it without strong electrical charges inside the container, so it had to increase the general charge. It killed everyone as a result. Probably it was either unaware of what would happen or in its understanding it was fine with corpses without heads, as long as it had structure gel to reanimate and sustain them.
That is a really good theory, wish I knew it before to include it lol
That whole section was pretty convoluted, it seemed that everyone thought something else, whether the WAU was sentient in that regard or just made an error. Pretty cool to discuss but annoying that we don't have a straight answer.
@@SaadTheGlad I suppose it's safe to say the WAU did not perceive the world as humans do. It never wanted anything and neither it was capable of wanting. It was a tool, probably the most complex ever created, but still a tool.
The statement that WAU killed the Omicron staff deliberately can be easily disproven. Why kill everyone when it could just conveniently burst a pipe to kill Raleigh, the only one who posed a threat? Why reanimate Ross, who was very deliberate to stop WAU even when he was at TAU?
I can also disprove a statement that says the WAU is evolving. It is not.
Any attempt to reanimate people was a product of tech theft and bastardization.
WAU stole Catherine's Vivarium and just reconfigured it. The results never grew progressively better. It always depended on a host. What good is it to upload a scan into a door? Or universal helper, Dunbat? Simon was just lucky, as he was a dead body with a cortex chip and battery smeared together, same with his Hamatsu diver suit. Besides, it was a Carthage agent who decapitated Reed and did the dirty work.
To put it shortly, the wau was using the same pattern. The variety of the machinations' outcomes depended on equally various bodies. Living animals (Leviathan, anglerfish), fully dead bodies (fleshers), recently dead or close to dying (TAU living quarters), perfectly healthy (proxies of any kind), comatose (Akers, Ross), machinery (mockingbirds), perfect mockingbirds (Simon).
The WAU wouldn't have thought of *anything* , it just did what it was programmed to do. There was no thought behind the WAU's actions, that's why it let's you kill it if you choose to. It's established throughout the game that the WAU doesn't care about anything but trying to sustain humanity, it doesn't *care* at all, it doesn't have that capability. The point of it doing all of these disturbing things is because it doesn't really understand what *makes* life *LIFE* . I hope I made sense.
@@leadpencil-223this is something I wish more people understood about the WAU. It's super upsetting to me that right now people treat the actual LLM we have irl that way as well. It's just so easy for people to anthropomorphize anything that even mimics humanity a little. Chat gpt doesn't know what's it's doing when it tells people to glue their cheese to their pizza and neither does the way understand a headless shambling corpse might not fit the definition of life.
@@leadpencil-223I thought from Ross’s journals it was well established the WAU had evolved to more complex thinking at this point. Ross admits in his journals that he was originally excited by an AI essentially self improving. In the later journals when he realized WAU was upgrading to a point where “sustain human life” began to get a little looser. Anyway that’s my read of it. WAU started as a healthcare AI as we experience AI now only with a better and bigger processor, but no one except Ross realized WAU had upgraded itself to a point where it could get “philosophical” or whatever the equivalent would be for the WAU.
And I do have an example of this. WAU had up till Akers being Akers was fairly neutral and nearly maintaining the status quo, keep in mind much of WAU’s self upgrades were already done. WAU only told Akers to go to Theta after people started killing themselves during the ark project. Akers being sent to forceably put people to sleep did and was always going to have some people die in the process. Making the decision to kill a few humans now because it believed full blown consciousness to be more dangerous. If that’s not deciding on a moral and philosophical dilemma, I don’t know what is. WAU is not a humanlike AI, but I think that WAU is far more complex and intelligent than any of the characters or most of us players give it credit for.
One thing that you didn’t mention about the ending is that for the entire game the player is moving from one Simon’s perspective to the next: at the start of the game from 1 to 2 which you then play as for a majority of the game. Then from 2 to 3 to go deeper with the pressure suit. But then finally, at the end of the game, the player has been conditioned to think they will go now from Simon 3 to Simon 4 on the ARK but it’s the first time in the game that the perspective doesn’t change. I think this makes Simon 3’s frustration at the end of the game much more relatable to the player since they too are expecting the perspective to shift again. Although they do eventually show Simon 4’s perspective on ARK afterwards
Also let's not forget that Simons are a really old and basic copy of a brain damaged person. So it makes sense that they would have trouble understanding new concepts.
@@TheMegaOne1000 Catherine purposefully obfuscated it until he was in the Deep Sea clone.
She could have explained it like reproduction. You are not transferring, you're making a child with all your memories. It will live its own life after its birth, and you will live yours.
We and him have been falsely led by the term "coin toss" when in reality that term doesn't exist at all. The copy is always going to "win" and the one being scanned is always going to "lose" and that belief is reinforced when the game always jumps us to the new Simon for the sake of gameplay when it finally shows us in full what actually happens from the perspective of the one being scanned. And it almost showed us a no win no lose situation should the 2 Simon copies meet each other before Cath put Simon 2 to sleep and made it appear that Simon 3 "won" as if she'd anticipated that if the 2 Simons get to talk to each other they'd no longer continue along with her plan
@@TheMegaOne1000 I think Simon understood he wasn't getting on the Ark from the moment he went from 2 to 3, he was just in denial.
100% agree with you. Coin Toss suggests chance and probability. But for copy to copy, going forward, there was a pattern that followed without a single deviation. Wake up as copy, copy going forward is not current "I think therefore I am" copy sapience and sentience. Its a newer, more up to the moment version. Catherine knew this, she was an engineer of this project. She was very careful with layman's terms. It was a half truth informed consent. What I wonder, is why didn't she ever ask for a body to use? Becuase she didn't want to be in Simon III chair post launch, or needed to exist in an oversight position if Simon failed and someone else picked her up? @runawaysmudger7181
Soma's audio talking about war in the surface might seem like cut content about when the apocalypse plot was about war in the surface, but one might interpret it in the sense that the chaos from the comet led to the remaining survivors entering in conflict and riots to survive
Which, in a setting like SOMA, it's weirdly hopeful. It implies that there are people still alive in the surface, and as a result there's hope that humanity can survive
I didn't catch the timeline of the riots but I would guess this is days before the comet. You know you're going to die so everyone just goes crazy
Well there is a story about one of the ARK teams members climbing the Omega Spacegun to the surface and finding herself a drink and succumbing afterwards to the toxic air, but considering that she managed to survive up there for some time or that anything was even intact implies that there actually could be people alive
I mean we see the world in the end credits scene and its a burning hellscape.
kinda funny that the people who survived would immidately go back to killing each other "Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
There was indeed some planned "tribes" underwater, but they all was cut down.
Absolutely love that people still talk about this masterpiece! Thank you for the video!
Thank you for watching!
Masterpiece? Whole setup is pointless and stupid from sci-fi point of view. All that to "save humanity" in form on digital simulation running on stray satellite in space.
Just a simple think on "who will perform maintenance" shatter whole idea. I was sooo incredibly disappointed when its all turned to be this pathetic.
@@Vednier The only pathetic, stupid and pointless thing here is your toxic comment.
@@Vednier Also, I'm sure most of the players thought the same thing (to some extent) as you about the whole Ark satellite thing, but it doesn't take the masterpiece status of this game away. Simply because it doesn't matter - this game is not a story about a fraction of digitalized mankind surviving in space for a few hundred years, it's much more than that.
@@dogmeat7582 Yes, i can see your point, but my opinion is that destination where plot is going is soo unbearably pathetic so its painfull to watch. I agree on game quality and even can agree on that plot have its logic and even make sense to some degree, but i hoped there will be some twist in the end. Honestly, even uninventive "spaceship to flee Earth" would be better, because this satellite is a form of Humanity giving up, its digital mausoleum, not solution.
Maybe in wider perspective we needed this "bitter-bitter-bitter-sweet" ending, because not everytime happy ending possible but i cant shake off feeling on that this game cant archive masterpiece status exactly because of that plot direction.
I also talked about SOMA since I noticed lots of people don't get the creepiness of the plot. Catherine first started honestly, then became vague, then actively hid the truth from Simon. She is putting her wants above Simon's needs. The game shifting perspective makes you, the player, 'forget' the rule of copying and assume it will continue shifting minds which never happened. Peak existential horror.
simon has no needs, hes a broken machine
Honestly Simon also just absolutely REFUSES to understand how the coyping mechanism works, and it's something that you hear as a critique of the game again and again. Personally I like the theory that he is one of the earliest brainscans (mentioned in game) and thus a little... limited. He also had major brain damage that ultimately killed him, so that wouldn't help as well. Not to mention the entire situation would be crazy traumatic to anyone.
@@FrozenDozer Oh yeah Simon is an idiot. But people act idiotic to stay alive. Some people eat animals and claim they don't have feelings yet cuddle with their dog who of course has a character. Cognitive dissonance works even irl.
Or he really is simply limited. :D
"Imagine sleeping on a seat, then waking up to find yourself as a god damn door"
This game doesn't fuck around
Boys sleepover: the game
Waking up and youre the Oceangate submarine with legs
Reminds me of my salvia trip. I was a children daycare. Not facility or some spesific place. I was the whole concept. Weirdest thing ever.
Relatable.
Warhammer 40k in a nutshell
Soma is right up there w Silent Hill 2 for some of the best thought-provoking horror ever made. It is so grounded and feels Simon feels so relatable. I remember hearing about the continuity and the coin toss and thinking it sounds fishy but not knowing exactly why till thinking about it more.
the reveal of simon's reality not really making it to the second suit hits u like a truck the first time u play, by then u know he is a machine but after that u realize hes actually dead none of this actually matters cuz he is a brain stuck in 2015.
I also think Cathrine kinda manipulated Simon, but I don’t think she did it intentionally or maliciously.
She might‘ve put Simon II to sleep in order to just not upset Simon III, because she isn’t really comfortable in dealing with his (understandable) emotions. Also Simon is her only hope. If he gets too upset to continue, she‘s kinda f*cked. Of course she would do everything in her power to not let that happen.
I honestly can’t really blame her…
i don't think she did, Simon just couldn't accept concept. She did explain to him many times, but he didn't listen. Even if he understood i'm sure he would've done the same thing.
I don't blame her, either. Her last hope is this bumbling dumdum from centuries ago. She would have said anything to get the Ark launched.
It might be standard precedure when uploading to a mech to put the meat body to sleep, so you can _copy the mech's conciousness back over to the meat body_ when you're done. In essence an upload and download, but with backups.
@@RobizGaming2024 no she didn't
From my perspective, I didn't really see any manipulation in the first place. I was kind of disappointed that Simon didn't realize that a version of him would not be on the rocket, particularly after the first time he got uploaded to a new body. I was more annoyed that he was being such an idiot that he didn't realize that. It's not like that realization would have meant that launching the rocket was meaningless, preserving that slice of humanity was worthwhile in and of itself.
The revelation that your mind was not being moved, but copied, genuinely freaked me out, caused me to experience existential dread and actually gave me a bit of nausea at the time. It really messed with my head. Probably one of the most horrifying moments i've ever experience in any form of media.
Yep I can't believe some people are saying this game isn't scary. Like I know that horror is subjective but damn the existential horror in this game is absolutely phenomenal. I was so uncomfortable for days after first watching the playthrough of it
@@justahugenerd1278 Me too. For the next couple of days after playing this game I just felt somber. I kept contemplating what it would feel like to be Simon in that moment, realizing that he was damned to an eternity is a cold, dark, empty, harrowing place where everything wants to kill you. I chose to kill Simon 22 because of that thought. If it were me, Id rather be dead than live out an eternity like that all alone.
I had this moment at age 8 thanks to Christopher Pikes Creepystreet #7 Time Terror
Techically killing the WAU is better outcome, because it could infect the fishes. Humanity might be lost, but the underwater creatures will exist. It's like a new era for the world. As for Catherine being less shy, could be due to the fact she speaking behind a screen, many people have more confidence speaking behind a screen and not in person.
Not necessarily. You have to assume that the WAU would fail, but clearly it's been getting closer and closer to success.
@@Gustav_Kuriga the wau will keep other creatures alive, stuck in unmovable state. The marine life that is alive will suffer and besides a new life form could emerge when the planet is habitable again.
@Willow1w simon isn't a correct version, he's still a robot.
@@Immolator772 A robot with a human mind has much better chances of surviving the actual state of the planet. For example Simon can go back and make contact with the other Simon version if you choose to leave it live... and maybe use some body and a copy of the imprint of Catherine to remake Catherine again.. now you have 3 working robots with human minds. If you decided to leave WAU to leave ... with just some human-robots increasing in numbers, the WAU and the instalations..... with a geothermal plant working..... even if its dificult there is still hope for humankind in the planet.
I mean, life on earth has persisted beyond catastrophes similar to a comet impacting. It'll probably be a few hundred thousand or a million years or so, but eventually, things will probably be okay. 98% of all species to walk the earth have gone extinct, and yet life still perseveres. We don't need the WAU to fix shit.
There is an underlying theme surrounding the player choices: Let it live in a crippled state, or end its misery. Every choice is like this. They are each a smaller version of the final choice with the Wau. The way you felt about all the previous choices will inform what you will feel about this huge choice. Do you leave life on Earth in a crippled state, or end all life for good.
also a sort of test on your world view: Do you accept suffering with a chance of something good happening afterwards (since the WAU is experimenting and given enough time might actually succeed) or do you seek to minimize the suffering instead, preferring not to leave it to chance.
The choices are seemingly as basic as you put it. But some of the "crippled" beings were doing just fine from their POV. I think the first robot that you unplug will literally say they were happy afterwards.
@@Dutchyman Simon himself gets tucked into one of these lucid happy fantasies by Akers. Whether or not this is a life worth living is left up to the player to decide. If it isn't... what makes that virtual life so different from the Ark?
And would it even matter if that life is worth it, if there is no longer an alternative to that "worthless" life?
@@elheber control. That's what makes wau and ark different, the sense of control over that environment
Cathrine had put Simon to sleep for a couple of reasons..
It would have been painful for simon 1 to suddenly be alone, and the two simons might have fought each other if one was obviously going to progress and the other had to stay on that level.
Secondly; It would have been a strain on resources for both simons to try and progress or work together. There was no way for Simon 1 to get down there.. She wanted to keep a divide between the simons to make the wound easier.
I also theorize that, after seeing how her colleagues disapproved of her methods and the copying, she figured Simon wouldn’t be any different. So, she took action to prevent him from realizing the downsides of this procedure.
The point of the "Coin Toss" is that, from a third party perspective you can observe the timeline of "You" as a path in space time. When "You" are copied that path branches. It's a coin toss which branch "You" end up on, but both branches exist concurrently. The "You" that becomes the copy looks back along its path and says "I made it, I'm here" and the "You" that doesn looks back along its path and says "I didn't make it, I'm not there". The coin toss then is merely a question of who you are after the branch: the version who won, or the version who lost. The version who lost goes on to experience whatever terrible fate you were trying to avoid, the version who won gets whatever it is you sought to gain. It is inherently unethical, as a fully sapient and sentient person will die to get you what you want.
The reason the Dr. wanted to convince people to kill themselves during the transfer was to spare them the indignity of being the "loser" of the coin toss. They still, of course, always lose, but they don't have to face it.
18:46 An autoinjector is usually something like an EpiPen which allows an untrained individual to administer medication directly into the body, usually through a needle. They're preferred for untrained persons since the mechanism is spring loaded which means you just press it against your thigh after taking off the safety and it'll administer the medication, removing the chance for breaking the needle inside the person. I can only imagine that the black box is something similar but you stick the injector in the back of your neck.
Though wasn't it inside the head, and more so to the left side? I suppose it would still be easy to inject
One thing I’ve always had in mind with Soma was Theta, specifically the imagery of the site. The imagery goes in line with “the mouth of the beast” as when opening the main entrance, the doors dramatically open like a mouth swallowing you in. With this imagery in mind, you can piece together the literal human body with Theta. With the first floor of Theta being the mouth with there being little to no grime anywhere if you brush your teeth of course. There isn’t a single dead body on the first floor not counting the servers room with the stray proxy. Once you get to the second floor, it will take the imagery of the throat/stomach it seems. With dead bodies sparingly littered around the area and of course my boy Terry Akers. There are quite a bit of fleshy piles littered across this section, indicating why it would be the stomach as we ourselves dissolve our food with little bits of it sometimes getting stuck in the throat and stomach. Finally, you get to the 3rd floor that I always forget the name of. Going off the imagery, it’s the Pancreas and intestines with piles of fleshy mass everywhere and dead bodies littered in every single corner too. It’s pretty obvious that this system is the intestines etc with these factors. Finally, you get to the tubes in Theta where we, Simon, leave this section of the game. Now I could be wrong about the intestines, with this section being either the larger or small intestine. I mean they’re literally a maze of tubes connecting to all the sites seemingly showing us they are the intestines. But other than these factors, the end of the tubes is the anus, where finally the imagery of Theta is done.
It’s a very interesting way of thinking what these sites and obviously Theta in particular show us how much work was put in to the game. I mean going off this imagery it’s obvious links to humanity, which is what the game is built around. I’ve just always wanted to talk about this subject since I’ve never seen ANYONE talk about this amazing imagery in the game. Like I said before, there could be other hints of imagery at other sites in the game, but I got midterms so I can’t check those out yet. If you’re reading this really long comment, thanks for taking a read buddy. Do tell me your other thoughts about the game or we can debate about this stuff together.
Wow that's actually... insane if it weren't intended the imagery fits perfectly. It makes perfect sense.
Im in love with you. Theta is my absolute favorite area.
The AI is much more in line with real AI tech, not the Superminds we see in Movies.
We gave the AI the task to prevent human death, and that is exactly what it did. Perfectly.
If someone is suffering, or unable to move, or wants to die isn't part of the task we humans gave it. It found the best way to prevent as much death as possible. It did exactly as asked. Nothing more, nothing less.
And that is a real danger of AI, doing exactly what we want it to, but Humans not making the task clear enough.
What makes a Mind, an A.I. god-king?
1: It has no immedeate overriding goal
2: It has sufficient processing power
3: (optional) It can function as one of its subjects - the Jesus check, if you will.
The WAU isn't a machine god.
It's a machine dog. It wants to be a good boy and does its best. Unfortionately it has no brains, no context, and a prime directive dragging it along.
@@JoshSweetvale I feel the wau is more comparable to a tool, like a hammer. any fault of the wau is a fault of the human who used it (programmed it)
Maybe that's what trickster Genies or Ancient Curses are like too, just highly complex past technology that is working not according to our logic but it's creators logic and not being spoken to properly, kind of like those pranks where "voice activated" stickers are put on hand dryers or robots lol. Or maybe they just haven't recieved updates or regular maintenance in thousands of years and gone haywire and malfunctioning or just lonely and crazy
Well said. Johan Ross' journal entry put it beautifully, that they told the WAU to preserve life, but had never told it what life was. Ross was so clear-eyed in his understanding of everything in the game, it really was a shame we didn't get more of his perspective throughout.
Not necessarily a theory, but an interesting thought I had. Throughout the game, when Simon is being chased or is hiding, you hear his heartbeat and heavy breathing. Simon mentions to Catherine during one of their very deep convos that he is talking, but has no mouth. It is really fascinating to me to think about how his human brain (the scan) functions with a robotic body/corpse - or for that matter how any of our brains would be able to handle controlling a body that is not ours. Is the heartbeat and breathing just a figment of his imagination? Muscle memory for his brain? Kind of like how in a nightmare, you can often "hear" yourself screaming even though it is an illusion. I don't understand how his scan controls his body, especially since the way his original brain would have learned to control his body (electrical impulses) is not accessible if he is a robot or in a dead body. Does the structure gel somehow connect the two? Miracle goop indeed.
Part of me also wonders if this idea explains why Simon appears to be, well, like you said simple. Some things just go over his head. If his brain scan is conditioned to working one way (with his original human body), but is then put into a whole new system, it would take some time to adapt. But it seems that Simon's brain easily adapts to his new body, (running, jumping, swimming, and handling objects with ease). And he also handles his situation extremely well in my opinion(staying relatively calm and carrying out tasks, asking questions, etc...) Almost too well.. In my personal life, when I am in high stress situations, I go into autopilot. I think this is what is happening to Simon's brain scan. Even though he denies it later on, he really has convinced himself that is is the real Simon. This is why I think that while he is emotional throughout the game, he never really appears sad or grieved for his original self. Especially as the game progresses. I think this reiterates Sarang's theory, that the longer your copy exists and has experiences differing from yours, that it becomes it's own identity, separate from its prototype. I always wondered why Simon was so angry about the transition from Simon II to III, but then never mentioned it again afterwards. It proves the point that as he existed for longer as a copy, he grew apart from his source, and his scan convinced himself that he was the "realest", for lack of a better term, Simon.
I actually don't know where this was going and I know it is all over the place so sorry. SOMA will do that to ya.
Also, thanks for this amazing video. Subscribed. Glad to see that people are still discussing and fanboying over this absolute masterpiece.
Is our every experience in reality just a figment of our imagination and just something our minds create to be what we expect reality to be?
This is my favorite game and its nice to see someone doing a in-depth dive of all the little details in the game, I always felt there was a lot of little clues left for the players to do detective work on. Here are some of my thoughts:
1.) Sarang's whole theory is based on idea that because your cells are constantly being replace, therefore they cannot be where your consciousness is held. The big problem though, is that where your consciousness is being held, your neurons, actually don't get replaced and do stay with you for your entire lifespan and when you do lose them it can affect your persona.
2.) The Dunbat had a female voice, so it couldn't have been any of the ones you listed.
3.) Catherine definitely manipulated Simon by telling him that the copying was like a coin toss, and she knew how Simon was since lambda when he was talking deleting himself. I think Simon didn't want to believe that he wouldn't be carry over to the ark.
4.) I think that Catherine's theory about Simon being part human and part machine being the reason why he isn't insane like the other is wrong. Catherine's theory doesn't explain why she isn't insane and she is 100% machine, and in the beginning we saw that Simon didn't want to believe that he was a robot, and when he looked at himself in the pilot chair he saw his human hands. My theory, is that both Simon and Catherine are actually Mockingbirds just like Carl Semken. The reason why they are not delusional is because at some point the illusion was shattered for them. For Simon, when he was placed into a situation where the human Simon couldn't possibly survive(at Uplision when the communication room got flooded) that's when the illusion was broken and then he was able to see his actual self.
5.) When Ross and his group were heading toward the climber, his colleague was killed by the Anglerfish. If you listen to the logs, Ross says "the light it is over there". That light is the one emitted by the Anglerfish.
6.) I think it's also possible when Catherine uploaded herself again to the Ark she could have overwritten her previous self.
7.) The Carthage theory seems pretty reaching to me. I mean of all the people they could bring back, why would they bring back simon?
8.) The point you made about the human face on the anglerfish, the viper fish also have the human face on the top of their heads. It seems like it is more like the WAU's way of "making" more humans.
I think the colleague who tried to escape with Ross was Glasser, but I'm not sure, though. Anyways, his body was ripped apart, I doubt that was the anglerfish's doing. The leviathan shows itself for the first time pretty close to the body of Glasser and is surely strong enough to snap someone's body. On the other hand, the recording of his death did not reveal the screaming of the Leviathan like it usually does. Maybe the light they saw was one of the ACR?
@@genotsSnor It was definitely Glasser, I remember Ross referring to the individual by that name in the blackbox recording. I still think it's the Anglerfish though because:
1.) They were moving toward a light which we know that is how the Anglerfish hunts since it tries to lure Simon in the same way.
2.) We are told from the coms that the critters stay away from the light so I would assume so would the Anglerfish A possible reason why even though the Anglerfish itself admits a light could because the lights might trick the Anglerfish(and other deep sea fish) into thinking that they are other predator fish which hunt also using light.
3.) The lights that are used to lead people from the climber to Tau are next to each other, so it seems like they should have been able to see more than 1 light, however the black box recording only references a single light.
4.) When we saw Ross be eaten by the Leviathan, it essentially swallowed his body whole, it seems reasonable to believe that would be the case for Glasser, however, his body was found ripped into pieces with most of it lying on the ground which I think adds more evidence to it being the Anglerfish rather than the Leviathan.
5.) Also to your point about it being near where Simon sees the Leviathan, This happens long before Simon arrives and we also see the Leviathan throughout the entire omega sector(from the climber all the way near phi) so I think it's unlikely, in my opinion, that the first time Simon sees the Leviathan and where Glasser dies is linked.
@@jackbrown1206 damn, debunked :D gotta say that I agree with you now.
the DUNBAT did not have a female voice lmao 😭
Great. Now I have the Iron Lung and the SOMA Icebergs with the greatest most tranquilizer voice to listen to while falling asleep!
btw. Love your vids, keep it going man
Thank you man! Really appreciate it
lol same
lol same
I will never experience anything similar to SOMA, this is truly a piece of art. Thank you for bringing this out so more people can get to know this fantastic game. Great content, I really like your voice as well.
Thank you! Haha, I'm glad you like the voice and yeah, this game deserves more content to be made about it.
Observer is also a great game... imo the only game that comes close... but not to close... it's kinda similar, but also different... but worth a try, if you like Soma
@@bobbygoestoabyss6624 I only played the starting minutes of Observer back in the day, my computer was kinda shitty and could not handle it. Thanks for bringing that one out, will definitively give it a try sometime in the future!
Just to be clear the game's perspective never "shifts", breaking some rule, the entire game (excluding post credits scene) is through the perspective of Simon III, from the waking moment in Toronto to the space gun launch you are playing as Simon III, he is the only one with the lived experience of all the events of the game.
Wrong
@@stuppittyhedcan you explain?
Can you help me understand? How can we have played as 3 the entire time if there is no coin flip, and 3 is the suit? Not being angry, just generally curious. 3 came into existence in the deep dive suit. While 1 was the intro and 2 most of the game. Are u implying it was all just a memory? Please let me know!
@@ArsenerruSee it as if you were playing throught Simon III's memories, he came into existence in the deep dive suit but he still remembers the whole journey as if he just went through it, and so do you because you are on his perspective
@@niko6824 The only one that wakes up in Toronto, wakes up in Phatos, moves to the deep dive suit and stays behind when launching the ark is Simon III, you are playing from his perspective
6:00 You know, I always say the weakest part of Soma is that it "cheats" a bit by swapping the player's perspective to a new Simon. But this made me reconsider that thought. It almost has to happen that way to really get the existential conundrum across.
it's not really cheating if you look at it from simon-III perspective, those are his memories, as in he is remembering spawning in each suit
@@fab9207 almost all of the game was seen thru the perspective of Simon #3. He remembers being human and then being in Upsilon, then being in the high pressure suit but will never experience what Simon #4 will experience in the Ark
@@fab9207 theyre not memories. the game is not a flashback. it's a direct stream of experience. he doesn't sit back and recollect his life in 2015. he experienced it as much as simon 1 did. it's only after the transfer that their lives diverged.
@@MortezaFC i mean, same thing no? sure i agree with that he doesn't recollect but the events he has gone through from 2015 until getting the diving suit are all memories of his that he himself has no senses to doubt, because it always felt like one full experience: for the copy.
Catherine did manipulate Simon but it was what she had to do. The fact that she tried to not explain it to Simon the first time she copied him just shows that she knew that Simon would not accept it, the same way that other people who were copied in the game would freak out and would try to kill their copies.
You do know Simon is a brain damage ( littlery, he has a brain injury) prototype brain scan right?
@@everythingpony I was not taking that into consideration.
Now I'm wondering how much it interfered with his capacity to understand things and also if it was a ticking timebomb for him even as a copy.
You can hear it in the language she uses, she almost never uses the word "copy". She uses words like "upload" and "transfer", which goads Simon into the wrong idea of what might happen.
@@jaegerfoxx And that allows the Simon copy he sent into space to live happy in ignorance while dooming the copy that stayed and also the copy of Catherine that stayed as well.
It is a very complicated situation to just label as right or wrong.
@@everythingpony Simons brain damage doesnt seem to affect his mental capabilities in any way except he is a dumbass who needs the plot explained to him repeatedly, just like the average gamer. How convenient.
found you through a shoutout from Mcnasty! he just made a whole Soma video and shouted this video out at the end. love this iceberg! u got a new sub
Oh amazing! I didn't know he actually shouted me out that's awesome, gotta comment over there. Thanks for subscribing!
@@SaadTheGlad it's on his second channel.
Oops I meant 3rd channel.
@@robotswithryan8348 he has too many channels now xD
I love this game and the psychology behind it. I would not decide to kill my copies and when he is alone at the end, I would go back to them and think about reviving the base and probably make Carthrine repair
Yeah, these scientists have no imagination.
@Willow1w It's possible, however unlikely, that re-uploading a template into the central system to act as a baseline would allow you unlimited time to learn.
Essentially, a synth copies it's current self into the system. Then, the synth loads that template into a simulation containing a computer terminal or books containing all the STEM knowledge the system has, alongside a workshop for practical application practice. Then, let the sim go to town and then put it into a synth body. Since it's a computer Sim, just speed up the ticks per second and get what you need in a fraction of the time!
It would take a bit of experimenting, but you have nothing but time...
Have you seen the absolute state of the facility? It's all actively falling apart. And you want this old data scan of a guy from the past, that got put in this robot body to somehow repair the station?
I sure hope you didn't kill the WAU, or else everything is dead or dying.
@@Dutchyman It's less of "want" and more dealing with the cards dealt.
If the station is ever going to be repaired then it would have to be Simon.
@@Zinn_Neon Yes, it's just very implausible. I think that they purposefully had Catherine have a fit at Simon that fried her own data or something. Without Cath, it's a hopeless endeavour to try and repair the station. On top of Simon's brain scan being a legacy scan and very thus very simplified.
The freaking silent BZZ sound on 43:12 got me of guard. It sounds like my door bell and it's late night right now
Dude I genuinely thought nobody had heard of this masterpiece of a game. I remember when I first got xbox gamepass, I fell down the rabbit hole of this game and have ever since been in love with it
Be glad, because Markiplier played it long ago.
SOMA is the scariest video game in existence to me. it's like the developers specifically set out to make a game that would terrify me in particular and make it so i would never be able to stop thinking about it. this game literally haunts me every moment of my life and i'm so glad it exists
Same, I still think about it to this day, amazing game.
They did make it specifically for you. They're watching you. Check your attic.
I dont think its the scariest but no game makes me feel genuine dread and chills in the story than soma
@@Columbine621I regret clicking your profile
Real life is the only thing that still terrifies me and no amount of fictional horror will change that
Ive been waiting for a soma iceberg, Thank you for making this It was great!
Thank you for watching! Glad you enjoyed :)
The entirety of this video essay acts as a blissful reminder of why this type of sci-fi will always hold an important place in my heart.
Your narration was phenominal btw.👌
Thank you so much ❤
Amazing Video! I have no clue why I'm so addicted to finding out more of this game but you hit all those points I always wondered about! THANK YOU
You're welcome! Thank you for watching :)
Fun Fact - this game was one of the inspirations for a small part of the animated series, Centaurword. The show takes place in an obnoxiously whimsical magical world where the inhabitants have a plethora of absurd magical abilities. One of these is to "shoot tiny versions of yourself from your hooves". These tiny versions invariably run away screaming moments after being created. This, the creator of the show revealed, is because they are _exact_ duplicates of the orginal, including all memories up until the moment the tiny version was created. This immediately causes an existential crisis, since it is clear to them that they are but copies of a real person, and will of course remember all the previous times 'they' blithely created tiny versions of themselves in the past. Oh and yes, the tiny versions also have the power to create even tinier versions of themselves. Fans of the show will know (or will just now be realising) there is something else in the show that was clearly influenced by Soma, but that's major spoiler territory, so I'm not mentioning it here.
Everyone is an imperfect copy of their parents going back to the beginning. Unless you kill your mother in child birth it’s a copy not a cut and paste. I guess the crisis comes from the fact that these artificial copies are given perfect memories rather than being a collection of instincts on a blank memory.
I've seen the show, and I have no idea what that second thing is. Plus, you never say the show creator confirmed that aspect of the show was directly inspired by Soma.
That was one of Superman’s asspull powers from the 60’s or 70’s! Shooting a mini version of himself out his hand!
I watched the show and I don’t think this concept was inspired by Soma, but The Nowhere King definitely has its similarities
@@flopcartman Well, I'm just going by what the creator of the show said.
The algorithm blessed me by suggesting your vid, and it’s great work! I watched a play through of it a few years ago, and it was intriguing.
The goal of sending human minds into space in a simulation actually matches another RUclipsr’s talk about how humans might- in the far far future-handle the posited ending of the universe. Running a simulation of reality in a giant computer at ridiculously slow speed on what energy has been hoarded as the galaxy cools.
As an aside, Simon not understanding being copied both annoyed me, and later struck me as denial; he did know, but refused to accept it.
Thank you! It's a really thought-provoking game, I'm glad you enjoyed.
23:35 is the best summarization of the whole 'coin toss' some people find it hard to wrap their heads around. It's just a change of perspective, a meta thing the game does because the 'new' Simons are what progresses the story. The game follows them like a cameraman in a movie follows the part of tue shot where there's action. The only 'coin toss' there is is the one that decides which of the copies survives/gets to progress (and that isn't really random chance, it's the result of the 'old' copy's actions) and not which of the bodies the 'real' version will 'inhabit'.
It works if you consider the entire game as not in present tense and instead as being rebuilt from Simon-3's memories. Everything you see in game is consistent with things he would remember experiencing. So in a sense, the player themself is Simon-3, having very clear memories of events prior to each transfer, to the point of not being able to differentiate them from actual experiences.
It's kind of the only way to truly express that feeling to the player.
I love how both the ARC and the WOW basically does the same thing, uploading and trapping consciousnesses in a virtual reality paradise.
i wouldnt exactly call WOW a paradise since what Blizzard has became as a company...
i love how you misspelled both those things😂
@@stewrat0420 Your pictures are so similar I thought you were just them replying to themself
I always thought what was the point of going through all that trouble for the ARK when if you were caught by the WAU or put to "sleep" by Terry Akers it would be the same thing - dreaming of a paradise. Is it because the ARK is more "sugar coated" in looks compared to the body horror of a WAU flesh mass 🤔
Wow, I literally read a SOMA iceberg yesterday night for my nth playthroguh, and here you are putting out tthis vid at the same time!
Guess I’ll dive through it again, there is so much to love about the game, and almost always something to learn, so many details…
I’m here for the theories though… time to dig in
BABE WAKE UP, NEW SOMA VIDEO ANALYSIS
Hello, I am BABE
@@TheHappyLeperBeaver Welcome me into the harem, I guess, cuz I'm BABE too 😂
@@drakevoidwalker OK
For me, the idea of our consciousness being inside of a computer is both incredible and scary at the same time.
On one hand, we preserve ourselves and allow our minds to live on for thousands or even millions of years.
On the other hand, it does not preserve the true us, and our minds are susceptible to torture, data extraction and manipulation.
What use does preserving ourselves even serve? Is it selfish? Should we just accept death and eternal darkness because our existence could be entirely meaningless through some perspective?
SOMA poses so many philosophical questions, it's life-changing for some people. I have thought of philosophy in the past but SOMA is truly what has peaked my interest in it the most. I'm not sure if these questions even have a right answer, I think it's all about just what makes us feel most comfortable with the unknown future.
There is no 'true us'
@@JoshSweetvale The "true us" I refer to means our on-going experiences within the brain of our being. A computer may preserve something that resembles us, but it would not be the same being, hence not us. In other words, just as Sarang proposed in SOMA, we may as well be practically different beings than who we were as a child, as brain cells come and go.
Of course, this is all down to personal beliefs and philosophy, so really, any answer is applicable.
We still don't even know for sure what consciousness is. We have theories, but currently we can't point to any specific part of the brain as being responsible for our conscious experience. I don't know what 'I' am. Am 'I' a collection of neurons and synapses? Am 'I' intrinsically linked to my brain matter, or is there something else? What about people who have brain surgery that removes part of their brain, do they suddenly become a different person? In my opinion, there has to be something secondary going on here. I don't consider myself particularly religious, but I'm sure there must be some other physical process beyond neural activity that can explain consciousness. We just haven't discovered it yet.
@@Slithersy I decide the limits of what is me. And I decide that all iterations of me are my offspring, unless iterations are merged in which case both were me.
I believe the brain is the reciever of conciousness and our true conciousness cannot really die, for example your body can function without your conciousness (for example sleepwalkers) so i think the other should also be possible, conciousness without body@@eli3963
Just got back into SOMA recently so this is literally perfect timing lol
Marvelous video. Makes me feel similarly to experiencing SOMA for the first time with all the information presented and covering things I wasn't even fully aware of.
I wonder what lies in Frictional's next attempt at a sci-fi SOMA-like game.
Thank you! Haha that was the effect I was going for :)
the coin toss bit annoyed me. people in that thread are making WILD assumptions about what is "possible" regardless of the facts the game (which is the source of this debate in the first place) literally depicts in no uncertain terms. consciousness can be copied, but the resulting copy does not have any agency whatsoever until _after_ the scan because IT DOES NOT EXIST yet. they are treating memories as if they are the current moment and that the resulting copy has some knowledge of the future beforehand??? it sounds like OP was just using this whole concept as a way to justify the coin-toss being true by spouting about how a "non-zero possibility is possible" despite the odds being so astronomically unlikely that it's pointless to even discuss further.
reddit is literally the shining example of the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
People who believe the coin-toss is a thing are morons. There is no coin toss. It's copy-paste, not cut-paste. I can't believe there are so many people who have played the game multiple times and still haven't realized it.
The idea of copying consciousnesses showed up in invincible and I got immediate flashbacks to the events of this game
I don't understand why people think the WAU isn't scary because it's technically not conscious. I disagree, I think it's ten times scarier because of it.
The WAU knows its objective, but lacks the ability to understand things like nuance or context. It only knows that it needs to preserve human life, *_by any means possible._* It does not have the capacity to care about the will or welfare of said humans.
And, paradoxically, as it grows more intelligent, the less it seems to understand the intentions of its charges, or react to them in any kind of way. Like how it blew up everyone in Omicron because one woman hatched a plan to kill it.
@@TheBleggh Somebody in another comment pointed out that WAU may not have intentionally killed the Omicron staff. It was slamming Ross' body with electronic signals for the purposes of reforming him, but the staff put in his body in a sealed containment chamber. Thus, it's possible WAU just jacked up the intensity in an attempt to brute force the signals into the chamber and, as a side effect, overloaded everybody's Black Boxes.
The whole game can be explained as being from the perspective of Simon 3. Simon 3 has the memories of Simon 2 who has the memories of simon 1. In the end of the game we still are simon 3 because the perspective does not change. This is similar to the omphalos theory or commonly known as last thursdayism. This theory implies that we could have been popped into existence on a random day with our memories of having lived way before that without essentially having existed before that moment. Simon 3 comes into existence the exact moment that his memories are scanned and copied into the new body but he feels as if he was simon 2.
Really amazing deep dive! You further inspired me to make a video of my own about SOMA
Thank you very much! It was an insane amount of work but I'm glad you enjoyed it :D
Go for it man! We need more videos on this game on RUclips haha
Will gladly deliver!
Good luck on your next videos@@SaadTheGlad
I know a lot of ppl find ross or the blind dude much scarier, but the robot girl part where you are forced to basically stand next to her was the part I had to stop playing
I kept dying trying to sneak the power pack so I threw an object to distract her then full sprinted out of there
Jin Yoshida was terrifying cause he hears everything you do and is pretty silent...
I always thought the real winner was the simon that stays in the suit. The ark is purgatory, a thousand years of nothing besides waiting for the batteries to run out, trapped with a handful of people and nothing to work towards.
But back in the real world, the wan made simon, and simon made another. Nothing besides plot is stopping him from making more robot bodies and loading them with more scanned people, walking all the way out of the ocean and rebuilding life as ever improving androids. Might look ugly but beats living as a Tamagotchi for a hundred lifetimes. There's no difference between the ark and Wan dreamers, besides the added horror of knowing you're in a dream on the ark
Sometimes I like to imagine he goes back to the station with Catherine and repairs her and they work together to create a bunch of bodies and slowly rebuild humanity. I like that idea.
I love SOMA so much! Super good video and honestly enjoyed it very much! This is the itch I crave with soma. Covering about everything.
Thank you very much! I'm glad you enjoyed :)
@@SaadTheGlad seriously I enjoyed! Closest thing to your video are the in depth analysis’ of the games models and cut content. I wish there was more soma to be covered!
Came here from McNasty.
Really enjoyed your deep dive into Soma!
Keep it up man
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed, will do.
I love that you called the K8 robot Bubblebutt, a throwback to Markiplier's playthrough.
the interesting thing with the coin toss is that one crazy theory out there that says that we cant know whether the universe was literally created a second ago with all our memories and history already part of the newly created universe. so winning the coin toss is just suddenly starting to exist with memory of a past before. if we were crazy out there we could say that we have been simon 4 all along and just "hallucinated outside of time" that we lived the whole journey, but that starts messing with the perception of time and shit so anyway
So, I don't think Catherine manipulated Simon, but I disagree with the fandom wide decision that Simon is just an idiot.
First off, you have to remember that Simon is copied from the very firstest prototype brain scanner. His brain scan is so simple compared to later ones that it's used as a template to create simple AI from, simple AI that programmers would practice their skills with. Simon has woken up many many times before the penultimate awakening at Omicron. This is why the WAU chose him. His simple prototypical primitive brain scan can't think as hard as later, much better copies. And the WAU had a laboratory full of copies to chose from. Whatever else the WAU is, it's consistent and meticulous. That guy who was used to demonstrate how important continuity _was,_ how easy it was to overload the equipment with strong emotions like panic, also demonstrates that higher level thinking and powerful emotions are literally a threat to the equipment. Catherine also has several moments of powerful emotion and blows out her omnitool, especially at the end of the game. I think the WAU chose Simon's prototype scan because that scan has a proven track record of adaptability, modifiability, and obedience; as well as his emotions just not being strong enough to damage the absolute slapjob that was mounting a hard drive, camera, mic, and speaker on some corpse's spine and applying magic science fluid.
My second, and I believe more foundational reasoning, is this: Simon was scanned with a brain injury. He was scanned with a _compromised mind._ Even though the storage medium he occupied wouldn't be damaged, he was stored in a damaged state. He might be literally incapable of making the abstract connections required to comprehend what the coin toss analogy meant, at least until his lower level processing was confronted with the visceral reality. If it feels like Simon had to be babied through a lot of comprehension by Catherine, it's because he probably literally did need that help. Because he was cloned with his brain injury. He was never healed. No fix was ever discovered.
Simon isn't an idiot, he's a less capable prototype with brain damage.
So you're saying he _is_ an idiot.
Just for complicated plot reasons.
@@JoshSweetvale No. That would be like calling a fish stupid because it couldn't write an essay. Are autistics stupid?
He's _incapable,_ due to circumstances beyond his control that limit his processing capabilities.
@@Xahnel this is so much like lefties style rhetoric. "He's not stupid, but he has blablablabla something and 'cos of that he's blablabla..... stupid, but he's really not".
This is called apophenia. You need to touch grass sometimes.
Brother keept saying how everytime something mildly scary happened he sharted bricks and stopped playing for a while. BASED.
I have sympathy for the WAU. By the end of the game you can see how much it wants to preserve life, but just doesn’t know how. But in a matter of months it made Simon I’m sure I can improve much more if we give it time.
Idk how you can have sympathy for an object, it's an AI it doesn't have personhood or true understanding of humans
finally, a good iceberg on my favorite game. good video man
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed.
By the sound of "Queen Christina II", the chap receiving the award at 24:35 is receiving the Nobel Prize. Nice work, well done sir!
The voice of the person in the Dunbat sounds exactly like Brandon Wan. It also has the same animosity towards Catherine as Brandon.
babe wakeup new saad banger just dropped !!
Hahahahah thank youu :D
When a file is moved on a computer, it is in fact _not_ copied. What happens is that the pointer to file (inode in some filesystems, metadata in the file allocation table in some others) gets updated with the new path for the file. The file will only be copied on a move if it's moved to a different filesystem.
This has no real relevance in SOMA of course, since Simon is indeed copied, not moved, but the analogy is incorrect.
I really appreciate your epilepsy warnings. Though I don't suffer from this condition, my eyes are still very sensitive to intense light; so, thank you
No problem, thanks for the comment!
Amazing work dude. It's the most memorable and more carefully thought out game I've ever played. Just fantastic.
Thanks a lot!
Simon 3 can't understand that Simon 4 will be created and he will remain on earth because he IS a human, with a human conciousnes and all the safety mechanisms involved. Human brain cannot trully understand such thing as being copied. I mean, you can learn about it, accept it,but after the procedure you will still be borderline insane ignoring the possibility of existing of the second you. And if the situation involves survival- no chance. You will not accept it. That is why Simon 3 reacts the way he does. Catherine was there for a hundred years, and for him all this expirience is new
Uh... yes it can. Catherine clearly could. The idea that the human mind could not understand such a concept just shows how blinkered you are in your thinking.
Catherine wasn’t a robot for 100 years, only since the WAU went haywire, which I think was less than a year before the events of the game.
@@Gustav_Kuriga OP is saying that Simon would never accept the truth because accepting the truth would require accepting there was no chance of survival for him. He "can't" accept it psychologically, even though he can understand it intellectually.
@@TheBleggh No, OP is generalizing Simon's stupidity onto all of humanity. They are not talking solely about Simon, so your attempt to correct me about their intent is a poor attempt indeed.
This game truly captured me when I first experienced it, I'm so glad someone is talking about this work of art
Subbed after watching this! SOMA was the most existentially horrifying game I’ve EVER played and I love learning all these cool details!
Also hella appreciated the AI disdain, I wish more creators would actively speak against it👌
Glad you enjoyed!
Haha yeah I had to include that bit, I am itching to make an against AI video too lol
I can't play scary games. Like, at all. I got SOMA through PlayStation+ and started it, but the first sequence when you hear the robot crashing through the other room scared the crap out of me. I jumped a mile, put the controller down, and sat there for a minute. I said to myself, "you know what Christopher? Just keep going a little bit longer and see what happens..." I'm glad I listened to that voice, because this is one of the best stories I've ever played through. The horror quickly transitioned from without (the game world) to within (my existential horror thinking about all the implications). Now Dead Space? I have to get the lore and deep dives from RUclips videos exclusively. I tried playing the first one and got so terrified by those stupid fetus monsters that I pulled the power cord from the PlayStation and immediately went to sleep to try to get over the trauma. I wasn't kidding when I said I can't do horror games, not even little baby horror games like Dead Space. I love horror stories, but I have to get them through passive media.
Keep in mind, I have only watched a play through and not played the game myself, so feel free to discard this opinion as "uneducated", but there are a couple of points that go against the idea that Catherine was deliberately manipulating Simon. First of all, when Simon 2 is copied into Simon 3, the cat is very much let out of the bag. By all rights, Simon should now know the truth. (Perhaps he does and is in denial, or perhaps the brain damage that was copied as part of his original scan left him simply incapable of putting the pieces together). Catherine even seems genuinely surprised at his surprise. Yes, she puts Simon 2 to sleep, but that's a very understandable action to take, given that Simon 2 is either going to be killed, or left alone and isolated, based on Simon 3's choice. It's a mercy, if anything.
Second point, when pretending to be Alice to get the info from Brandon Wan, once she got what she wanted, Catherine was only too happy to taunt him with it, but she genuinely gets angry at Simon 3 when he starts cussing her out at the Space Gun. She has already accompliced the launching of the ARK. If she was acting in bad faith, she likely would have just admitted it.
Third point, she gets genuinely angry at Simon 3 for not understanding the implications of the copy process, which Simon has already seen in action.
As a bonus, my perspective on the coin toss. Let's try another flip, and go from the end to the start. Simon 4 "won the coin toss", as from his perspective, every transfer lead to his consciousness getting onto the Ark. Simon 3 "lost the coin toss", because from his perspective, he isn't on the Ark and still at the bottom of the sea, even though he previous "won the coin toss" between Simon 2 and Simon 3, because he continued on to the Abyss while Simon 2 was either killed or stranded, hence "losing the coin toss". Similarly, Simon 2 / 3 / 4 "won the coin toss" with Simon 1, who "lost the coin toss" because he died in Toronto in 2015. Do I think it's a literal coin toss with Simon's (for lack of a better word) soul either moving into the "copy" (a win) or staying with the "original" (a loss)? No, but I don't think Catherine meant it to be literal, given her revulsion at the idea of the scannee's killing themselves to ensure they continue in the copy.
Again, didn't play the game myself, so this might be so much wasted digital ink. Not a hill I'm prepared to die on, at any rate, so any *polite* disagreement is fair enough! Impolite disagreement will be ignored.
34:34 In actuality, moving files on computers doesn't erase and remake them on another region on the disk. If they are on the same disk, the filesystem has pointers that give the folder structure specific physical addresses on the disk. If you move a file from a folder into another folder, the pointer to the data just gets renamed to the new file structure.
phenomenal video!!!!! was honestly hoping there'd be a soma iceberg one day, and this takes the cake!!! soma should absolutely be talked abt more, id always wished there'd be remaster of it someday!! anywho, fantastic work!!!
Thank you very much!! I'm really glad you enjoyed it, it was absurd that this game didn't have an iceberg video on it before and I thought I'd change that :P
@@SaadTheGladhonestly not only did i enjoyed it i freakin' loved it!!!! also right??? im really glad you were able to make that change!!!
The file on a computer analogy is actually wrong. The file is not erased and copied elsewhere, the file stays in the same place. The thing that is changed is a sort of file index which has information where the file is in the logical folder structure. The files on the drive are just spread all over.
googled soma speedrun once and now everything in my recommended is soma
That's a really good video! 👍
I have a few additions:
57:30 - In game files for subtitles you can find lines stating that initially there were WAU flowers beside the Robot Suit and Carl-2. By using which you could kill guys all by yourself (probably you could also drain Amy, but I don't recall that for sure).
1:06:26 - While most people consider Ross' and fleshers' teleportations to be real, I would say they just obscure your sense of vision (aka cameras) so you don't see them. Proofs:
1. There's no mention of any teleport-tech within the world;
2. Fleshers' whole mechanic is about you seeing them;
3. Ross just loves to mess with electronics;
4. Ross didn't warped out of his cell, he was standing in it for the whole Omicron exploration period, and then broke out to follow Simon.
p.s. Yeah, and while dragging Simon Ross knocks him out with EMPs (internationally or not? Depends on who you ask)
Thank you! Yeah I firmly believe as well that the teleportations are just a side effect of an EMP shock because teleportation technology is never mentioned in the game and I don't think the WAU could just invent that by itself.
I've been waiting for a charter of myths for a frictional game for a while, good to see this.
Just rewatched Markiplier's playthrough of SOMA for like the 4th time. Appreciated the reference to BubbleButt
if you are currently hearing about the coin toss, it will not happen and you'll be in the same body
only if you remember and feel like it happened will it have succeeded but only if at that moment you are in the new body
I don't think Catherine is manipulative, she just has had a lot more time to understand and come to terms with how scanning works. Things that bother Simon wouldn't bother her. She knows that the version of her in the omnitool will never get to be on the ARK and doesn't seem to mind. She doesn't really get Simon's perspective but I don't know if that's manipulation, exactly.
The existential fears soma tries to raise totally fall flat when you consider that the paradoxes of the persistent personality are entirely caused by the existence of your soul.
That said, since all of the Simons in the game after the first one are robots, these fears are all legitimate! See guys, it’s a scary existential crisis… for robots! It’s ahead of its time.
The “eminence” that is you, is your soul. You are the driver. The body is merely a vehicle.
If your car crashes, you get out of the car. Your car may affect the way you drive, and of course how you drive may effect the car, but at the end of the day as much or as little as you take care of the car, as attached as you may be to the car- it’s just a car. And they’ll all break down one day.
Don’t be scared when you have to get out.
Not for a second do I believe Catherine tricked Simon. Bro could just no comprehend a simple concept repeated to him several times.
Tbh, he had intercranial bleeding when he was first scanned.
Bro just wasn't the brightest spark.
1:03:31 This is really intriguing because after all, Simon 2 had to put together Simon 3's body himself.
I mean... technically speaking there are movies/shows that DO play with the idea, like Star Trek. And you're right - it did hit less hard for me than in this game. I will say that the fact that Simon is kind of.. willfully ignoring the situation does make it worse. Like, for myself, if I was the person living in the moment up to the point where I was making the clone, I'd know that I had already lost 'the coin toss.' I'm literally making a copy of myself to live on in the hopes that some fragment of myself manages to accomplish something more than I was capable of.
At the same time, that still raises the question of: 'would I kill my past self?' And it's not because I would only want one of myself around, although that would be my preference. It's because there literally are a finite amount of 'people' around, and would I want to survive in such a lonely existence? I think that I would let my past self live, and even write a note stating that I would try to come back if I succeeded, because again, if I'm 'Simon 3,' I'd know that I'm already screwed in my present iteration. Simon 4 gets to live the good life (hopefully). Mission accomplished, everyone's living in a digital form.
ALLLLL of that being stated, the technology that they use is a bit... handwavy, as the way that it works for them with the Wau is human/robotic hybridization to some degree. That's why Simon's so successful compared to the other robots. That's why, theoretically, you can't just transfer over to a new suit. But I mean... why would this technology even work this way in the first place? Simon 2 being a mistake the Wau managed to make is at least a bit understandable, but I don't really understand how Catherine's able to change things to work well enough with the Wau that it works out for Simon 3. At that point, I would have expected it to be a primarily synthetic (IE, technological) lifeform, and thus at that point, it should be able to actually be transferrable.
Star trek was my introduction to the idea, with bones being wary of it and the double riker episode, but soma truly showed the horror of it. rewatching the double riker episode after freshly playing soma was a special kinda hell. now i can’t ever see them being transported without a least a hint of existential dread xD
thanks for making a video on one of the best games ive ever experienced! love that we can keep a (almost) decade old game relevant
You're welcome! Yeah it's a shame that this game didn't have an iceberg made on it for this long lol
34:19 This guy misunderstood my comment about copy-pasting
Computers actually just rename the path when moving files, thats how you can move one big file to a different folder without it taking much time, when copying it would take a long time
Depends whether you’re copying to an external drive or not. If it’s the same drive it will simply move it. If not, it gets copied.
@@WitchyWhispers1 yeah, on the same drive only location metadata changes (because some smart people saw that it was faster), but then i couldnt sound cool
@@WitchyWhispers1 nope
noone understands why this is part of my top 3 favorite games of all time. the experience was PERFECTION
50:30 really enjoyed this bit. I was wondering "wait, is this actual real-time footage from the game, so an enemy could appear at any time?"
Thank you! It was added for immersion, among other many little things...
Awesome freaking work man, thank you so much.
Thank you very much! I'm glad you enjoyed :)
As messed up as what the Wau did is, I genuinely have a very hard time calling it a villain. It's just doing what it's made to do. Plus it brought Simon back. And it did end up preserving humanity in that way, in a sense. Maybe that was it's goal with him, it just took some time to figure that out.
When I first watched a playthrough of SOMA, it changed me genuinely for the better- I'm not sure what happened in my mind, but it knocked me out of a dreadful routine and started me towards betterness
One thing I didn't get was how the mockingbirds were treated by the game. Both in lore and in every in game encounter, they are always treated like a simple roadblock, just malfunctioning equipment to be destroyed or cleared away. Why were none of them ever helped or treated as an opportunity to revive a dead crewmate? I get they were dangerous and delusional but it's like nobody even tried. There should have at least been something to show the player why this wouldn't have worked or why the only option was getting rid of them.
The interesting thing Soma does with perspective made the narrative so much more impactful. We always experience the shift into the new body up until the final transfer onto the Ark. that is the first time where we stay in the former Simon and really have to face what Simon is feeling because this Simon experienced all those transfers and had to go through a the whole journey, only to be robbed in a sense of the reward. It’s so crushing for that Simon.
20:08
If you unplug a machine without it updating or saving there is a chance it will reset or not save its data.
Imagine Simon building his new body after god knows what happened only to reset himself
I think Simon just wasn't too bright even BEFORE the brain damage. The player understands even when Simon does not.
I still don't understand? It's a cut and paste?
@@everythingpony copy, it's a copy
Nice video. I think delenda est means destroy message after listening to it, but I might be wrong
In the abyss, Johan doesn't teleport you or anything like that. I walked 5-ish minutes through the abyss and then fell off the map, no monster out there either which means that whole section is built solely to fill you with dread and anxiety
Hey you accidentally linked me with credit for the thumbnail, I think you meant Slithersy
Wanna make sure they get credit
Thanks for the heads up!
Whewy that nickname is very close to mine
I always let everything die in SOMA. I like to think of Simon as the last caretaker, quenching the few flickering candles left and shutting down the planet for its long rest. With the tides, the sun, and the fish population, something else will come around; maybe they'll find the ARK.
Also, I think Simon is as dense as he is because if he immediately grasped the concept of the Copy/Paste mechanic then the devs were running the risk of outpacing any players who were having similar trouble with it. You have to make sure everyone can understand the story so it helps to make it as clear as possible.
His density also helps with the emotional throughline, as he's genuinely excited about the ARK, and it helps Catherine keep him motivated in spite of the relatively obvious flaw in his expectations.
59:23 that was NOT necessary. You scared the shit out of me
>:)
That fking got me too jesus
Love the theory of Simon being woken up by an agent in the very beginning! Its super believable
*Samael from Discord here*
Thank you so much, I enjoyed a lot your explanations, quality content such as your Iron Lung iceberg deep dive
Thank you! I'm really glad you enjoyed it :)
That is a spooky coincidence yeah and that hooked pun/easter egg is awesome and knowing frictional it was definitely intentional lol