The Playdead development team has gained a very loyal fan base with its classic game Limbo and its great Inside, our game for today is Somerville and it is the first game of the Jumpship development team and one of its founders is Dino Patti, former co-founder of Playdead and Executive Director of the aforementioned great games, so will Patti return to provide another classic experience?
Like the Limbo and Inside games, Somerville is a game that tells its story in a cinematic way through what happens in the game world and some story scenes without texts or dialogues. It was the case in Inside especially.
The story puts us in the role of the father who lives with his small family consisting of the wife, their child, and their loyal dog. The family is surprised by the alien invasion of the Earth, which results in the injury of the father when he tries to help one of the injured soldiers. The father wakes up after a while to find himself alone in the house with his dog, with the father acquiring a strange ability. In this, he generates electrical energy that affects the light, which in turn affects the materials of the aliens, and here the father begins his journey to search for his family in this difficult world that has become full of dangers.
The negative that directs the game more towards excitement and a sense of adventure is that the silent narration style does not answer many questions that need elaboration. Unlike Inside and Limbo, Somerville hardly provides any hints and indications through its world, which makes the end of the story and the last part of it very blurry and with the absence of the connotations that can be analyzed, so we have nothing but pure imagination to explain what happened, unfortunately, but this does not prevent us from enjoying the majority of the events of the story.
Somerville offers a unique and simple artistic approach, and despite the focus on presenting a world with somewhat faded colors, the game is very beautiful and has charming scenes from time to time, while presenting a gloomy and silent atmosphere most of the time, and it is interrupted by a number of moments in which the exciting or sad music that depicts the scenes in a way dominates Exciting and exciting.
The gameplay is simple with the presence of a button dedicated to interacting with the environment and a button in which you use the strange electrical power that the father acquired after his injury. The material left by the aliens to a more liquid state allowing you to advance.
During this journey, you will also gain the ability to make space materials solidify with the need to mix the two abilities to solve puzzles, which provides an excellent variety in the experience, but the experience is not ideal in this regard due to the presentation of a 3D experience instead of the 2D experience in games such as Inside and the development team’s choice of corners The fixed camera was not always successful, and you will often feel lost because the road may be open at times, but it is not clear! Also, it is sometimes difficult to know some of the elements of the environment that must be interacted with in order to solve some puzzles, which is confusing in some areas.
We finished the experience within 3 and a half hours, and we can say in the end that it is similar and even identical to the Limbo and Inside games in many of its concepts and applications, but with some changes such as providing a 3D experience and a different direction for the story. Somerville is a great experience and a successful start for a new development team, and we look forward to its future projects and hope that the developer is learning from its mistakes to bring a new classic experience to its next project.
