You Are (Not) Safe Here

Happy Halloween! My favorite time of the year! For spooky month, I’m going to talk about my favorite spooky game: SOMA (2015) by Frictional Games. I’ve personally been meaning to revisit SOMA for a while; it’s been over a decade since I last played it, and I was curious to see how I would react to it now. Since I last played, the game added a Safe Mode, which makes the monsters unable to kill the player. I wanted to try this too, and see what it changed about the experience of the game.

Adding a “Safe Mode” to a horror game sounds counter-intuitive; why make a scary game less scary? The thing is, Safe Mode doesn’t make SOMA less scary, at least not for me. I actually find I prefer the game with Safe Mode on, because I find that enhances the horror by allowing the game’s strengths to shine brighter.

Simon’s sudden arrival at the crumbling underwater base Pathos-II

For those unfamiliar, here is the premise of SOMA: You play as Simon Jarrett, who recently suffered a serious brain injury after a car crash. Today, he’s going to visit a medical student who’s developing a new type of brain scanner, with the hope that it can help find a treatment for Simon’s injury. Simon sits down in the chair; the brain scanner does its thing, and then suddenly Simon is no longer in the office, but in a derelict underwater science station. Simon doesn’t recognize the technology around him. The walls have tumors. There is no one else there. Simon then has to figure out how he got here, what this place is, and if there’s a way for him to escape.

Before the official implementation of Safe Mode, there was a mod called “Wuss Mode” available through the Steam Workshop which did functionally the same thing; it made the monsters unable to kill the player. Initially made by modder Daniel Childers, the mod became popular enough to receive news coverage. The core concept for Safe Mode did not come from the developers, but from the community. There was a demand for something like Safe Mode, so it was added by the developers, and the mod is no longer available. Now, at the beginning of a new game, the player will be asked if they want Safe Mode or not. This cannot be changed afterwards, but it’s still entirely optional.

The first entity that can kill Simon

When I started this replay, I knew I wanted to test out how the monsters act with Safe Mode on. The first entity that can kill the player is The Construct. It patrols in a circle around its room, and the player needs to operate several valves in order to open the door to the next area. I tried sneaking up to the monster from the side, it didn’t react. It did react when I was close enough to touch it; it turned around and hit me. I ran away only for it to follow me a short distance, then went back to its patrol. When I did, I remembered thinking The Construct seemed deeply pathetic in that moment. It’s a big boxy robot with some kind of cancerous growth, it doesn’t speak, and now it can’t even properly chase away an intruder. It was an interesting reaction to this change in behavior. Another interesting moment with Safe Mode on was near the end of the game, a section I remembered struggling with before. There’s a roaming monster in a series of tight corridors and few places to hide, and it spotted me quickly. What happened then was it just started following me around. I thought to myself, “I could treat this guy like a new friend, but that wouldn’t actually be fun.” It became a stalker constantly breathing down my neck that I had no way to get rid of until I escaped its territory. Sure, much of that is how I reacted to it, but for me it resulted in a new and interesting little experience.

After that first monster, I chose to continue playing the game and reacting as naturally as possible. I reacted to the game as if nothing had changed; if something seemed scary, I’d crouch down and move slowly while looking out for the danger. Even if the monsters cannot kill me, they still make horrible noises, they look disgusting, and looking at them causes screen distortions, so even in the absence of the threat of death I still default to sneaking around and avoiding them. I don’t want to be near those things! In those moments, it is easy to forget that Safe Mode is even on, that the danger isn’t real. For me that meant most of those moments kept the tension of trying to sneak around a monster that’s hunting for me, just without the interruption of a death screen.

The scariest thing was never the monsters.

I never felt that the monsters’ modified behavior took me out of the experience much. Sometimes it did, for example: I was cornered in a room with only one exit, with the monster standing just outside the doorway. The only way I could progress was to run past the monster, and it didn’t take a swing at me as I did. That was weird, and reminded me that Safe Mode was on. However, this doesn’t compare to the couple of times I got stuck on puzzles. I do not care for some of the puzzles in this game. Once I was so stuck I resorted to tabbing out of the game and looking up a guide for the answer. That’s taking me out of the experience literally. Any disruptions Safe Mode caused were relatively minor and over with quickly, and was nowhere near the most disruptive part of the game. Safe Mode means I can run up to the monster and do a little dance, but I didn’t outside of that first experiment. If I go to a haunted house and loudly make fun of the scare actors, they’re going to kick me out because I’m being rude. It’s something I can do, but all I’m achieving is spoiling the fun. I feel the same way about playing Safe Mode: if a player is going to take advantage of Safe Mode to troll the monsters, then all that’s being achieved is spoiling the intended experience.

The reason Safe Mode works so well is that the monsters aren’t the scariest part of SOMA. What made this game special, what kept it rattling around in the back of my head for over a decade, isn’t the chases. The parts I most dreaded replaying aren’t the sections with the monsters; I can get that gameplay from other works by Frictional Games. What makes SOMA the experience it is, is its story, the environment, the feeling of it. Leaving Omicron. The infirmary in Tau. The ending.

“The privilege of being makes a strong case. At least every once in a while.”

When I first played the game over a decade ago, I was too scared to play it alone, with headphones on, or even in full screen. While I did still prefer to play during the day, this time I did play it alone, with headphones, and in full screen. I still had to play it in several sessions over several days, but I did replay it and I had a great time. All art is subjective, and horror especially so. What I find scary and compelling might not work for someone else, and that’s fine. Another person might find that Safe Mode does kill the horror of SOMA for them, and that’s fine. I love horror as a genre because it can be so much. Different people are afraid of different things, and have different tolerances for various kinds of stress. I find the monster chases too stressful without Safe Mode on, the fear tips over from being fun to being genuinely distressing. For me, Safe Mode enhances the horror by allowing the parts of SOMA that are great to really shine — the atmosphere and the writing — while deemphasizing the weaker parts of the game, the mechanical gameplay challenges.

The central trick that makes horror work is that you are safe here, even if you feel scared. Just because something feels true doesn’t make it so. It doesn’t matter how terrified I am hiding in a dark corner hoping the monster passing by doesn’t spot me; I’m safe, and SOMA is safe. If it’s too much I can put it down and walk away, with no obligation to ever continue. I can return when I am ready. That’s what makes everything else possible: the safety to explore difficult thoughts and feelings. Understanding and exploring different kinds of horror enriches the experience. A horror game that stays scary even after removing the monsters is one that is well crafted.