{"id":39306,"date":"2022-11-15T10:31:45","date_gmt":"2022-11-15T10:31:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pley2win.com\/featured-news\/somerville-review-limbo-inside-spiritual-sequel-has-blockbuster-scope\/"},"modified":"2022-11-15T10:31:45","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T10:31:45","slug":"somerville-review-limbo-inside-spiritual-sequel-has-blockbuster-scope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pley2win.com\/?p=39306","title":{"rendered":"Somerville review: Limbo, Inside spiritual sequel has blockbuster scope"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The first thing you should know about Somerville<\/em>, the spiritual sequel to Limbo<\/em> and Inside<\/em>, is that the story makes sense. Its predecessors lived on the far end of the narrative spectrum, somewhere between \u201cBu\u00f1uelian nightmare\u201d and \u201cthat time you smoked salvia in college and disassociated while reading Orwell.\u201d But Somerville<\/em>, well, it\u2019s a bit normal. At first.<\/p>\n

The Somerville<\/em> elevator pitch needs only one floor: \u201cWhat if someone finally made War of the Worlds<\/em> into a decent video game?\u201d Because H.G. Wells\u2019 novel (and its countless variants) has achieved that rarefied level of pop culture ubiquity, the early beats will be familiar: a bit of domestic bliss interrupted by an apocalyptic alien invasion; Earth\u2019s collapse from the POV of the folks on the ground; the distant possibility of a counter-maneuver to gird humanity from total annihilation.<\/p>\n

This time, rather than follow the president or the world\u2019s sexiest scientist, we get a guy who just wants to see his wife and kid again. The guy has no knack for violence, and no talent for survival beyond a slightly elevated ability to problem-solve on the fly. He\u2019s like a particularly clever and\/or lucky ant skittering to stay alive during a family picnic. <\/p>\n

Of all War of the Worlds<\/em> adaptations, Somerville<\/em> has most in common with Steven Spielberg\u2019s Tom Cruise vehicle, released a few years after the 9\/11 attacks. Cars zip erratically along a highway, fleeing in a direction where things are probably just as bad \u2014 maybe worse. Survivors hide in sewer drains or gather at impromptu evac centers. An outdoor festival is abandoned, as if its partygoers had been raptured.<\/p>\n

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Image: Jumpship via Polygon<\/cite><\/p>\n

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Because this is a video game, our guy gets to hike into the night with a superhuman power. In the moments after the invasion, but before the family gets yanked apart, the dad has a close encounter with an alien soldier. With a tap of fingers and a period of unconsciousness, he receives the gift to transmogrify light into a world-bending tool.<\/p>\n

When he touches a desk lamp or a ceiling fan or a spotlight, he can channel blue energy through the current, converting the natural white light into a seafoam glow that melts alien materials into a sort-of-living goop. Not much later, he acquires a red energy that, with a concussive pulse, solidifies the alien goop, like lava instantly hardening into rock. Most of Somerville<\/em>\u2019s puzzles involve the dissolving and restoring of materials, liquefying stones to fill a gap with melted other-world sludge, then hardening its surface so that the guy and his dog can hobble across the crust.<\/p>\n

And so the dad sets out on a journey across a world that looks a bit like our own, but moodier and utterly demolished. In this way, the game looks and plays an awful lot like the games of Playdead. You walk left or right across a more or less 2D space, solving puzzles, hiding from unstoppable enemies, and piecing together a story performed with pantomime rather than dialogue. <\/p>\n

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Image: Jumpship via Polygon<\/cite><\/p>\n

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But this isn\u2019t a Playdead game. Following the release of Inside<\/em>, Playdead co-founder and executive producer Dino Patti left the studio and founded Jumpship, where he hired new talent. Somerville<\/em>\u2019s director and writer, Chris Olsen, came from the world of animation, and from that, he brings a more acute interest in the cinematic \u2014 not just in blockbuster set-pieces, but the little things, too: the wide shot and the close-up.<\/p>\n

So while the game presents at first blush as another Limbo<\/em> or Inside<\/em>, as its journey continues, the similarities chafe off like a snake shedding its skin. <\/p>\n

What do I mean by that? Basically, the game works best when it\u2019s not being much of a game at all. When the guy leaves his demolished home, he leans on the door frame and cranes his neck, looking for his dog. When he evades the spotlights of a behemoth alien ship, the camera pulls back until he\u2019s a spot on the screen. You can tell that an animator had greater-than-usual control, because every character and creature and catastrophe has been granted so much time and care. We\u2019ve seen this level of detail \u2014 in which characters engage with the world and the people around them \u2014 in mega-budget projects like The Last of Us Part 2<\/em>, but rarely in a game this size, where prioritizing animation means deprioritizing something else.<\/p>\n

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Image: Jumpship via Polygon<\/cite><\/p>\n

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Speaking of: As the adventure finds its footing, its creators seem to lose interest in puzzles altogether \u2014 for the better, frankly. The puzzles are fine, fussy, and a bit forgettable. In the back half, our guy\u2019s journey skews closer to the walking simulators of the 2010s, where the only real obligation is to keep moving forward. This too comes with some minor irritation, as the game\u2019s dark visuals and the character\u2019s diminutive size can lead to confusion about how to interact with the world. Occasionally, I understood where the game wanted me to go, but couldn\u2019t immediately grasp how it expected me to, say, climb a rock or swim across a pond. Most bothersome were the handful of instant-death action sequences that broke the flow entirely, forcing me to retry three or four times.<\/p>\n

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