Somerville Game Review | An artistic journey with high ambitions

• Platforms: Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, Windows
• Genre: Somerville game is an Adventure Video Game
• Only Single Player
• Official Website:  https://jumpship.co.uk/
• Price: Approx 10 USD
• System Requirement for Somerville Gameplay : 8GB Ram. Nvidia or Radeon 2 GB Graphics Card, Processor with base frequency 3.0GHz, Gamepad, Directx 11 and Windows Operating System.

Purchase, Buy – Download Game Somerville from epicgames.com or from steampowered.com

PC Game Somerville Story and Narration

One of the main pillars of Somerville is story and narrative, something I was looking forward to. If you have played Inside, you know that the game does not contain texts or dialogues, and the story is told through the world and events. The same thing applies here, the new game does not tell you anything, and you have to understand what is happening.

Once you enter the game, you will feel the breeze of mystery, as everything is mysterious to you. Our journey begins with a family of three and a dog sitting in front of the TV. A few minutes later, you (the man) get up and go down to the cellar to get food for your dog, and when you come back to the kitchen, boom, there’s an explosion. This explosion was not only a bomb that shook the entire house but an alien invasion of heavy caliber.

Lucky for you, the world is about to end, so like any sane person you try to save your family and go away to a shelter, but you can’t and you go back to the basement to take cover. While you’re hiding in the basement, an alien character falls in front of you, and that’s when the main character decides to touch the alien. As soon as you touch it, you’ll feel strange and then pass out, and then when you open your eyes again, you’ll notice that the bombs have stopped and that your family is not here — besides the dog. Thus begins the events of Somerville, and now you have to search for your family amid the alien invasion and find out what happened to them, and what is happening to the planet as well.

Telling a story and presenting characters and narration without using any words is a great challenge, and few games have been creative with it, and unfortunately, the story and narration are not among the special things in the game. During the journey, which lasted only about five hours, I couldn’t relate to the few characters, nor did I relate to the world. Also, the dog is beside you all the time, and it is the only one who stays with you from your family, and sometimes it gets lost from you and comes after several events have passed, but despite that, the main character denies his presence in the game and has no influence on it, which is somewhat strange.

During the journey, I had a lot of questions, and I expected to get a lot of answers in the end, but the end didn’t give me that and left me wondering more. I understand the storytelling here, and I certainly learned more about the alien invasion and what is happening and I no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood, but several things did not make sense, and the scenario presented did not reach the level of similar games in this style. This really demoralized and frustrated me. Somerville’s story is mediocre, if you play it, it won’t amaze you, and if you don’t, you won’t be missing out. It should also be noted that the game contains more than one different ending. During my experience, I discovered two endings, but I expect that there will be more in somerville gameplay.

Somerville Gameplay style

Somerville’s gameplay is all about overcoming obstacles to get to the goal, and you can do this by solving various puzzles that you’ll encounter in different places. When you touch the alien that has landed on your house, the main character will gain an ability that enables him to smelt the alien matter that came from the invasion. The gameplay depends on melting materials and converting them from solid to liquid, and later you will get the opposite ability, which is to convert space matter from liquid to solid. For this transformation to happen, you have to find a light source, whether it’s a desk light or a car.

Each puzzle in the game is based on the transformation of space matter from one structure to another and the use of objects in your surroundings. For example, sometimes you have to melt the space material from a high place until it falls unfortunately, and then you can convert it into a solid material so that you can use it as a floor to climb to a place high on you. There is also a big focus on the physics of things, for example, there was a puzzle in which you have to find a cart, fill it with liquid space matter, put a rope on it, and then turn it into a solid so that it does not slip. Most of the puzzle ideas weren’t too challenging and were OK, a few were really clever, but most were OK.

Somerville is a short game, which is probably why there isn’t a lot of variety in the puzzles, each puzzle depends on lowering or raising a switch or escaping from aliens. Inside me, I wish there were more puzzles, but I understand that this is a small game and the team couldn’t add more.

Control is one of the weakest aspects of the Somerville game, and it may be the weakest due to the large number of problems that affected the puzzle-solving experience greatly. Before we share more with you, it should be noted that the game is from a 2.5D perspective, that is, two-dimensional with three-dimensional factors and designs. This is a big difference from previous similar games, and I initially expected it to be for the best, but in fact, it was not, as it made the experience more negative rather than positive.

A lot of the time you may want to go to the right, but your character decides to go somewhere else nearby. Also, a lot of times you have to stand at a certain point only, otherwise, you won’t be able to open the door or lower the key or something like that. There is a puzzle that I wasted a lot of time with because of the control issues. The way to solve the puzzle was intuitive, but my character didn’t do what I was trying to do, and I thought that was something she couldn’t do. After about a quarter of an hour, I returned to the same element and was able to solve the puzzle directly.

Conclusion for the Somerville Game

I expected the game to offer more freedom by adding a third dimension, but the developers want you to move and advance by the millimeter. Also, the use of 2.5D in designing the stages increased the problems with control more and more, and in events that require a lot of movement, you may find yourself stuck in a place due to the presence of a small rock that makes the character stand in place. I also encountered many technical errors in the review version, for example, my character got stuck behind a tree and I couldn’t move, and there again my character decided to fly through the air. In both of these cases I needed to redo the last save point, and there are also several small technical glitches I encountered.

Author: Ranta

Ranta