Throwaway account as I don't really post to Reddit. I'll try and remember to use it to engage with the community to offset some of the negative energy coming off this post. I want to make it clear up front that I love this game and its studio. As I'll be discussing the story I should clarify I also mean Hannah and the writing team. This is a critique of the story of 1.0, not an indictment of any person.

The story portion of 1.0 is incredibly disappointing. If you haven't beaten the game and want to avoid spoilers you should stop reading now.

The Main Story

This is more of a letdown than actively bad. I was honestly hopeful about the story when Steve and Catarina were removed for being an 'earlier iteration' of the story because that implies that there were things replacing them, necessitating their removal. The truth is nothing here necessitated that. They're just cut. I held out hope until the end, but the truth is that there isn't much here aside from just more Tier and Phase line readings. The ending does have a setpiece, and it's beautiful, it's too bad there aren't more things like that.

Project Assembly leaves way too much completely unresolved. It's just another ship filled with clone pioneers that starts the cycle all over again. This is the most obvious and uninspired reveal I think I could have come up with. You are abandoned by the ADA you arrived with as she moves on to QAR437, and you are left at QAR436-Akycha-B1 (Massage2B's system) with a cloned instance of ADA for company.

The entire project is a self-licking ice cream cone. It serves no functional purpose other than to perpetuate itself (and by extension humanity, albeit in the most depressing, shallow, lonely form). Project Save The Day has no ultimate goal. You are on its 436th iteration. It has no endgame.

None of that is a problem in and of itself. Games can be parodies of bureaucracy. Games can be lonely and depressing. SOMA is in my top 10 favorite games of all time. The problem is the story does nothing with itself. Much like Project Assembly, it exists purely to exist. Nothing the main narrative ever has to say affects any aspect of the gameplay, your decisions, or characters.

As someone who loves worldbuilding I was left almost entirely empty-handed with the exception of one thing I'll mention later. Absolutely none of the logical conclusions the story comes to are explored. What are the ramifications of being born in a biosculptor? Are we born into the contract? Were we forced to sign it just before our genetic template was taken who knows how many lifetimes ago? If this is the 436th iteration of the project, is Earth even around? Do puppies even exist anymore? Is Ficsit out of business? Why is this the first time the entities in the deep are contacting us despite Somersloops, SAM, and Mercer Spheres being a known quantity? The game doesn't seem to think that the consequences of its own narrative matters, so we don't get to know.

ADA

A lot is riding on ADA being that she's one of only two characters in the entire game and by far the one you hear the most. She's a beautiful, terrible, charming travesty. She seems to serve more as a vessel for the developers to deliver jokes than as a character with a consistent personality [sad trumpet noises]. She will seem completely unable to deviate from her programming one minute, only to develop personal interests the next. She'll praise you for being exceptional one tier only to condemn you as the worst humanity has to offer a moment later. These two lines are only ONE TIER APART:

"According to Ficsit predictions you are exploiting this planet with unexpected efficiency. They did always struggle to see the true potential of things. Nothing about you is unexpected to me..."

"This is not a competition, but other pioneers [...] had already completed Project Assembly by this point. Don't keep making the same mistakes you did with other by-products."

So one minute she's praising you for your smart choices, the next she's calling you stupid. Really stupid. And if you disagree with her calling you stupid so much, why don't you do a study on portal or warp technology then? By the end I hated her and considered her emotionally abusive at best, and just written by popsicle stick punchlines at worst. I didn't want to finish milestones because I'd have to hear her tell me how fucking dumb I was again for no good reason.

Strange Communications

God this is the only bright spot in this mess. It hits the game's highest highs, but will just as soon evaporate, punishing you for caring in the first place. The Composers (as I will call them from here on) are wonderful writing. The way they use metaphor to communicate says a lot about them. The way they use music and water and art to describe the universe and how it works is inspired. Deciphering their vocabulary - Temples meaning planets, Effigies being physical shells that hold consciousness and so on - is an absolute joy. The developing relationship is so interesting that it actively encourages you to find more artifacts - as if their raw benefit wasn't a good enough reason. It's also the only place in the game where ADA feels like a consistently written character with a actual arc who develops an interest over time. Until eventually, when she doesn't have to deal with babysitting humans who she obviously thinks are inferior, she almost becomes a person. The most memorable moment in the game for me:

"Your curves are beautiful."

"How inappropriate. Tell me more."

"Your mimic-tapestry follows the pattern. It swallows temples. It is harmonious."

"If I could blush I would."

This is the closes the game comes to having an arc. And then? It abruptly ends. It builds up in your imagination until you think you're about to open up a portal somewhere, or get some massive alien download, or get information important enough to change Project Assembly. ADA speaks to the Composers saying, "See you on the other side," and you get so hyped for something that never happens. You collect 5. 10. 15. 40 more artifacts, waiting for a new communication that never comes. I finally checked my inbox after dozens more collections to find out that the last log is labeled 'Final.'

There is no closure. The ending isn't changed. There is no reward. Nothing happens. The game doesn't even bother to tell you the questline is over. It's so bafflingly sudden that I thought I must have encountered some kind of bug. It just couldn't be. But as far as I know now, it is. What a giant waste of potential.

What Happened?

I don't know if the coders and story writers were each cordoned off in their own separate teams and they never talked, but that's the vibe I get here. Like programming was in charge and did nothing but give the writing team prompts and assignments. It felt like a given that story can't actually affect the game, all it can do is be background noise. Little holotapes or journals that you find along the way. Nothing we write can matter, so we'll write keeping that in mind and do the best we can. We're only asked for Mercer Sphere collection log #12 and Tier 6 completion log so that's all we can write. If that was the limitation of the writing team I feel for them. I personally wanted something more engaging. Obviously there are going to be people who say, "This isn't that type of game. What do you want, just build factories." To those people, I totally get you. But it's possible to both love this game for its gameplay and wish it had something better to offer here. It could have. What do you think about the story?