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The voice in my head is not the voice in my game. That's what I keep thinking as I play the early stages of Soma, Frictional's upcoming spiritual successor to Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Like Amnesia, Soma is a first-person horror game. Unlike Amnesia, your character talks this time around. Unfortunately, he displays fraught peril of a man running late for a date. The demo - played in a dimly lit hotel room in San Francisco - begins with your character walking through a peculiar tunnel comprised of what appears to be metallic scales. At once industrial and alien, it eventually opens up into a derelict research facility that years of sci-fi cliches have led me to believe is in space - which we soon find out it isn't. The dimly lit corridors are littered with more scaly metal architecture haphazardly jutting into the geometry and upon closer inspection these formations are subtly moving, as if they're breathing. I don't know what's going on, but I don't like it.
My character, however, is only moderately bothered by this eerie ordeal. Upon finding a comm station and explaining he's been kidnapped, he exhibits the casual nonchalance of Assassin's Creed's Desmond. As I understand it, being spirited away to a haunted subterranean research vessel is kind of a bummer.
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