First things first, inside is one of the best games I have ever played and this game being made by the person who worked as executive producer on both limbo and inside leave for some very very obvious similarities, which for the most part I am fine with, although it has to be said that these feels like a less thought of version of inside. The gameplay mechanics, the art style, the camera work, if you put both games side by side you would think they were made by the same company and are in some way related, that is worth mentioning.
Overall I liked the game *because* of similarities to inside, because as simple as inside was in terms of gameplay, the atmosphere, sound design and mystery made it very compelling to play. That being said for me the endings in somerville are a big let down.
There are 3 endings and all of them are terrible 1: You "resign" yourself to living in a pseudo recreation of the protagonist's normal life before the invasion, staying in a mock creation of his house and what I presume to be projections of his wife and kid, these projections do not appear to even move, so it isn't a convincing facsimile.
2: Blaze of glory ending, somehow using nothing more than a couple of notes produced by different colour lights you trigger an instantaneous self destruct on the mother ship, killing yourself and presumably the beings controlling the invasion, this ending is completely flat, the explosion happens out of nowhere and happens so fast it has no impact, plus we have no idea what happens next, without the control do the other ships leave? Do they all crash down to earth killing the sparse survivors of the initial invasion? Do they also explode? It is technically an "ending" because the credits roll, but there is no resolution to anything with this one.
3: The secret code ending. This one requires you not only finding and watching every orb throughout the game but also memorizing the exact order in which each of them flashed lights. You repeat this sequence back to the machines and that is somehow a cheat code that fixes everything. The wife who was last seen on top of a crumbling church, bleeding out, surrounded by hundreds of hostile alien machines somehow materializes in front of you, the beings controlling the machines decide to instantly stand down and stop the entire invasion, the protagonist and hundreds of other humans that for some reason were huddled in a giant circle within the mother ship just stroll out of the ship and return to earth. This ending is so lazy, so painfully stupid and frankly an insulting end considering how obnoxious the condition is to get it. Literally not a single question is answered, we have no idea who the super powered trio were, we have no idea why their powers used the same colour as the beings controlling the mothership, we have no idea what the plan was of the human collective that shot the protagonist out of a giant gun into the mothership was, we have no idea how the wife and kid survived, we have no idea why out of the thousands of ships they were smack bang in the center of the mothership, we have no idea why they invaded in the first place, we have no idea why the orbs ( the aliens own creation) would somehow give a random human a cheat code to cancel the invasion, we have no idea what was "said" to make the aliens leave, we have no idea why after killing untold billions of lives and easily dominating the planet they walked away so easily.
I am all for a good mystery and have no problem at all with ambiguous endings, but these endings are not ambiguous, they are unfinished. Inside had 2 endings, both of which are ambiguous and leave you with more questions than answers, but they fit with the theme of the game and there are some hints so you can extrapolate from them and create theories about the significance of each ending, with somerville you cant, because there are no crumbs, no hints, just 3 abrupt cut to black "endings" that render the journey leading up to it pointless and they don't leave you asking questions because of an open ended nature, they leave you asking questions because the story is incomplete and there are more holes than plot. Inside left you wondering what was real and how much will and choice the boy actually had in the story and how much was pre-determined via the experiment, somerville leaves you thinking -well what was the point? Aliens invaded, their own balls handed jeff from down the street a sentence, he just went to the mothership and said "would you lot mind getting lost" and just like that the wife is teleported and healed, the baby is fine, humans abducted for unkown reasons walk out the front door and order a chippy, the protagonist doesn't question having 3 super powers or how he assimilated 3 super powered beings into his arm and the alien invasion which was apparently controlled by 3 spheres which were powered by the same energy that powered the 3 super powered beings just float away as though they had bumped into someone on the street and everything is resolved with a simple " sorry, my bad"......... I am sorry, but that is pathetic writing, anyone with working digits can write a story if they only need to establish a base line premise, not build on it, not explain any of it and not write an ending.
Overall I liked the game *because* of similarities to inside, because as simple as inside was in terms of gameplay, the atmosphere, sound design and mystery made it very compelling to play. That being said for me the endings in somerville are a big let down.
There are 3 endings and all of them are terrible 1: You "resign" yourself to living in a pseudo recreation of the protagonist's normal life before the invasion, staying in a mock creation of his house and what I presume to be projections of his wife and kid, these projections do not appear to even move, so it isn't a convincing facsimile.
2: Blaze of glory ending, somehow using nothing more than a couple of notes produced by different colour lights you trigger an instantaneous self destruct on the mother ship, killing yourself and presumably the beings controlling the invasion, this ending is completely flat, the explosion happens out of nowhere and happens so fast it has no impact, plus we have no idea what happens next, without the control do the other ships leave? Do they all crash down to earth killing the sparse survivors of the initial invasion? Do they also explode? It is technically an "ending" because the credits roll, but there is no resolution to anything with this one.
3: The secret code ending. This one requires you not only finding and watching every orb throughout the game but also memorizing the exact order in which each of them flashed lights. You repeat this sequence back to the machines and that is somehow a cheat code that fixes everything. The wife who was last seen on top of a crumbling church, bleeding out, surrounded by hundreds of hostile alien machines somehow materializes in front of you, the beings controlling the machines decide to instantly stand down and stop the entire invasion, the protagonist and hundreds of other humans that for some reason were huddled in a giant circle within the mother ship just stroll out of the ship and return to earth. This ending is so lazy, so painfully stupid and frankly an insulting end considering how obnoxious the condition is to get it. Literally not a single question is answered, we have no idea who the super powered trio were, we have no idea why their powers used the same colour as the beings controlling the mothership, we have no idea what the plan was of the human collective that shot the protagonist out of a giant gun into the mothership was, we have no idea how the wife and kid survived, we have no idea why out of the thousands of ships they were smack bang in the center of the mothership, we have no idea why they invaded in the first place, we have no idea why the orbs ( the aliens own creation) would somehow give a random human a cheat code to cancel the invasion, we have no idea what was "said" to make the aliens leave, we have no idea why after killing untold billions of lives and easily dominating the planet they walked away so easily.
I am all for a good mystery and have no problem at all with ambiguous endings, but these endings are not ambiguous, they are unfinished. Inside had 2 endings, both of which are ambiguous and leave you with more questions than answers, but they fit with the theme of the game and there are some hints so you can extrapolate from them and create theories about the significance of each ending, with somerville you cant, because there are no crumbs, no hints, just 3 abrupt cut to black "endings" that render the journey leading up to it pointless and they don't leave you asking questions because of an open ended nature, they leave you asking questions because the story is incomplete and there are more holes than plot. Inside left you wondering what was real and how much will and choice the boy actually had in the story and how much was pre-determined via the experiment, somerville leaves you thinking -well what was the point? Aliens invaded, their own balls handed jeff from down the street a sentence, he just went to the mothership and said "would you lot mind getting lost" and just like that the wife is teleported and healed, the baby is fine, humans abducted for unkown reasons walk out the front door and order a chippy, the protagonist doesn't question having 3 super powers or how he assimilated 3 super powered beings into his arm and the alien invasion which was apparently controlled by 3 spheres which were powered by the same energy that powered the 3 super powered beings just float away as though they had bumped into someone on the street and everything is resolved with a simple " sorry, my bad"......... I am sorry, but that is pathetic writing, anyone with working digits can write a story if they only need to establish a base line premise, not build on it, not explain any of it and not write an ending.
