Review: Somerville is a brief but beautiful sci-fi survival story

videogameschronicle.com:

It’s a little difficult to review a game when our best advice for it is to go into it with as little knowledge as possible.

Still, there will doubtless be players who want to know whether Somerville is worth starting in the first place, so with that in mind we’ll press on regardless – fitting, since that’s the game’s general task.

The game opens with an apparent alien invasion, which leaves a family’s home partially destroyed. Already we fear we’re saying too much so we won’t give further plot details, other than to add that you play as the father for the most part as he experiences the aftermath.

The game is the debut offering from Jumpship, a studio formed by Dino Patti and Chris Olsen. Patti was a co-founder of Playdead, which was responsible for Limbo and Inside, while Olsen is a UK film animator.

The strengths of both sides of the partnership are plain to see while playing the game. Somerville maintains that wordless, fascinating gameplay seen in Playdead’s titles, but with a larger, more cinematic scope than those games offered.

Movement is no longer locked to a single plane, meaning Somerville can’t truly be considered a straight successor to the 2.5D platforming found in Limbo and Inside. Indeed, Olsen was adamant in an interview last year that the game isn’t a ‘puzzle platformer’.

The reality is this isn’t quite the case, however. While it’s fair to say that the level of platforming is minimal at most, there can be no denying that there are a number of puzzles sprinkled throughout Somerville’s four-hour journey.

Not only that, but some of these puzzles are responsible for the game’s rare handful of frustrating moments. The complete lack of any hint option is usually fine because most of the set-pieces can be worked out