Somerville Review
Somerville is a delightfully bizarre, physics-based puzzle adventure game that was developed by some of the former talent that created Playdead’s pair of modern classics: Limbo and Inside. And yet at the same time it plays very differently from those offerings, reminding me more of the seminal early-’90s classic Out of This World than Limbo or Inside with its upside-down setting, its color palette and character renderings, and its ever-rotating camera orientation from scene to scene. This was a pleasant surprise, though it isn’t nearly as polished or thought-provoking as its progenitors, leaving us with a very good game but ultimately not one I expect to be thinking about for very long now that I’ve finished it.
Somerville opens in the most wholesome way possible: A man, a woman, their infant child, and their dog are all on the living room couch, having fallen asleep in front of the TV. You take control of the man, who is never named. In fact, we never hear from him or from anyone else. Like Limbo, Inside, and Out of This World, there is no dialogue; Somerville’s storytelling is entirely visual. And visually, I do love what developer Jumpship has done here. Our nameless, voiceless hero is also essentially faceless, since all of these characters are more like impressionist renderings of people. And yet the use of color – and particularly contrast – makes the world pop when need be, such as when a dash of yellow wordlessly tells you that you can interact with an object.
Sound design, meanwhile, is effective in its minimalism. Aside from the piano soundtrack that’s good at nudging up the drama or tension when Somerville’s designers want it to, the pervading audio you’ll hear is the pained breathing and movement of our hero.
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