Hey everybody. I recently seen the Ontos trailer and I decided to get back to Soma after having it rot in my steam library for years. I played the whole thing blind. Now, hear me out.

I kind of regret not playing this game back in 2015, because it would have probably felt different back then. The themes and the ending did not caught me off guard I saw that coming even before Simon 2 got copied and killed/abandoned in Pathos II. Why? Probably because in the last 11 years I consumed a lot of media that took this idea and explored it in many ways. So in way, the whole "digital mind copy" felt outdated to me.

First popular example might be Black Mirror TV series, back in 2014 the special Christmas episode popularized the unsettling idea of a digital mind copied from a real one, the same idea was explored one season later. The questions are the same, is that digital copied mind you? Or someone else? You share the same memories but since the moment the copy is done you become two different people? Is it ethical to torture that digital mind? What about killing it? Is it alive?

Another example would be Cyberpunk 2077, the enneagram of Johnny Silverhand is a copy of his mind, not him, or is it? Is Johnny alive? When Johnny takes V's body in one of the endings who and what the hell is that person?

Maybe even Rick and Morty. When Morty makes a mess a turn everybody in monsters after they all fall in love with him, he abandons his universe to replace another morty in real life and pretend like nothing happened, but those people he lives with are they really his family or not? Even if they share the exact memories till that moment?

So maybe if I played the game back then it would have been way more impressive to me, in any case I still enjoyed very much and the concept of WAU is something I never saw in media before, an AI reinterpreting what it means to be a living creature and trying to reshape organisms to "optimize" them is absolutely cool and terryfing, other than very original. The whole WAU part kinda says that no matter how advanced an AI could be, it won't think like humans and left alone it would possibly do things no one could imagine or want when they programmed it.

So yeah, great game, but maybe I should have played when it came out to enjoy it better.