BUMMERVILLE

Did you like Limbo? Did you like Inside? Well the co-founder of Playdead co-founded a new company called Jumpship and Somerville is their first outing. It looks similar to Inside, but boy it does not feel as good as Inside.

First issue is that the game is played in a 3D space. Inside, despite being a 3D game, only had the player move in a 2D plane making it hard for players to get too lost and limiting the interactive objects to only those on the same plane as the player. Somerville allows the character to move left and right but also away and towards the camera. It causes confusion as to which direction the player should be heading and which objects should be interacted with. The beginning of this game literally starts the player in the center of the screen and most players will likely start by approaching the light source (this is actually a developer trick used in a lot of games to help guide players) only to discover that the glow of the television actually means nothing and then will stumble around aimlessly trying to stumble into what to do next. While most of the time the objective is pretty clear, it happens more than once where the 3D movement is a hindrance because it is unclear where to go. The 3D movement also makes it hard to feel like there’s progression outside of story beats. When the player starts at the left of the screen the goal will likely be to move to the right and as long as the player keeps moving right they will naturally feel as if they are moving forward and progressing. This game lacks that feeling and because there doesn’t seem to be a central goal in the story, the game seems to meander.

PLATFORMS: PC, XB1, XSX
MSRP: $24.99 (ALSO ON GAMEPASS)
PRICE I’D PAY: GAMEPASS ONLY, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME, ESPECIALLY ON XBOX ONE

Speaking of story, that’s the second issue. I get that there’s an alien invasion and this is a survivor’s tale but outside of that, there’s a lot of this game’s story that is unclear and not in an interesting way but in a “this game could have used some exposition” way. Plenty of cinematic platformers, including some of the earliest like Another World, don’t have explicit dialog but still tell a cohesive narrative. The latter half of this game makes almost no sense. I don’t know who any of the people are and whatever is happening in the latter half of this game fails to give any sort of closure or explanation to these people or their roles. The alien invasion is pretty clear and I don’t need to know their reasons or internal workings or anything like that… but when I’m dealing with other people and what seems to be some secret base I need some contextual reason. Also the pacing is terrible. Great moments of watching another person get in a van only to get instantly vaporized are followed up with long treks through mines or weird movement tutorial segments LATE IN THE GAME. Also the endings are all just bad, and you’ll most likely see the worst of them unless you look up the other solutions online. I know how the final segment is solved and where the answer comes from, but it’s just poorly done.

Third issue: Gameplay/puzzles are boring. They just aren’t all that fun and are based around the idea of making things solid or liquid and honestly those are neat concepts until that’s the entire game… which it is.

Now that we’re out of the design flaws we move into the technical problems. Fun.

Fourth issue is connected slightly to the first issue in that things get too small on the screen. If something is extremely small on screen on a 50” television, how would that be visible on a 20-something” monitor? This is primarily caused by the character having to travel away from the fixed camera at times. There was a sign that pointed out a tunnel that was nearly invisible and I have zero idea how anyone is supposed to see things in this game and know what they are looking at immediately.

And the fifth and final issue which makes me think that the fourth issue was maybe missed due to lack of playtesting was performance. This game is buggy. Now if it weren’t for Google I could maybe say it was my Xbox One as it is an old VCR model but it can run more resource intensive games no problem. Some of the bugs come from things like a model disappearing after the player character interacts with them or the game loading a scene and the player character infinitely falling making me manually reload the last checkpoint… but then there was the church tower. The church tower dropped to a single frame per minute. I am not kidding. I thought the game froze. I restarted my console. I did everything I could including recording the game footage just in case I couldn’t finish the game for review… but I did. I just sat there and eventually that frame ended and I could move a bit more. Eventually I got through the tower, but good lord you would think I was running Crysis on Windows ME. It was the worst performance I have seen in a video game in probably a decade. From that point on the game never felt like it ran well either which is fine cause I was definitely not enjoying myself at that point anyways.

So yeah… Somerville kind of sucks. The best parts of the game are when it focuses on the alien invasion aspect. The worst parts are everything else. Honestly, skip this game. It actually makes me worried for what Playdead has coming next because they have said they want to do more than just 2D games too and if they play anything like Somerville I’ll probably skip it.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.