Somerville was always going to be scrutinized more than other indie titles. When word got out that one of the co-founders of Playdead went on to create another game studio, players had expected its debut title's gameplay to be up there with the likes of Limbo and Inside. When the first trailer for Somerville appeared, it felt like it was exactly what people had expected — to the point that some people thought it was a new game from Playdead itself. With the final game in hand, it is clear that those expectations created a game that is more divisive than universally praised.

Compared to most other games of this type, the story starts off rather peacefully. There's a shot of a car driving in the British countryside, and the camera transitions to a family sleeping on the couch while the television is on. The child wakes up and wanders around the house causing mischief, all while strange things are happening outside. The rest of the family wakes up, and when the alien invasion begins, the family car is destroyed and the family retreats to the basement. An alien crash-lands in the basement, and the father absorbs a mysterious energy and is knocked out. He awakens, but some time has passed since his wife and child have gone, and the dog was the only one that stayed behind to watch over him. He searches for his missing family in the aftermath of the alien invasion.

Like the games by which it was inspired, the story is told through actions instead of dialogue. While the approach worked in those titles since players are on their own most of the time, the impact is lessened in Somerville due to the presence of characters that you meet along the way. You get an idea of what's being conveyed through their actions, but the lack of dialogue actually hurts the story. Even a little more action or exposition would've helped elevate what is essentially a standard sci-fi tale. It also doesn't help that your character doesn't convey many emotions. He can get hurt, but he never seems to react to anyone else's presence except for his wife and child. Even the re-appearance of the dog later on elicits nothing until you manually activate the petting action. It's difficult to care too much about reuniting the family when the patriarch seems robotic in the first place.

Somerville can be described as a puzzle platformer, but there's far less of the latter than expected. You'll automatically run when needed, and you can climb up ladders and clamber up things to reach higher ground. You can grab onto objects and move them around or break them apart. You can also open and close doors, and you can automatically duck under low ledges or crawl in tight spaces. What you can't do is jump, which seems like one of the more basic actions you can give any character, and there are certainly moments in the journey where a simple jump would've made things go by faster compared to running into an object and hitting a button to climb.

While the game is light on platforming, it does emphasize the puzzle portions. You will find your fair share of switches to pull and boxes to move, but the main instrument in solving puzzles is your new alien powers. The blue power you're given early on can dissolve some objects into a blue liquid that's safe to traverse. Later on, you'll get a red power that can be used to turn the blue liquid into solid matter. In both cases, you'll need to use a light source to channel that power into a usable form, and that light can be anything from bulbs to sentient alien orbs or emergency flares.

The use of powers already makes this very different from the games it was inspired by, but you'll wish the developers had done more with the idea. The ways that you need to bring light to an object can be neat, but it also makes you wish that your character was smart enough to keep a flashlight on after discovering the purpose of their power. Alien liquid dissolving and formation techniques are used often enough that the power becomes less impressive, since it's always in the service of creating passageways or unblocking them, and it feels like the presence of companions could've been used more in puzzles — especially your dog, who seems to not have a purpose.

It's frustrating that the game's use of physics can sometimes work against you. A great example of this occurs in the early middle portion of the game, where you need to bring a light post to a ladder so the obstruction above it can be cleared. You can see that the string of lights on the post clearly isn't taut, but the post refuses to move far enough to reach the obstruction. A few reboots solved this issue, and then the game acted correctly, but there are other close calls where something like a bucket going astray can lead to orbs not following you to clear out stuff. Compared to the early Xbox and PC versions of the game, the PS5 iteration has a reduced number of bugs, but there are still some lingering problems.

The frustrations continue to pile up thanks to both the camera and use of 3D. In outdoor environments, the camera is usually placed far away and while it makes for some artistic looking screenshots, it also means that some of the interactive elements can be small to see. The immutable nature of the camera also means that there will be times that you won't be able to see an interactive element because of something you did. This is best exemplified in the beginning when you can pull one drawer and fail to realize that there's a drawer on a lower rung that needs to be pulled before you can start climbing. As for the 3D part, the game barely makes use of the newfound space to give you more routes to explore or interesting things to look at. It feels like bringing this back to 2D would have been a better move, especially since it means fewer dead ends to run into.

On a side note, the game doesn't emphasize death. That's a morbid thing to point out, but seeing your character meet an untimely end due to your mistakes has almost become an unspoken trait of the genre, whether it's getting dismembered by a bear trap in Limbo or being ravaged by dogs in Inside. Somerville simply cuts to black when you die, so it's sudden when a steel beam falls on your head or your powers are yanked from your body, leaving you no time to process what happened. This also results in players caring a little less about the character.

Graphically, the game can look good at times. The advantage of the pulled-back camera is that you can get a sense of the situation and how diminutive you are compared to the towering obelisks that rain from the sky. The depressing atmosphere is something you've seen countless times in other games, but it remains effective until you reach the caves, which look boring by comparison. The lack of a discernible face is an artistic choice, so one's mileage may vary on that, but the fluidity and related effects of the various liquids look good. Quality mode does exactly what it says by making everything look a tad more detailed, while Performance mode increases the frame rate at the cost of jagged lines due to the removal of anti-aliasing. Considering the nature of the game and how the frame rate boost isn't that big to begin with, sticking with Quality mode is the better choice.

While the graphical part of the presentation can be hit-and-miss, the audio is stronger. The heavy use of environmental noise emphasizes the state of the countryside as a wasteland, which also makes the alien noises even more frightening when they suddenly turn up with a jarring volume. The music is used sparingly as a result, and it is also effective in ratcheting up the tension during sequences where you can die from a laser blast or a beam of light.

Somerville is a game where both the new and old ideas don't work in the game's favor. The platforming is nonexistent, while the puzzles are hampered by either a lack of creativity, an uncooperative physics system, or a combination of both. The use of 3D produces situations where your objectives can become obscured due to the camera angle and distance. The shock and awe one would expect from the game's pedigree is greatly dampened, and the wordless story doesn't do much to carry a narrative that seems pedestrian and doesn't care about its characters. Some will still find fun in the various situations, and the runtime is brisk enough if everything works in your favor. If you are still interested in Somerville, wait for a sale before checking it out.

Score: 6.0/10