Somerville Critic Reviews

In truth, I’m not the biggest thinker when it comes to media. I watch a film, read a book, play a game, and take what’s happened at face value. If meaning is hidden behind a 10k-post Reddit thread, then, well, maybe it wasn’t conveyed well enough. Somerville doesn’t have this problem. It’s affecting in all the right ways, and a game I really can’t recommend strongly enough.

Somerville is a beautiful and smart environmental puzzler filled with great ideas and a story that grips you from start to finish.

Somerville immerses you in a gripping adventure in the midst of an alien invasion. It will bring immersive atmosphere, well thought out puzzle elements, gorgeous visuals but also some frustration.

Somerville is a fantastic game, offering everything you could want from the impressive set-up. The relationship between the characters is well defined and surprisingly touching given the lack of dialogue, which may not have been achieved so well since Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. The puzzles are intricate, challenging, and rewarding, and everything else stacks up to make the experience even more intriguing. While it is not perfect, it delivers an amazing atmosphere that feels perfect for these darkening days and tells a brilliant story with little more than some lights and shadows.

Somerville is a wonderful sci-fi adventure whose occasionally frustrating puzzles don't ruin what's otherwise a strikingly atmospheric adventure. Its four-hour runtime makes it perfect for a single, memorable evening.

Somerville is held back by technical shortcomings, but is full of impressive moments worth experiencing with the lights turned low and and your headphones up high. The father’s adventure lingers in my mind as I reflect on what happened, and those memories do ultimately outweigh the technical shortcomings. I hope time will provide improvements to bring the game to where it deserves to be, which is high in the sky alongside the ships of the invading forces.

Somerville is a bleak, threatening and intimidating world to survive as you struggle to save your family. Its mix of surprisingly in-depth gameplay puzzling, beautiful art direction and genuinely heartfelt narrative glimpses of hope help it overcome what could have been burgeoning control and technical issues. You’ll struggle with more than just the invaders on occasion, but you’ll persevere willingly to take in more of this utterly compelling world.

When the journey was over, with the credits rolling, I found myself left deep in thought, reflecting on what I had just seen unfold and the meaning of the journey I had embarked on. In this way, Somerville does succeed in delivering that punchy, thought-provoking crescendo and conclusion it was always building towards. I just wish it hadn’t been such a slog to get there.

Jumpship's debut is a fantastic sci-fi tale with an intense atmosphere and wonderfully touching narrative, even if there are a few puzzle and movement frustrations.

Visually impressive, with excellent style and design. And brave enough to hide its secrets in a travel that will entice Sci Fi fans.

Somerville reminded me of the qualities that I cherish in adventure games, particularly their ability to plunge one into the unexpected. I appreciated how its mechanics sidestep the usual weaponry that goes along with science-fiction games. (A gun-toting, super-soldier shows up at one point, but things don’t end well for them.) “Somerville” effortlessly pulled me in from moment to moment because I was eager to discover the next audiovisual flourish around the corner. There is a sequence toward the end where the man revisits places that is particularly captivating for the way in which it makes the familiar strange. That said, I was a little disappointed with the final scene in the game, which struck me as an overly familiar allusion to the ending of Tarkovsky’s film “Solaris.” But that aside, “Somerville” is the best adventure game I’ve played since “Little Nightmares 2.”

Somerville isn't another instant classic, but it is still an excellent game presenting what made Limbo and Inside special with some different ideas and choices.

Somerville is a beautiful game that will keep you glued to your screen from start to finish, thanks mainly to excellent camera use and a finger-licking art style. That makes the game worthwhile despite its short duration and disappointing puzzles.

Gorgeous, creative, and tense, Somerville can make for a fairly gripping adventure, but difficulty seeing what you're doing, a fair amount of frustration, and an underwhelming conclusion make the experience less than it could have been.

Somerville has some rough edges to iron out, and in both puzzle mechanics and atmosphere, it doesn’t stand quite as tall as some of its contemporaries. Also, while the family dynamic is a key part of the narrative, it feels like there’s more gameplay potential there that could have been explored. That said, Somerville still offers a worthwhile and moody sci-fi journey with a few fun tricks up its sleeve and secrets to unravel.

It’s hard to recommend Somerville purely on the basis of what loosely-tied and ultimately lacking material its narrative provides. A story, so to speak, devoid of a satisfying conclusion (not least if you’re going for all possible endings) wherein the vague explanation throughout doesn’t always work in its favor. Having said that, the same hands-off approach to its puzzle design does provide more than enough positives to render the game an enjoyable-enough trek.

Somerville isn't always the most enjoyable game to play, then. Its puzzles aren't anything special, and they're hampered by clunky controls. But what is special is Somerville's narrative and art design. The score, too, is excellent: we just wish there was more of it - too many scenes are simply too quiet. Even if we weren't enamoured with the ending, Somerville's story is worth experiencing. It's just a shame the gameplay is a little disappointing in comparison.

Somerville follows its own unique path within the puzzle-adventure genre. That path isn’t always a smooth one, with camera annoyances and physics wonkiness occasionally serving as a pebble in your shoe while solving its series of pleasantly challenging puzzles, and the story is more strange for the sake of being strange than it is thought-provoking. But thanks to its strong visual storytelling techniques and the way the opening minutes inspire an irresistible desire to find out what happened to this man and whether or not he’ll ever find his family, Somerville is nevertheless a very good tour through an exceptionally bleak scenario – all of which is successfully conveyed without a single line of dialogue.

A remarkable science fiction adventure that shines more for its tone, its context and its stimulating ending, than for the story of its characters. Despite this, it has narrative maneuvers that raise the interest in its text, and with a powerful staging that takes advantage of both its aesthetics and its fixed cameras. A concise and direct videogame that succeeds in almost everything it tries, and manages to leave an interesting aftertaste.

Ultimately it's the setting, art direction, and non-verbal cinematic storytelling where Somerville excels. But even here there are long lulls and a few sections that begin to feel bland. Like when you’re in a cave system trying to avoid attention in a way that feels like a homage to Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee. And outside of the emotional notes touched upon when it comes to trying to reach your family in an oppressive situation, the ending and final act are too obtuse and abstract to make any sort of lasting impact. Somerville is a visually impressive, relatively short cinematic adventure held back by its ambition.