Somerville Review: An Admirable First Effort

Somerville is a complicated game for me to put my finger on. In a number of ways, it has many of the same elements that made Limbo and Inside (both of which were produced by Somerville's Dino Patti) both so remarkable when they launched in 2010 and 2016 respectively. Despite having these broad strokes in common, though, developer Jumpship's first release with Somerville left quite a bit to be desired on both the gameplay and narrative front by the time I had rolled its credits. 

Much like Limbo and Inside, Somerville tells its story without saying a single word. Compared to Playdead's duo of previous releases, though, Somerville is a bit more straightforward, at least at its beginning. Somerville centers entirely around an alien invasion and puts players in control of a father of a young family. After being separated from his wife and child amidst the alien attack, this unnamed protagonist has to make his way across numerous landscapes while also piecing together what is happening around him. Along the way, the player-character meets some other mysterious faces and gains unique powers which seem to be tied to the cataclysmic event. 

In a general sense, I like the throughline story idea that sits at the center of Somerville. Learning how to navigate this invasion, find your family, and avoid the alien invaders that have descended upon your small, quiet town makes for a compelling opening hour or so. Where Somerville began to lose me, though, was in its final stages. Rather than try to keep the story focused on only the father and his family, Somerville's scale blows up drastically near its end. As a result, there's a lot that happens in a very short period of time, which only leads to confusion rather than any sort of satisfying resolution. I'm more than happy to play a game that wants to tell a story through visual elements alone, but I'm also hard-pressed to understand what even happened with some of Somerville's grander narrative moments. 

Although Somerville's story doesn't work for me in every regard, the best aspect of the game by far comes with its art direction. Somerville contains a number of striking landscapes and fascinating character designs, all of which are quite distinct. It might sound uninspired for Jumpship to look to tell a story about an alien invasion in this game, but the studio's artwork really does a fantastic job of making Somerville feel constantly harrowing and perplexing. 

Most of the time, what you end up doing within Somerville from a gameplay perspective is solve various environmental puzzles. These tasks are done as a way of helping you move forward from one area to the next. Some sections of the game will give you specific tools that you'll have to use to get around, while others will simply let you discern on your own how you're meant to get chart a path onward.

My biggest annoyance with Somerville is that finding your way around these environments to figure out what you're supposed to do was often a bigger challenge than the puzzles themselves. Somerville takes place in 3D levels compared to the 2D plane that was seen with Limbo and Inside. Because of this, there's more room to explore and more objects to interact with. While this is fine at face value, the issue is that Somerville does very little to highlight what you're meant to actually be navigating toward in order to advance.

More than once during my playthrough, I reached a standstill simply because I didn't know that I could interact with certain objects in the game. While Somerville doesn't do enough on its own to make certain items stand out from the backdrops, the game's camera also doesn't do it any favors in this aspect. Despite taking place in a 3D world, Somerville's camera is always locked at a specific location depending on where you're at within the game. As a result, sometimes you'll be in situations where your character and the devices you're meant to interact with are at a far away distance, which led to me squinting at my TV to simply get a better idea of what I should be gravitating toward.

All of these small problems make the act of actually playing Somerville pretty unsatisfying and borderline annoying. Even when I did feel pushed to continue seeing how the story of the game would unravel, I would soon after be met with a section that resulted in me roaming around for far too long simply trying to understand what I was supposed to be doing. 

Somerville feels like a game that is going through growing pains. As the first title to come from Jumpship, there's a fair amount to like here and quite a bit that can be built off of moving forward. Still, Somerville isn't also without its problems, especially when it comes to creating an enjoyable gameplay experience. As a result, Somerville itself isn't something that I would deem a must-play, but Jumpship as a whole is a studio that I'll continue to keep an eye on as time goes on. 

Rating: 3 out of 5

Somerville is available now across Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and is also downloadable via Xbox Game Pass. A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review and it was played on an Xbox Series X console.