Somerville Review: Jumpship’s Minimalist Horror Game Is a Close Encounter with Greatness

There’s a moment in M. Night Shyamalan’s post-9/11 fever dream Signs where Mel Gibson’s Graham Hess and his family are coming off an emotionally draining moment of clarity during dinner when, suddenly, the television set that they’ve been glued to since the alien ships entered Earth’s atmosphere goes silent. Graham checks the TV, and every station has gone dead. That moment is one of the eeriest scenes in an alien invasion movie because without even showing a single tentacled limb or explosion, it taps into innate fears about the world being erased from existence by a violence that you can’t yet see or comprehend.

That’s the level of anxiety and fear that Somerville manages to conjure right out of the gate, and for a time, the game does impressive work sustaining it. We’re offered glimpses of a family at peace—Mom and Dad passed out on the couch, their toddler wandering around, the family dog trying to go outside and pee—before everyone is startled into fight-or-flight response mode by explosions happening past the horizon, massive geometric ships start landing, and the TV blares the test of the Emergency Broadcast System. A ship crashes into the family’s house and Dad is left for dead, until the vessel’s pilot crawls out and passes on a small measure of power to him: the ability to manipulate alien matter from liquid to solid to vapor using electricity.

The first hour or so of Somerville is an enthralling playable nightmare, a frantic scramble for survival against a truly unknowable force. Yes, you have your alien magic trick, but most of the early going is spent running and jumping across empty roads and forest paths, hiding from hostile extraterrestrials. The extraterrestrial ability comes into play when removing obstacles from your path, melting alien debris, or making a lake solid to walk across it. The more innovative puzzles cause you to use your ability to enhance electronics, allowing even a streetlight to melt and frighten enemies away, to say nothing of coming across an abandoned state fair concert venue, where you have to bring the stage lights roaring back to life in order to burn away barriers to the backstage area and get back on an actual road.

Somerville feels like a slightly more grounded successor to suspenseful platformers like Limbo and Inside, though controlling an actual adult here is a welcome change of pace. That’s because the developers at Jumpship have put their protagonist through the wringer in ways that, logically, you wouldn’t want to see happen to the small children of Limbo and Inside.

Where Somerville shares more common ground with those two games is in the fact that it’s so much more intriguing as a breathless chase rather than a series of physics puzzles. There are excellent scenes of fear and tension throughout, even mind-bending, recursive sequences tailor made to make the player question their entire experience up to that point. It’s also impressive how much Jumpship has managed to squeeze out of a very spartan art style. At the same time, Somerville quickly settles into the same rut as Limbo and Inside, where the constant failure and death and racking one’s brain over some sort of problem solving leeches tension and curiosity away from a narrative that so desperately wants to be viscerally affecting to the player.

Somerville does at least stick the landing with a third act that largely pushes the puzzles to the side in favor of an alien mind game that plays with one’s perception of what came before, and some surprisingly effective emotional payoff in the multiple endings. These moments represent the game at its best: scary, strange, wondrous, and enthralling. Thankfully, there are just enough of those riveting moments to forgive the ones where Somerville feels more than a little rote.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Plan of Attack.