Somerville review: the most beautiful game I’ve ever played

It captivated me from the beginning. A small child wanders through a room, filled only by the static light of a television, while the parents sleep on the sofa. It’s the most unlikely opening to an invasion story, but it gives you all the information you need to invest. A low-key, personal disaster movie begins in the moments that follow, and I was hooked for the hours that followed.

Jumpship has created a game that is difficult to define. While it vaguely resembles studio co-founder Dino Patti’s Inside (which he produced on Playdead), somerville it is on an entirely larger, more beautiful scale. It’s, despite some rocky moments, a pretty magnificent sci-fi adventure and an amazing achievement for writer/director Chris Olsen and the team.

This article is going to be short, only in part due to the fact that I am pressed for time. I just don’t want to say too much about what happens in Somerville, itself a game that packs a lot into a fairly short running time. On a purely functional level, this is something of an evolution of Inside, in that much of the game is spent walking around with your character, more or less taking in the sights. There’s more exploration here than Inside, though, and the environment is more interactive, but this isn’t a platformer of any description.

Somerville is still much more of what I suppose you’d describe as an “interactive experience” rather than a “gamer video game”, but you can roam with a bit more freedom than I’d expected. This has thrown up some unfortunate control quirks, such as the character occasionally being unwilling to do what you clearly know you need to do (turn a crank, for example). At worst this is mildly irritating, however it doesn’t break the game, but can unfortunately be a slight jerk from immersion.

A pity, since that immersion is quite a bit. There are puzzles, most of which aren’t too obtuse and are generally based on common sense, but the star here is the world itself. The subtle details that imply events that have occurred. Arriving after the story has been told, you are only able to piece together what happened as you venture out in an attempt to put your own life back together after a calamitous, world-shattering event.

No doubt there will be lots and lots of critical thinking about what Somerville says, but for me it ended up being pretty simple, despite not fully understanding the climactic moments of the game. I’m looking forward to digging deeper with additional playthroughs and hearing what others make of certain scenes, but I was left with a deep sense of loss and regret. At one point, my face staring back at me as I played into the night on my Steam Deck, tears welling up in my eyes: a moment so perfect, so emotional, I’m still thinking about it. Days after.

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