Somerville Reviews
An escape from alien invasion, with beautiful art direction.
Somerville has ties to modern legends Limbo and Inside, but it’s equally reminiscent of another Hall of Famer: Out of This World. The end result is a unique physics-based puzzle adventure that isn’t quite on the level of the games that inspired it, but is nevertheless an extraterrestrial nightmare worth exploring.
Somerville never hits its stride, thanks to flat direction and frustrating mechanics.
Somerville is one of the year’s biggest surprises, and I’m still shocked to see it fly under the radar. Its portrayal of an alien invasion raging across the British countryside hit close to home, while the story of a father searching for his family and being tied up in a dilemma so much bigger than he ever imagined is both nothing like I expected and everything I wanted. I can’t wait to see players far smarter than I piece its most devious puzzles together, since there are still so many questions waiting to be answered.
A disappointing follow-up to Limbo and Inside that lacks the same complexity of plot and puzzles, and yet struggles surprisingly poorly with the move to 3D.
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.
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.
Jumpship's wordless debut comes uniquely structured, but neither the story nor the gameplay do enough to help it carry the torch it's been passed.
I suppose, then, that Somerville is the most welcoming of the three games, starting with the familiar, and riding the slow, exponential line upward into the bizarre. Wise choice. For all the craft required to make a clear, playable movie, nothing beats the otherworldly weirdness of video games.
Somerville is a fantastically evocative game as it depicts an everyman's journey through a War of the Worlds-like alien invasion, leaning on countless sci-fi tropes and ideas along the way. Disappointingly, it's undercut on a number of levels by controls and a detached feeling and hastiness with some parts of the story it's telling.
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.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
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.
It's hard to recommend Somerville purely on the basis of what loosely-tied and ultimately lacking material its narrative provides.
Somerville is a beautiful and smart environmental puzzler filled with great ideas and a story that grips you from start to finish.
It was a bold move for the devs to try and move this traditionally 2D style of game into this hybrid 3D space, but I can’t help but feel that Jumpship would have been better off leaving it in 2D, because that extra dimension ends up just weighing the game down. It’s weirdly apt that right at the end of the game, when I’d got two different endings but was trying to unlock what I’d imagine was the ‘good’ ending, I experienced a massive bug that for a moment seemed like a creative decision, as I fell through the world, was reunited with my family on a grey platform in some empty void, then jumped off again to go into an infinite fall. In the end, Somerville’s admirable artistic vision and technical issues merged into one, poignantly showing that these two aspects of a game can’t ultimately be separated.
Mechanically simple but visually engrossing, Somerville offers an interesting, if not particularly deep, sci-fi adventure.
“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.”
One man and his dog traverse the English countryside after an alien invasion in this haunting, wordless game: a masterclass in foreboding sound design and minimal storytelling
Somerville has some enthralling set pieces backed by some stellar sound design. While its narrative may be too much for some to decipher, its nuanced way of conveying emotion and drawing the player into the mystery is really excellently pulled off. Grab a headset and enjoy this experience to its fullest.