Somerville Reviews

Somerville is ranked in the 40th percentile of games scored on OpenCritic.
Wccftech
Top Critic
9 / 10.0
Nov 18, 2022

Somerville is a near-perfect adventure game themed around an alien apocalypse, with fantastic puzzles and exploration. Its few missteps do little to detract from the overall experience.

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GameMAG
Top Critic
6 / 10
Nov 16, 2022

Somerville is an exceptional project with huge missed potential, reason being the overall weak technical state. The game is just raw and would greatly benefit from at least another six month of dev time.

Review in Russian | Read full review

Unscored
Nov 15, 2022
Somerville | Review in 3 Minutes - YouTube video thumbnail
8 / 10
Nov 14, 2022

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.

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6 / 10.0
Nov 15, 2022

Overall, Somerville has a fantastic and intriguing world that’s begging to be explored from the off. Wonderful art and sound design compounded with excellent character animations really bring this narrative adventure to life, but a smattering of bugs, lacklustre puzzle elements, and an ambiguous story that left me feeling unrewarded after posing so many initial questions, really hampered the experience.

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Nov 29, 2022

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.

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80 / 100
Nov 27, 2022

With his particular vision of The War of the Worlds, Somerville proposes a precious cinematic adventure focused on narration.

Review in Spanish | Read full review

Unscored
Nov 15, 2022

“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.”

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6.7 / 10.0
Nov 15, 2022

While not reaching the expressive heights of Limbo or Inside, Somerville is in the wake of Playdead's videogame experiments.

Review in Italian | Read full review

6.7 / 10.0
Nov 14, 2022

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.

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ACG
Top Critic
Buy
Nov 14, 2022
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4 / 5.0
Nov 14, 2022

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. Quite whether this grand conclusion actually presents more questions than it does answers, I’m still not sure. In any case, I do think Somerville at least succeeds 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.

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7 / 10.0
Sep 3, 2023

In Somerville's attempt to differentiate from Limbo and Inside, player's are left with a moody, wordless story lacking technical finesse and head-scratching puzzles that define the genre's best.

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6.5 / 10.0
Nov 28, 2022

Though getting through it was occasionally bumpy, I only wish I'd been able to get more of it once it really got going. And had Somerville maintained its human element front and center, I think I would've loved the way the story ended more than I ultimately did. As it stands though, Somerville is a notable debut by Patti's new studio, it just has some of the wrinkles of one too.

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4 / 10.0
Nov 15, 2022

Somerville relies on its fantastic animations and settings to tell a story of a father trying to reunite with his family. But without important story fundamentals such as exposition, you have no idea what is going on. Coupled with the fact that the adventure consists of simply solving puzzles while walking around, it is hard to immerse yourself in the story or even care about what will happen. Solving puzzles can also be difficult because you are expected to fumble around and discover what can be interacted with. There's no guidance or assistance, which leads to frustration when you have no idea what to do next. There's a good attempt at telling a story here, but it's difficult to find yourself wanting to reach the end.

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8.5 / 10.0
Nov 15, 2022

It feels like cheating to call Somerville a debut indie title when its creator's individual pedigree is so strong, but it's a tremendous spiritual successor to both Limbo and Inside. It takes an ordinary setting, quickly removes all normalcy, and takes the player on a fleeting sci-fi thrill ride that makes use of every second of your attention that it has.

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8 / 10.0
Nov 15, 2022

Somerville does for Inside for what Inside did for Limbo. While the means of gameplay has evolved into a 3D realm, it’s more an emphasis on an actual narrative that sets it apart.

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AusGamers
KostaAndreadis
Top Critic
7 / 10.0
Nov 17, 2022

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.

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8.5 / 10.0
Nov 16, 2022

Somerville is a fantastic debut for Jumpship that should be commended, but a little extra polish in some key areas would have made an already great game even better.

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4 / 5.0
Nov 15, 2022

Somerville is a true "short and sweet" gaming experience that really throws a spanner into traditional storytelling and gaming.

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