Somerville Reviews
Somerville is an excellent start for Jumpship. It might not be another classic like Limbo or Inside, but it was close to being one. A must-buy for fans of the genre.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Jumpship tries its best to evoke Playdead's aura with Somerville and even if thematically there are some great ideas with a good art direction but the jump from 2D to 3D doesn't feel as polished as you think. The story needed some more time in game to develop properly or another focus, kind of dimishes the impact of the endings rendering them a little unearned.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
If you're wanting something that is easy and quick to play, and you're a big fan of sci-fi-oriented narratives, then Somerville's short two and a half hour runtime could work for you. However, frustrating puzzles, clunky controls, and an all-round unstable performance unfortunately left a sour taste in the mouth - even for such a short game.
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.
In dark murky cues, colors pops will either mean danger or interactable objectives. There is no soundtrack thankfully as it would just divert the attention away from the environmental sounds of our man’s harsh breathing, the droning of enemy scouts, and the dire creaking of the trees and buildings around this desperate endeavour to just survive.
Somerville has great potential, as not many games leave us wishing for more. It's an innovative puzzle game that falls a little short of its goal of providing a substantial and in-depth experience. But in no way can Somerville be called an imperfect game. It still manages to tug at the emotions and deliver its central themes brilliantly, and the genre will like many aspects of the game. It's an ambitious project, and I would love to see more from such a unique initiative.
Jumpship's debut mixes grand sci-fi and familial drama in a more cinematic take on PLAYDEAD's earlier titles to mixed effect.
Appealing art direction and excellent sound design do a lot of the heavy lifting in Somerville, but are undermined at almost every turn by frustratingly sloppy gameplay mechanics.
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.
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
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.
Somerville isn’t perfect and does struggle to get some things right with its physics, puzzles, and interaction, but this is still one of the best-paced games I’ve played this year, with a story to match. With stunning visual effects, Somerville just oozes atmosphere and stands among the most interesting, engaging sci-fi epics in recent memory.
Somerville is more of an interactive film than a narrative game. Unfortunately, the game's superb presentation fails to take away the impression that it could have been so much more. We would have liked for the devs to deepen the game mechanics, for the different members of the family to be used for gameplay purposes, for the player to have more opportunities to express his uniqueness, but above all for the rhythm of the game to be better balanced.
Review in French | Read full review
Somerville takes inspiration from 2 great modern classics, Limbo and Inside, however, it falls short to offer a deep contemplative experience. Despite some technical difficulties, it offers great value as a visually compelling puzzle adventure.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
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.
“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.”
Another special adventure emerges from a fragment of the creators of LIMBO and Inside, which with well-known forms intends to chart its own path as well. Somerville proposes family closeness and a great opening in its history and ties. An adventure of survival and discovery, expanded by the layer that adds manipulating extrasolar energies to solve its many situations and achieve something more personal and with its differential touch.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
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.
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