"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," scientist Stephen Hawking told the BBC last December.
Scary stuff. Consider its apotheosis in Western pop cinema: "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure," sneers Agent Smith in The Matrix, sewing the whole Darwinian machines-will-eat-us plot up. The only thing as frightening as your metaphoric progeny offing you, timeless as Cronus bumping off Uranus, is the number of TV shows, movies, books, and games that lazily flog the bugaboo.
Soma, a $30 downloadable survival horror game for PC, Mac, Linux, and PlayStation 4 (reviewed), is deeply invested in said bugaboo, but smarter, maybe just enough to ward off the eye-rolling.
Its answer to the hand-in-glove question "What is consciousness?" is one we've seen plenty of times before. Then again, novelty's overrated: It's the telling that moves us, not the twist.
Those twists almost derail Soma at first. The setup—a life-threatening head injury prompts a Canadian bookseller to undergo experimental brain treatment—screams "gotcha." The bottle of medical fluid you're asked to quaff before the trapdoor swings out from under you might as well be labeled "Drink me." Until the first major revelation early on, after which the game finally veers into metaphysically interesting territory, it's all pretty potboiler.
