Somerville

My first honest reaction after finishing Somerville was something like: that was beautiful, and also kind of maddening. Jumpship's debut drops you into a rural British landscape mid-alien invasion as an unnamed father whose only job is to find his wife, infant son, and dog. The setup is wordless and immediate, and the opening minutes generate genuine dread without a single line of dialogue or a tutorial prompt in sight. If you have any fondness for the slow-burn tension of films like Signs or Close Encounters, Somerville's opening sequence will hook you hard. The core mechanics are spare almost to a fault. Your character picks up a device early on that lets him interact with alien matter covering the landscape, melting it into liquid or freezing it solid depending on the light source he uses. Later you unlock the ability to flood chambers or petrify debris mid-motion to climb terrain, and stealth sections weave in to break up the puzzle rhythm. There are also alien drones and stalkers to evade, and a handful of chase sequences that land somewhere between cinematic and nerve-wracking. The sound design is worth singling out: the alien sounds in particular are deeply unsettling, built from manipulated everyday materials that blur organic and mechanical in ways that stick with you. The score does similar work, with piano pieces punctuating silence at exactly the right moments. The trouble is that the gap between what Somerville looks like and what it feels like to play is frustratingly wide. The world is rendered in a 2.5D plane that is neither a clean side-scroller nor a proper 3D space, and it creates constant low-level friction: running into invisible walls, failing to interact with objects from the wrong pixel-depth, spending a minute walking at a snail's pace toward something that turns out to be irrelevant. There is no run button for most of the runtime, which is a real pacing problem in a game this short. Some puzzles resolve through clever use of the melt-and-freeze power; others are genuinely obtuse in a way that feels unintentional rather than designed. The third act, which leans into abstract alien-communication sequences, divided critics sharply and will likely divide you too. For context on where it lands: the PC version holds a Metacritic score around 71, with scores ranging from 45 to near-perfect depending on how much weight each reviewer gave to atmosphere versus control responsiveness. That spread tells you everything. If you came in expecting the tightness of Inside, you will leave disappointed. If you come in expecting a cinematic sci-fi mood piece with light environmental puzzle-solving, multiple endings to discover, and a runtime that fits neatly into a single evening, Somerville delivers more than it stumbles. It is the kind of game that is more interesting to think about afterward than it always is to play in the moment, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on your tolerance for that trade-off.

Alex · Scout Team

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