After featuring in Microsoft and Bethesda’s 2021 E3 showcase, Somerville quickly gained attention as the first game from Jumpship, the new studio co-founded by Playdead Co-founder Dino Patti. I don’t think there is a single review out there that doesn’t at least mention the Playdead games Limbo and Inside, with most directly comparing the games for better or worse.
Sommerville is a dialogue-free adventure game that sees a family separated in an alien invasion and follows the father as he tries to reunite with his family.
Here’s what Australian critics are saying about the game.
KOALATY CRITICS – AUSTRALIAN CRITICS
AusGamers – 7/10 (Kosta Andreadis)
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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Checkpoint Gaming – 4/10 (Victor Tan)
For an adventure game, the sense of adventure isn’t there. The only objective is to go from Point A to Point B, solving puzzles along the way. You don’t have any reason to proceed other than “there’s nothing else to do”. Adventures ignite a feeling of excitement, you want to know what’s coming up. Somerville’s lack of story lowers the stakes, because solving puzzles just isn’t exciting. It’s difficult to motivate yourself to reach the end.
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Maxi-Geek – 7/10 (Terence Soet)
Jumpship has really created a beautiful and intense atmosphere with the lack of any music but heightened with the use of sound effects. It really does make players feel isolated and builds on the scariness of being chased down by unknown aliens at certain points. One can say that the environment created is the star of the game, placing players in what feels like an especially hopeless situation.
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MKAU Gaming – 8/10 (TheMayhemAU)
Somerville’s beauty and curse is its use of gorgeous camera angles to paint the picture of the narrative. Its conscious lack of dialogue means it needs to be creative in its storytelling. The scenes will pop from forefront gameplay to background, side-scrolling and top-down sporadically. As effective as this use was though, at times it was a push-and-pull fight of where you wanted to go as they transitioned back and forth.
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Player2 – B+ (Paul James)
While there are certainly some mechanical imperfections, and for some, the story may evolve no further than a simple “where’s my family” plotline, Somerville is the Limbo-like that we’ve long been looking for, and it just took some of the key characters behind Limbo to make it happen.
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Press Start – 8.5/10 (Brodie Gibbons)
It reminded me, somewhat fittingly, a lot of Edgar Wright’s The World’s End in both its wild story turns and some of the ideas it appears to tackle. It’s a game that can shock, surprise, and induce panic in great waves. With no regard for comfort, the brief narrative—which is devoid of any dialogue or narration, spoken or otherwise—twists and contorts on itself to the point where it’s nearly coherent in its own right, but ultimately it’s going to rely on a lot of interpretation from whoever experiences it.
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Stevivor – 8/10 (Steve Wright)
In counterpoint, 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. Somerville is ambitious and sometimes doesn’t hit the heights it aims for, but certainly retains points for trying
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WellPlayed – 8.5/10 (Mark Isaacson)
It’s a beautiful game to look at, despite the bleak nature of its story and the dangers that lurk in the night, backed by a solemn score and zero dialogue outside of a few grunts and cries of pain. It’s all about selling the story on emotions, and on that front Somerville is a class above.
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