Somerville (Xbox Series X|S & PC) Review

The comparisons are irresistible, sorry.

When your inspirations are this clear, developer staff are even partially from Playdead Game Studios, and you make a moody 2.5D, low polygon aesthetic platformer, your game is going to be put side-by-side with Limbo and Inside.

Luckily Somerville is a fine addition to this subgenre: a short, fulfilling experience with some polish niggles that keep it from reaching the heights of its inspiration.

Somerville starts with a War of the Worlds style alien invasion and the near total-destruction of humankind and civilisation as we know it. You, a dad, then begin an entirely wordless search for your now-lost wife and son.

Shortly after, you gain a mysterious ability to interact with lights, melting or hardening alien substances scattered across the landscape. The puzzles centre on these abilities, but they stay simple and rarely held me up for long.
There are some light puzzles along the way, but overall Somerville plays more like a rollercoaster, theatrical experience than other games of their ilk. That includes Limbo and Inside, plus the Little Nightmares titles.

Somerville’s story is told through the environments and what happens with the dad. There’s an eeriness that pervades each location, and the art direction overall has to be my favourite part of the game, a simplicity to each scene, area and puzzle that focuses on the unspoken narrative. Somerville contains a nice combination Kentucky Route Zero style aesthetic for the environment while the main characters have a high-resolution Sega Saturn look.

Like the Playdead games, there’s something satisfying putting together the story on your own, from environment and world design, rather than spoken dialogue. That said, while those games wrapped mysteries in enigmas tied in gordian knots, Somerville has a much more straightforward story, and by the game it is relatively clear what has happened, who caused it and why.

Unfortunately I did experience a range of technical issues with Somerville on my Xbox Series X, including constant screen tearing, stutters, visible errors and crashes to the Xbox Dashboard.

While Somerville rarely demands fast-paced reflexes, it is disappointing to see what looks like a game that’s reasonably easy to run not perform at its best on Microsoft’s most powerful console. Hopefully these technical issues are fixed in future patches.

Beyond the technical issues, I hit a couple of head-scratcher moments where it wasn’t obvious what to do next. Progress came through trial and error rather than the game pointing me toward the solution, a notable contrast given how directed and linear the rest of the experience is.

That said, the checkpoints are plenty, there are rarely time limits, and given it is so focussed on telling one story one way, you will always work out what to do.

Simplicity is the name of Somerville.
Does it go too far to keep things simple and keep the story moving? I appreciated the puzzles breaking up the story sequences, but I feel they should have gone further. As they stand, they seem to exist mainly to pad out an already short runtime. They sit in a strange middle ground: a large part of the game on paper, yet slight in practice, without the escalating complexity or story impact their prominence would suggest.

One last note: the game has multiple endings, and thankfully lets you easily replay key moments that affect how you reach them. After a straightforward linear path for most of its length, it’s only near the end that the player gets real freedom to decide how they respond to the alien invasion.

Unlike many games, Somerville’s ending is the best part of the entire experience, and I encourage you to play right through to get to these best bits.

Somerville is available on Xbox and PC, including on Xbox Game Pass. This is a perfect Game Pass game, a filling snack of a game that ties itself up nicely, a great experience for a weekend session of overcoming yet another apocalypse.