Somerville
Less is more. It’s an old maxim that Jumpship seems to have taken as dogma. You can see it at work in the length of Somerville (six hours should see you through to the credits) and in its allusive approach to storytelling, which is handled without a single line of dialogue. But nowhere is this more apparent than what fills the screen as you play. It’s not uncommon for large areas to be cloaked in darkness, all the colour and light saved for a single focal point. Even its splashiest vistas are realised with a few broad brushstrokes: a block of murky brown here, another of drab green there, two grey lines enough to suggest fields bisected by a motorway.
Which is not to say that the results aren’t beautiful. Far from it. Somerville is often like the work of an especially careful painter, a succession of landscapes – farmland to forest, festival site to high street – that add up to one of the most precise evocations of modern Britain we’ve seen in videogames. Those desaturated colours, and the chalky quality of light that Playdead first brought into vogue, lend themselves perfectly to this climate. Playing on a train journey, we look up from the game and out of the window, at a foggy rural scene that could have been torn straight from the Steam Deck screen in our lap. (The smaller device, we should note, is strictly saved for a replay – this game demands being played on the widest screen you have available, with curtains drawn and speakers cranked up.)
That embracing of the dark, the small, the mundane, means that when Somerville goes big, you feel it. A spear of extraterrestrial technology pierces the quiet, striking down from the heavens with a crack; a tractor beam makes a sound of pure force as it paints the scenery purple in wide arcs. Among all this, your character (a father searching for his family amid the alien invasion) is frequently kept tiny on the screen, an insect under heel. It’s hardly novel subject matter, but these contrasts hammer two or three of Somerville’s most otherworldly moments straight into our list of the year’s finest.
Having drawn the comparison to paintings, it’s worth pointing out that this is all realised in three dimensions, although for the most part you move from right to left, from one screen to the next, much as you would in a 2D cinematic platformer such as Another World or Inside. A lack of jump button aside, the interactions here are of a similar nature: pushing, pulling, carrying, clambering, all handled through a single contextual input. Eventually you gain supernatural powers that enable you to melt and freeze alien matter, with the twist that they require a light source through which to be channelled. You might run jump leads from a generator to a car’s open bonnet, for example, letting you turn the headlights into a kind of scenery-deforming blowtorch. These puzzles, if that’s the right word, aren’t really intended to tax you. They’re here to provide a slight friction, to prevent the game feeling like a slideshow of beautiful concept-art pieces.
Somerville’s interactions work best when they’re instinctive. You duck into the shadows because it’s the natural thing to do when an alien casts its eye beam in your direction, without considering the ways that light, colour and composition are being stage-managed to push you towards that particular piece of cover. The game is the director here, not only picking the camera angles but blocking out your movements, even dictating how quickly you can move in each scene. You are its actor, and everyone is going to have a better time if you just stick to the script. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible.
One of Somerville’s themes is communication. It’s there in the non-verbal storytelling, and something that the story touches on at various points (it’s the key, in fact, to an extra layer of the game that we won’t give away here). Here, Jumpship seems to have taken another old mantra – show, don’t tell – as a challenge, seeing just how much can be conveyed through intuition and imagery alone. When it works, piecing together a mechanic or narrative beat yourself brings a spark to events that, told straight, could be fairly rote. On occasion, though, communication can break down.
The sense of moving through living concept art, which is one of the game’s greatest strengths, can also be a weakness. More than once we struggle to unpick the interactive from the decorative, or become snagged on a piece of scenery whose beauty we’d just been admiring. The third dimension doesn’t help, making it harder to read whether the diminutive figure of your character is passing in front of or behind something. Some of this can potentially be fixed: a problem with finicky interaction triggers is solved in a pre-release update, for example, and so it’s possible Somerville will blossom into its best self. But if any blemishes at all remain, they naturally stand out more in a game in which everything’s stripped back. One simple sequence, for reasons we still don’t fully understand, takes us most of an hour to get right.
That aside, Somerville’s stumbles aren’t what linger in the memory. It’s the images, the atmosphere, the lasting curiosity about what its story might be gesturing towards – not to mention that aforementioned obscured layer, which motivates our second playthrough. You might argue that, even in its brevity, the game suffers from a slight sagging in the middle, but equally this means its strongest offerings are concentrated at either end of the experience, where they’re most likely to make a lasting impression. The finale in particular is a summation of everything seen up to that point, reenactments and recontextualisations presented with a confidence that they’re strong enough to have stuck in your head from the first time. It’s well earned. In fact, this is how Somerville seems destined to live within us: outbursts of light and colour and shape, simple enough that they have the potential to become iconic.
That embracing of the dark, the small, the mundane, means that when Somerville goes big, you feel it