Somerville Reviews

It feels like cheating to call Somerville a debut indie title when its creator’s individual pedigree is so strong, but it’s a tremendous spiritual successor to both Limbo and Inside. It takes an ordinary setting, quickly removes all normalcy, and takes the player on a fleeting sci-fi thrill ride that makes use of every second of your attention that it has.

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Somerville has some enthralling set pieces backed by some stellar sound design. While its narrative may be too much for some to decipher, its nuanced way of conveying emotion and drawing the player into the mystery is really excellently pulled off. Grab a headset and enjoy this experience to its fullest.

Somerville is a fantastically evocative game as it depicts an everyman's journey through a War of the Worlds-like alien invasion, leaning on countless sci-fi tropes and ideas along the way. Disappointingly, it's undercut on a number of levels by controls and a detached feeling and hastiness with some parts of the story it's telling.

Somerville is a super-stylish slice of sci-fi that nails its aesthetic and provides a solid narrative that comes to a pleasingly surreal and fantastical end. However, all of this good stuff is bogged down by dull gameplay, performance issues and the addition of a third dimension that, while certainly very cool to look at, leads to awkwardness as you attempt to solve puzzles and interact with environments. If you can make peace with the gameplay, you'll still find a story worth experiencing here, it's just a shame there wasn't as much creativity in those puzzles as there is in every other aspect of what Jumpship has served up.

Somerville is a fantastic debut for Jumpship that should be commended, but a little extra polish in some key areas would have made an already great game even better.

Somerville is an interesting sci-fi tale that has a lot going for it, unfortunately, none of that can be experienced well on the Steam Deck.

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Somerville isn’t always the most enjoyable game to play, then. Its puzzles aren’t anything special, and they’re hampered by clunky controls. But what is special is Somerville‘s narrative and art design. The score, too, is excellent: we just wish there was more of it – too many scenes are simply too quiet. Even if we weren’t enamoured with the ending, Somerville‘s story is worth experiencing. It’s just a shame the gameplay is a little disappointing in comparison.

Mechanically simple but visually engrossing, Somerville offers an interesting, if not particularly deep, sci-fi adventure.

Jumpship's wordless debut comes uniquely structured, but neither the story nor the gameplay do enough to help it carry the torch it's been passed.

A narrative adventure that turns the apocalypse into a slog.

But clunky gameplay and confusing story beats hampered most of my enjoyment. Even with a 4-hour runtime, Somerville feels padded with trippy late-game sequences and ultimately doesn’t deliver in any meaningful way. If you’re still curious to try it out yourself, Somerville is out November 15 for $24.99 on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X | S and included in Xbox Game Pass.

Overall, Somerville feels like great ambition being stretched a little thin, and fundamentally, the way it feels to actually play makes me wish it spent a little longer in the oven, refining and polishing the best parts. Fans of the genre, and sci-fi fans in particular will absolutely find a lot to love in this 5 hour or so adventure, but once the credits roll, you may be left feeling more than a little underwhelmed.

What happens when your world is suddenly turned upside down by forces you don’t understand? Somerville throws you into such a situation when unexplained phenomena disrupt your character’s idyllic life with his family. Given a strange power that can clear away unknown structures, you must find a way to reunite with your family and survive.

Jumpship's debut mixes grand sci-fi and familial drama in a more cinematic take on PLAYDEAD's earlier titles to mixed effect.

It was a bold move for the devs to try and move this traditionally 2D style of game into this hybrid 3D space, but I can’t help but feel that Jumpship would have been better off leaving it in 2D, because that extra dimension ends up just weighing the game down. It’s weirdly apt that right at the end of the game, when I’d got two different endings but was trying to unlock what I’d imagine was the ‘good’ ending, I experienced a massive bug that for a moment seemed like a creative decision, as I fell through the world, was reunited with my family on a grey platform in some empty void, then jumped off again to go into an infinite fall. In the end, Somerville’s admirable artistic vision and technical issues merged into one, poignantly showing that these two aspects of a game can’t ultimately be separated.

Gorgeous, creative, and tense, Somerville can make for a fairly gripping adventure, but difficulty seeing what you're doing, a fair amount of frustration, and an underwhelming conclusion make the experience less than it could have been.

Some clever puzzles, great visuals, and a solid story help carry Somerville through its occasional rough spots.

Somerville begins with a peek into the life of a young family and their dog. Everyone fell asleep watching TV on the couch, but the curious toddler gets themselves into some inconsequential trouble, forcing the family into their routine. Both the child and dog need to be fed and the kitchen needs to be cleaned, but something feels off. In an explosive moment that truly caught me by surprise, the family is suddenly reckoning with an alien invasion. An intense, often scary adventure kicks off from there. When Somerville hits its highs and fires on all cylinders, it’s a moving spectacle, but unfortunately, technical hiccups and some unclear puzzles hold it back from being truly incredible.

It's hard to recommend Somerville purely on the basis of what loosely-tied and ultimately lacking material its narrative provides. A story, so to speak, devoid of a satisfying conclusion (not least if you're going for all possible endings) wherein the vague explanation throughout doesn't always work in its favor. Having said that, the same hands-off approach to its puzzle design does provide more than enough positives to render the game an enjoyable-enough trek. At least for those willing to toss such lacking explanation on its world to the side. Complimented by a style of presentation unafraid to shake up its framing from time to time, as well as respectable visual left-turns along the way. Somerville may lack the foundation or staying power to justify its narrative's more personal but muddled intent, but its gameplay and philosophy on letting players figure things out for their own still wins out overall.

Somerville is the debut game from Jumpship. It plays very differently to the beloved Playdead games it won't ever escape comparison to, and as a result, while it stands apart as a gaming experience I won’t easily forget, is ultimately one I do not hold in such high regard.

Jumpship has created a gorgeous work of art that just achieves greatness in Somerville, in spite of some control quirks.