I've probably been 5 hours in myself so far, but I can tell already despite some saying it's a 12 hour game that it is not giving me that suspense horror vibe that Alien Isolation did. Worse yet, the tedium caused me to force the pace too much in one spot. It's misleading because in some places, the scripted nature of the game gives you no option but to run to escape, doing that in a bad spot however leaves you gimped with slow, disoriented movement and annoying onscreen distortions that can't be disabled if the monster catches you, even with distortions turned off in the settings.
So then I went into the user config, since it's a UE game, which are easy to edit, and still no luck. I was just about to get past the hole I'd dug myself in, gimped, no health nodes, etc, then another craptastic thing happened. I'd just found a door that I still don't know what caused to open, and I was sure it was the way out, but the textures were missing in the room it lead to, I fell through the map, and my saves got corrupted.
I tried to remove the most recent autosave in the save folder, but the game kept putting the corrupt save back in. So here I am, about 10 hours in now on a 2nd play through, with only 5 hours actual gameplay. I did however reinstall the game, and I noticed now I'm seeing the interactive icons. I had Simple Icons turned on in the menu before starting the first run through, which I mistook for having hand, etc, icons on. Despite trying to set it back to off, I could not get the normal symbol icons to show. So I highly recommend NOT changing that setting before actually starting a game. Removing those icons only makes it harder to figure things out anyway.
I'm trying to play more patiently now. The puzzles are actually more challenging than the stealth horror aspect, and some of the level design is not bad, but a lot of it feels samey, esp if it takes you a while to figure out the puzzles. I spent far too long wandering the ocean floor in some places, and let me tell you, it felt extremely monotonous. Which it can in places because there's literally no clue what to do often times.
As far as comparing to Alien Isolation, I don't feel it comes even close. AI had WAY more gameplay variety, better level design, better graphics, more atmosphere, and despite following known canon, a more compelling story. SOMA by comparison seems almost like a mere adventure game, exploring the world with the protagonist responding to many things in a very casual ho hum tone. I mean the story is fairly original if you exclude certain movie titles that follow a vaguely similar theme, and it's premise has potential, but it's just told horribly.
The dialog regarding story details most of the time is too matter of fact and poorly written, and the data, videos, pictures, and notes you encounter are made tedious by the distortion effects, having to stay glued in one spot to listen to them, or conveyed with little immersion via cheap drawings.
As much as I've said many times that Amnesia (TDD) was not scary to me, at least it had a more shocking story and immersive atmosphere. This doesn't seem to even fit in the horror category except for a few brief moments where it becomes obvious you need to move crouched and sneak around. The rest of the time it's just an adventure game.
One of the things I hate most about the game is once you take damage, your movement and visuals are awkward, slow and blurry. So unless you have a health node somewhere, it stays this way until you get past the area you're in, because there's no option to reload a checkpoint.
Maybe 10-15 hours??? Anyone know a way to find out?