Somerville review: the most beautiful game I’ve ever played

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I was enraptured from the start. A toddler ambles around a room, filled only by the light of a TV’s static, as the parents sleep on the sofa. It’s the most unlikely opening to a story about an invasion, but one that gives you all the info you need to be invested. A low-key, personal disaster movie begins in the moments that follow, and I was hooked throughout the hours that proceeded.

Jumpship has created a game that is hard to define. While it loosely feels similar to studio co-founder Dino Patti’s Inside (which he produced at Playdead), Somerville is on an entirely grander, more beautiful scale. It is, despite some fiddly moments, a quite magnificent sci-fi adventure, and an astonishing achievement for writer/director Chris Olsen and the team.

This article is going to be brief, only in part due to the fact that I’m pushed for time. I simply don’t want to say too much about what happens in Somerville – itself a game that packs a lot into a fairly brief runtime. On a purely functional level, this is a kind of evolution of Inside, in so much as a lot of the game is spent walking around with your character, more or less seeing the sights. There’s more exploration here than in Inside, though, and the environment is more interactive, but this isn’t a platformer of any description.

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