SOMA is an upcoming horror game from Frictional Games, the developers responsible for Amnesia: The Dark Descent. As you’d expect it’s going to be another horror, this time taking place under the deep blue sea.
The game was first announced back in 2013 and aside from a few more teasers here and there, not much else has been revealed about the game. According to Frictional’s official blog, the game is “pretty much complete,” with just a few things that need to be added or tweaked.
Recently, an ARG (alternate reality game) cropped up on the SOMA website that allows users to input commands. If you’re resourceful enough, you can unlock more info about the upcoming title, including some related videos and images.
What Has Been Found?
Aside from a few images, this neat teaser trailer was uncovered too. It appears to show the same facility we’ll explore in SOMA.
This teaser was also uncovered:
According to Reddit, several users have reported receiving a 10 digit CD key for the game that will either allow them to download it at launch via Steam or participate in the Beta.
How Do You Unlock This Stuff?
If you don’t want to figure everything out for yourself, you can check out this Pastebin guide on the SOMA ARG. I’m not going to cover every single thing in great detail. Instead, I’ll show you the basics — the ropes so to speak — and you can head on over to the site to unlock all the goodies on your own.
It takes a bit of trial and error to find the different secrets. Good luck!
The first thing you’ll want to do is type in “dir,” and after that hit the enter key. This will reveal the contents of the root directory, including any files and sub-folders.
Commands
From there, you’ll be using standard programming commands. The full list of commands that work in the Pathos system are:
- list/dir/ls
- run [application]
- cd [directory] (cd.. to go back)
- login [username] [password]
- pinfo [firstname] [lastname]
- help
- ping
- database
- exit/quit
- simon
Some users have also reported the following commands work, but they don’t work for everyone:
- ark
- soma
- wau
Interactions
The next step is to choose a file or directory and interact with it, just as you would a computer.
For example, in the root directory there is a text file called “root.txt” that I would like to read. Simply typing in root.txt and hitting enter does not do anything. This tells me that it needs to be opened with another program. The first time I tried this game I failed to get root.txt to work, but I kept playing around with the commands until I found the solution.
You need to use the “run” command to execute. It must also be followed up by the program and file you wish to interact with. So, for instance, after typing “run read root.txt” and pressing enter the information from the root text file was displayed in the console on the right.
Remember, if you want to cut out a lot of the trial and error you can always refer to the Pastebin tutorial for all the available commands.
Exploring Directories
To change directory or enter a sub-directory, you’ll need to type the command “cd” followed by the directory name. Since we want to look at the “/wau” directory we’re going to type “cd wau” just like that (you can see me do this in the image below).
Once the directory is open, we immediately see two .vid or video files. To play them, we’ll need to use a similar command as the one we did to open the text file from earlier.
Simply type in “run play reed.vid” and the video will begin playing in the right console window. You can use the same command for the other video, as well.
Logging In
Some of the directories and files will return an “access denied” error code when you try to open them. That’s because you are not logged-in to the system with an administrator account — similar to how Windows and Linux users work. If you don’t have the proper credentials you cannot access the content.
Eventually, you’ll need to login as an admin.
Simply enter the following command, “login ireed yuLRzzz” and you’ll be provided the appropriate permissions. Yes, that login is case sensitive.
That’s about it! If you keep all of this stuff in mind you should be well on your way to unlocking all the secrets that PathosII has to offer. Good luck and godspeed!
