While I thoroughly enjoyed Half-Life 1 (or rather, Black Mesa) and Blue Shift, Opposing Force wasn't really up to snuff, in my opinion. The gameplay was the same as in HL1 and HL:BS, though it felt significantly more difficult. There weren't as many puzzles, and the ones that were present were often frustratingly unintuitive. The level design was also confusing at times, forcing you to backtrack randomly or leading you in one direction only to bring you to a dead end. The story lacks any meaningful narrative and only really gets interesting at the very end, leaving you with a well-written ending that feels almost a little too similar to that of the main game. The game also features one of the most annoying bosses I have fought in a while and a not-insignificant number of bugs. I got stuck in elevators or on ropes frequently and had to noclip out to continue.

The AI companions, which are one of the most interesting parts of this game, tend to either refuse to follow you and just stand around or die within the first five seconds of any firefight. I assume this is intended by the developers, and it makes sense in theory, but it gets stale after you meet the sixth group of soldiers who keel over at the first sign of enemy contact.

Overall, I still recommend playing it at least once while going through the Half Life series, but I would probably skip this game on future replays.

SOMA is one of the greatest executions of classic cyberpunk that I have seen to date. While it might seem atypical for the genre due to the lack of huge cities, bright neon lights, and advertisements plastered all over the place, the themes the game focuses on are all the more typical, especially for early cyberpunk. While the focus of current works within the genre seems to have shifted more towards the future of capitalism, early works much more regularly made the relationship between humans and machines, as well as the difference between them, take center stage. SOMA follows those themes well, dealing especially with the relationship between the mind and the body, as well as, in some way, the existence of the soul. What makes us human, and what does it mean to clone someone's mind?

All this is done amazingly well in terms of the story. I won't go in-depth on the story and the world because figuring all that out is a huge part of what makes the game so enjoyable, but all the themes are wrapped into a very engaging story with characters that are believable and well-written.

The only thing that holds this game back a bit is the jank that is present in most aspects of gameplay. While I did find most of the puzzles quite fun, and the interaction with objects shows some age but feels good once you get used to it, I did have a bunch of technical difficulties throughout my playthrough. Granted, I am on Linux, so this might not apply to everyone, but the native Linux version was very unstable for me—it crashed regularly while tabbing out, and things like the gamma setting didn’t work at all. The Proton version was alright but had some windowing issues that were fixed by setting it to windowed mode and fullscreening the game through my window manager. Halfway through my playthrough, the game would only show a black screen upon starting; this was fixed by verifying the game files.

I played the game on Safe Mode because I am not good with horror, and usually, fighting in horror games just feels like a frustrating chore to me. While I knew the monsters couldn't kill me, they still managed to scare me, and the general atmosphere did not suffer.

Overall, SOMA is an experience you shouldn't miss out on. It's fairly affordable on sale and pretty short at around 8 hours of playtime. Normal Mode will give you a pretty traditional horror game experience, while Safe Mode will turn the game into more of a walking simulator, so depending on your preferences, it can be played either way.