$19.99Somerville A wordless sci-fi story of family and invasion
Search a devastated world for your family after an alien invasion, in a cinematic adventure told without a single word.
Is Somerville worth it?
Somerville is worth it if…
- you like stories told through images rather than dialogue, and enjoy piecing the meaning together yourself
- you want atmosphere, scale and sound design more than challenge
- you have a soft spot for classic sci-fi about ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances
- you would rather linger in a place than race through it
Screenshots
A catastrophe seen from one family's side
The invasion is global, but the story is not. It follows a young family separated in the final moments of humanity's conflict with a hostile alien civilisation, and your job is to find the means to make them whole again. Nobody speaks. There is no text to read, no exposition to sit through: the whole story reaches you through images, body language and what the ruined world around you shows. That makes it a quiet, heavy experience, and it also means you interpret it yourself. What the aliens wanted, what the resistance did, what it all meant: the game leaves room for your own reading, and the multiple endings each carry their own significance to dig into.
Exploring, hiding and reading the aliens
You move through a landscape altered by alien sediment, a 2.5D world with real depth where the camera pulls back for wide, film-like views of the devastation. Progress comes from watching and experimenting: study an alien entity, learn what it does, then use that. The alien material that drenches the world can melt and solidify, and the puzzles grow out of that altered terrain. When danger finds you, you flee, hide, or in some cases negotiate your way through. The puzzles themselves are light rather than brain-bending, and the pace is deliberately slow: this is a game about drinking in a broken world and piecing together what happened, not about testing your reflexes. The sound design carries a lot of that atmosphere, and headphones earn their keep here.
What should you know before playing?
Is there any dialogue or text in the story?
No. The entire narrative is told visually, through what you see, what characters do and what the environment shows. Even the aliens communicate without words. That is part of the design: it puts interpretation in your hands, and it also means the game never explains itself. If you like working out a story rather than being told one, that is the appeal. If you want clear answers about the aliens' motives, you will have to dig for them, and even then some questions stay open.
How long is it, and how hard are the puzzles?
It is a short game, around four to five hours for a first run, with multiple endings to uncover afterwards. The puzzles are on the gentle side: most are about observing your surroundings and figuring out where to go or what to interact with, not about complex logic. The real challenge is often simply reading the scene, since the game gives no hints about what to do next.
Does the slow pace actually suit the game?
It is a fair question, because the pace divides opinion. The slowness is deliberate: the game wants you to take in the scale of the catastrophe and the small human moments inside it, and much of its power comes from that patience. If you go in expecting constant escalation or tricky platforming, the measured walking pace can feel like a drag. Come for the atmosphere and the story, and the pace reads as tension rather than padding.
