In Soma you are regularly met with moral dilemmas, which put the lives of the few remaining humans on Earth in your hands. With most of these decisions there’s no real positive outcome, with many of them being choices to either outright kill someone or leave them with near endless solitude and suffering.
In many cases, these choices were unavoidable. One your options is simply to leave them to the horrible fate they’re already in, such as waiting to eventually realize that they’re no longer human, haven’t made it to the ark, and can no longer move, act, or even die on their own. However, there are a couple of exceptions to this, most notably being the case of Carl.
If you hadn’t come through, Carl could have been left in his robot body like the others, but because of your desire to progress through the game area, you need to divert the power keeping him alive. You can choose to divert the power from Carl, leaving him lying there in a state of intense agony, or divert power from the whole area, outright killing him.
You could argue the moral choice is to spare him, to avoid taking away any chance there might have been for him to regain his agency, but then you’re putting him into an extended torment that would likely leave a permanent scar based on a hope that might not come true.
You could argue that killing him is the moral choice, as it’s a mercy to avoid his torment, but you’ve still taken away any agency he had to make the decision himself.
Not to mention, whichever choice you make, you are the one creating the situation, he wouldn’t need to be tormented or killed if you didn’t choose to push past him. No matter which of the options you choose, there’s no outcome that can be easy on the conscience.
But what if there were a third option?
In the game Undertale, one of the many paths you can choose to take through the game is what the fandom calls the “genocide” route. To do this you have to choose to kill every single character in the game, searching out every encounter and killing every major character, all of whom you could normally have chosen to spare. When you see this route to completion you’re met with the game’s most difficult boss, Sans, the only character who is no longer willing to accept your mercy after the countless people you killed. Because of this, in universe, this fight should only have two ways to play out, either you kill him and complete your massacre of the Underground or he kills you. However, Sans is fully aware that you can travel through time through saving and loading, that you can restart the fight as many times as you want, and he simply asks you to quit, to stop playing and stop resetting.
This brings me back to your third option in Soma, when faced with a decision in a game that impedes your progression, one where all options provided will leave you feeling equally morally bankrupt, you always have that extra choice, the privilege afforded to you as the player in control of the world. The moral decision to make isn’t to kill Carl or leave him in torment, it’s to leave the game, and not make the decision at all.
Works Cited
SOMA. Frictional Games, 2015.
Undertale, Toby Fox, 2015
War Games, John Badam, 1983
