SOS (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
1,598A playthrough of Vic Tokai's 1994 adventure game for the SNES, SOS.
Played through as Capris Wisher. I get his best ending in this playthrough. At 59:13, I included some of the alternate endings you can see while playing as Capris.
SOS is a game quite unlike anything else to be seen on the SNES. Seemingly adapted straight from the script of The Poseidon Adventure (Titanic wasn't released until four years after this game appeared!), the game begins with a giant wave capsizing the Lady Crithania luxury liner during a bad storm. You select who you want to play as and set about exploring the ship, searching for your loved ones (and other random survivors) and escaping before the Lady Crithania's hull completely disappears below the murky surface of the Atlantic, killing everyone aboard.
You are given one hour, in real-time, to collect potential survivors and make it to the boiler room (where the salt water eventually will hit the boiler causing it explode, creating a massive hole in the hull through which you can escape).
There are an endless number of ways you can approach the game - there is no set "correct" path for any of the characters. However, you will only get the best ending if you save your character's "important" person as well as several other passengers.
It's an adventure game that relies heavily on exploration and platforming, with controls that feel somewhat like stiff facsimiles of what you find in Prince of Persia. After the ship initially turns over, you'll find that everything is upside down. The doors are on the ceilings, staircases run the wrong way, compartments eventually begin filling with water, and before long, several areas of the ship lose power.
After thirty-three minutes have passed, the ship begins to violently pitch back and forth. In what is hands-down the best use I've ever seen of Mode 7 effects, the ship rotates around you at regular intervals. Furniture starts raining down from other floors, the walls become the floors and ceilings, and God help anyone that is in a long hallway if ship turns itself at a 90 degree angle - anyone who can't hold on will plunge to their death, usually with a pretty brutal sounding scream thrown in for good measure.
The whole experience is tense, filled with suspense, and far more uncertain than most games. There's a good amount of luck involved in escaping in time: the random movements of the ship can kill you unexpectedly at any point - each death removes 5 minutes from the remaining time, and sometimes the wonky pathfinding AI for the survivors makes them do some pretty stupid and suicidal things - but the game is short enough that you can experiment with nearly any situation and never have to worry about losing several hours worth of progress.
It's certainly not perfect - the graphics are fairly plain (and it's very easy to get lost on such a huge map when so many areas look similar), the writing in the English translation is super-awkward and stilted, and the controls don't always cooperate - but SOS is one of those games that's so unique and entertaining that it's easy to put up with its flaws. And, with five characters, each with several endings, there's a lot of replayability here for anyone that just can't get enough.
Finally, I think it's worth noting that this was developed by Human Entertainment. It feels a lot like their 1995 SNES title Clock Tower many respects, seeming as if they were exploring different options for "survival horror" well before the term survival horror ever actually existed. There are a lot of conventions established here that fans of Human's later work will recognize.
I almost want to say it's like Clock Tower mixed with Super Metroid.
I loved SOS. It might've been a bit too ambitious for its own good, but the game play is solid, the premise was (and still is) quite original for a video game, and it's one of the few games I've seen that leveraged the available tech to make something that wasn't really possible before. The Mode 7 effect is seriously awesome here, and the game wouldn't have really been possible without it. Plenty of games used the effect, but very few made it an integral part of the game play like was done here.
The potential for brilliance was here, and though SOS never quite fulfills that potential, it still makes for a damn fun game.
_____
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete