I feel weird still being someone who actually really liked the monster encounters.
But I played SOMA literally after a week of playing all the Penumbra and Amnesia games blindly for the first time, and I played all of those are hard difficulty. SOMA itself doesn't have difficulty settings, and how it works often is you can get caught once but often the second time will send you to the last checkpoint. However, I think I only got caught a second time once my whole entire blind run of SOMA. I managed to go through the game and react on instinct to never really get caught in any of the encounters. They're infrequent outside of one segment of the game, and I found them a joy due to the different so of arenas and small twists each monster brings.
THE THING IS... I didn't play SOMA like a hide'n'seek horror game most of the time. I always see everyone say, "Oh yeah, the encounters are bad, I hid in a corner..." And I think that's where the dissonance I have with others is. Surprisingly enough, I don't think SOMA is as much of a hide'n'seek horror game as many think it is. I went through must of the game sprinting and throwing things in my way and surviving rather than hiding, and it proved highly successful. All the monsters had a quirk that made it obvious if they were worth hiding from or not.
The blind enemies, for example, were easy to make a lot of noise in an area, then creep your way to where you want to go and avoid them, and since they're slow you can make a mad dash. The enemy with the light head got super pissed off when you looked at it, so the goal was to simply not look at it but move so it didn't catch you as it slowly approached. The crying girls who get pissed are like alarms, just don't trip too many things near them. The enemy at the end who kind of fast-forward and slows-down movement I just ran from and made loops in the level as I unlocked doors.
I just think too many people tried to play this too meticulously and weren't experimental enough, trying to use the same approach for every monster.
