// PC GAMER — GAMING
Razer Soma Chroma gaming chair review
Sure, a chair that lights up. Why not? The Soma Chroma is not a bad thing to sit in, but for the same money you could get something even better with no lighting. It feels fitting for Razer to have produced this chair, but it also feels like a product in search of an audience.
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Picture the scene. It’s Christmas morning, the sky is still dark, and Santa is heaving his gigantic ass through your central heating ducts. He emerges into the living room; perhaps he oozes like toothpaste, or pops out fully formed like a jelly from a mould. We’ll never know. He looks around, picks a bit of fluff out of his ear, and sees what he’s looking for: there, in the corner of the room it sits, lit up like... well, a Christmas tree. Only it’s not a spruce or fir, but a chair.
Razer has reinvented the Christmas tree as something you can sit on, and its name is the Soma Chroma. Yes, literature fans, it’s got the same name as the drug used by the totalitarian state in Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World that keeps citizens perpetually happy, docile, and compliant. Perhaps it is therefore a metaphor for videogames, which famously leave their participants meek and submissive. Or maybe not.
The RGB strips are only at the very top, at the sides of your head if you’re tall enough, but something about their shape distinctly recalls the angles of a Nordmann (or one of those car air fresheners that dangle from the rear-view mirror), as do the harder edges you’ll find elsewhere in contrast to the softer curves of something like the Iskur V2. Otherwise it’s a standard racing-style seat with the usual Razer black and green styling, and this even extends to the thin gloves (Razer calls them ‘building gauntlets, which is so cute) provided to protect your soft hands during the only bit of manual work many of us may ever do.
Steel frame, black fabric, plastic and cold-cured foam foam
✅ Your PC gaming setup doesn’t have enough RGB: It may only have two light strips, but they’re colourful and customisable and feel a bit like Christmas. Which is nice.
❌ You have no need to light up the sides of your head: Seriously, get something with adjustable lumbar support and you’ll be able to play for longer after you hit 30.
Building a gaming chair always looks like a much worse job than it really is, and the Soma Chroma is no exception. One of the biggest bits is dealing with the large box, then getting everything out of its plastic packaging and tidying it away, though at least all the bags have the effect of protecting the chair while in transit. You chonk the casters into the base, insert the gas cylinder, undo some screws with the included tool, do them back up again, attach the back to the base and lift this assemblage into place on top of the cylinder. It’s all very easy, and there are plastic covers to hide the screw heads once you’re finished.
The seat base has channels in it that are probably for ass-related airflow purposes but which are just as likely to fill up with crumbs, uneaten popcorn, and bits of chocolate. The natural state of the office or gaming chair is abject filth and sultry stickiness within a week of unpacking them, and the hard plastic rear and fabric covering of the seat and backrest are going to be easy enough to wipe or vacuum clean.