Razer Soma Chroma gaming chair review

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.

Soma Chroma specs

Materials

Steel frame, black fabric, plastic and cold-cured foam foam

Recline angle

90-155°

Seat depth

47cm

Max seat height

51cm

Armrest height

Up to 78.9 cm

Backrest width

58.5 cm

Max user weight

150kg

Chair weight

24.5kg

Dimensions

53.1 x 26.4 x 28.1in / 135 x 67 x 71.5cm

Price

$499 / £499

Buy if...

✅ 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.

Do not buy if...

❌ 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.

What it doesn’t have is an awful lot in the way of adjustability, especially compared to some other Razer chairs. The backrest goes all the way from 90° upright to a 155° recline, but the armrests only have swivel and height adjustment (they are at least padded) and you can change the height. While there's a lumbar curve built into the backrest you can’t alter it, though there's a butterfly tilt mechanism for the seat itself. Larger readers will be pleased to know that the Soma Chroma can accommodate a butt of up to 150kg/331lbs and a frame of up to 200cm/6ft 6in, and you’ll need the XL version of the Secretlab Titan Evo to get that kind of support.

Those signature RGB lighting strips mean this is an electric chair, and they’re powered by a remarkably short USB-C cable, a curious thing for a chair described as ‘wireless’. You absolutely won’t be able to plug it directly into your PC tower, and while you could use an extension lead (Razer will sell you one for £20, but any capable of supplying power will do) to hook it up to a wall charger or other Type-C port, the best thing is to use a portable battery pack (it needs 20W, PD 2.0) and tuck it into the convenient zip-up pouch on the back of the seat cushion, where you can also store the single spare bolt included in the box. It might have been nice for Razer to have included a battery with its $/£500 chair, but then a headrest isn’t in the box either.

While there are some buttons built into the top of the chair above your head, you’ll really need the Razer Synapse app on your PC to control the lighting, and it’s the first chair I’ve ever seen that comes with a 2.4GHz dongle (at last, the ‘wireless’ part of the product description) and has built-in Bluetooth like it’s a keyboard. Perhaps one day a chair will have pressure sensors built into its seat so you can control games by wiggling your hips, but we’re not there yet.

You can keep the lights in Razer green, make them coruscate in many colours, or react to what’s going on in your games; and if you’ve already got a deskful of Razer peripherals, like its light-up mic or light-up mouse pad or one of its light-up keyboards, then it will fit right in.

An opportunity seems to have been missed to integrate RGB into the Razer logo, given that it’s right there in-between the strips, but that might violate the brand guidelines. In fact, why there isn't more RGB on it is a total mystery. It could run up the back, along the armrests, and even in the grooves of the seat to bring blue, green and other common eye colours to your lower extremities. At the end of the year Razer could sell you some RGB tinsel and colour-changing baubles to hang on it. This would certainly feel more complete, rather than the minimal implementation we have here.

As it stands, or sits, when you’re seated in the chair you can’t really see the lights, which raises the question of who they’re for. The Chroma Soma is a chair meant to be looked at from the outside, specifically from about the same level as its occupant’s head, suggesting it’s been designed for the subset of gamers who do it on camera.

And despite what Twitch would have you believe, that’s a small niche. Perhaps this limited appeal explains the high price, as while this is a comfortable, well-padded chair that’s nicely made and looks good, you pay the price for the RGB lighting in both cost and a lower level of adjustability, and most of us would probably rather be able to pull a lever to stick a cushion into our lower backs than illuminate our own ears. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and plug in my chair.