SOMA studio says its next game is not 'stressful or scary' in the traditional sense, but it'll still mess you up real good: 'The goal is to evoke this deep existential terror that stays long after you finish playing'

One of the reveals I was most jazzed for at The Game Awards 2025 was Ontos, the new thing from Frictional Games. I'm a fan of the studio's work in general, and I loved the way SOMA took the aging Amnesia formula and somehow made it better (and so much worse) by dialing back the in-the-moment horror of oh jeez gonna die and injecting a healthy dose of existential nightmares that's left me still occasionally thinking, more than 10 years later, man, what would I do?

In light of those good times, I'm very happy to hear that Ontos aims to go even harder on that more cerebral take on horror. "In your more standard horror game, say the first Amnesia, the focus is to have players survive in a scary environment. The intent is to evoke a very primal sense of fear," Frictional Games creative director Thomas Grip told GamesRadar.

"In Ontos, the focus is more cerebral. It is about encountering strange, often very disturbing, situations where the player is tasked with figuring out the best approach. So, where your typical Amnesia-like game has you encountering a stalking monster, Ontos puts you face to face with a man trapped inside a computer made out of rats."

That "computer made out of rats" is one of the first things seen in the Ontos reveal trailer, and while it's not scary in the traditional sense, it definitely sure ain't right, either.

Grip said Ontos "is easily the deepest and most complex game we have done from a narrative perspective," and "much more open" than SOMA: There's a greater focus on exploration and discovery, and a reduced emphasis on puzzles in favor of "interactive story scenes" in which players are presented with various ways to solve scenarios and move forward. That sounds a bit like an old Telltale adventure, but Grip said those options "are not laid out to the player," but must be discovered—and of course, "it is also possible to screw it all up if you are not careful."

Exploration in Frictional games is traditionally a fraught process: You're never allowed to forget that while you're poking around in corners and under tables, some psyche-shattering horror from beyond the seventh dimension is quietly sneaking up behind you. It sounds like Ontos will be a much less nerve-wracking experience than its predecessors, however.

"Our intention is not to make a stressful or scary game in the traditional sense," Grip said. "Ontos is not a game about survival. Instead it is about providing a hands-on experience where players are forced to grapple with heavy and thought provoking themes. The goal is to evoke this deep existential terror that stays long after you finish playing."

For me, that's great: I'm a big fan of Amnesia's work, as I said, but I also really don't care for horror, and the experience of playing Frictional games is genuinely stressful and unpleasant. In a good way! But also, not good at all. It's hard to explain: I love having had the experience after the fact, but the actual moment-to-moment of experiencing it? Not so much. So if Ontos really is able to double down on the SOMA approach of, "You won't be utterly terrified now, but you'll be haunted for the rest of your life when it's over," well, that doesn't sound so great when I spell it out like that either. But I'll take it.