Soma successor Ontos is "like Shadow of the Colossus" says its creative director: The moon-set horror is "built around the looming excitement and dread of what the next big Experiment will be like"

What do you do after making one of the scariest games ever with Amnesia: The Bunker? If you're Frictional Games, you celebrate that success by blowing up your winning formula. Ontos is a spiritual successor to the excellent undersea survival horror Soma. But instead of yet another game of high-stakes hide-and-seek, Frictional Games are branching out into new ways to terrify.

"The intended experience is simply different," explains creative director Thomas Grip, on why the studio doesn't see Ontos as another traditional horror title. "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."

"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."

Hello computer

That computer promises it can "explain what's going on" which is a pretty bold claim for a chatty machine made out of living rodents. But this is Frictional Games' ambition – to show you things that confound and leave you asking questions rather than simply desperately fleeing to the shadows. "There will still be a little bit of hide-and-seek, but it is quite limited and almost always possible to overcome by other means," Grip promises.

"Our intention is not to make a stressful or scary game in the traditional sense. 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."

Ontos is set on Samsura, an opulent moon hotel built atop the ruins of a failed mining colony. Unfortunately, its residents didn't pay enough attention to the lessons of Bioshock and now the moon hotel has been split up into philosophical factions, where 'science bleeds into faith'. It's a significantly larger setting for what sounds like Frictional's most ambitious game yet.

"Ontos is easily the deepest and most complex game we have done from a narrative perspective," says Grip. "There are many layers to unravel and every room seeps with things to discover. Exploration is an integral part of the experience. In Soma, the game was quite linear and the narrative heavily relied on this. Ontos is much more open."

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"Players can tackle things in different orders and in many different ways. This means that the story is more player driven, and less of a curated experience," he says. "It's an approach that fits quite nicely with the story of the game, which is all about searching for the truth and eventually reaching a revelation on the true nature of things."

It's this search for the truth has also pushed Frictional to engineer more varied approaches to play than in anything you've seen from this studio before. "We want to have gameplay that feels more interesting, immersive and player-driven. So this time around players have an assortment of tools and multiple ways to overcome obstacles. The goal is to give a more open-ended playstyle, reward careful thinking and to encourage creativity," Grip explains.

Anyone who struggled through Soma likely still has nightmares about getting its bloody doors open. The game loved halting your escape attempts by having you desperately try to decipher some obtuse contraption before a sea monster introduced itself to your face. Effective, but the studio is looking to move away from these more familiar puzzles for Ontos.

"While we have a few more standard puzzles spread out over the game, the bigger ones are less puzzles and more 'interactive story scenes'," he says. "The player faces a situation and is then given a wide range of options on how to complete it. The various approaches are not laid out to the player, but it is up to them to discover them. It is also possible to screw it all up if you are not careful. Oftentimes the survival of a character is in your hands. And worse, it is not clear whether life or death is the correct option."

Shadow of the Experiment

There's a lot of sinister experiments occurring on Samsura, as we're sure a certain rat-computer would attest. Frictional Games promises these experiments will make us 'confront existential questions that will make you question the nature of the soul, suffering, and the very fabric or reality itself', something I usually only do after a heavy night on the gin.

"The experiments are very much the highlights of the game," says Grip. "In a way, one can liken it to something like Shadow of the Colossus, where the boss fights are the core of the experience. Many sequences and areas of the game are basically just extended preparations for the Experiments. Testing tools, discovering ways of interacting, saving up resources, understanding the stakes and overall just collecting enough information to be able to overcome these complex and layered scenarios. [...] Much of the game is built around the looming excitement and dread of what the next big Experiment will be like."

"We really push what can be done with a game narrative," says Grip. "When we say that we explore the nature of reality, we truly mean it. This is not just a gimmicky aspect of the story – it is the whole point of the game." System Shock 2, a clear influence on Frictional Games and just about every sci-fi horror game made since, also played around with reality-distorting, but was hamstrung by the limited resources a game had in 1999. The idea of another studio, currently at the top of their horror game, realizing it properly is as tantalizing as it is terrifying.

It won't just be several hours of chin-stroking and philosophizing on the nature of reality though. Frictional are keen to stress that they're aiming to improve on every aspect of Soma. From its level design ("we want to give players this sense of being in an actual place, not just a set of levels") to the moral decisions it asks of the player. "In Soma you had these short encounters with moral and philosophical decisions," says Grip. "E.g. 'Will you pull the plug on this person?'. These have been greatly expanded in scope and complexity."