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SOMA, the first-person sci-fi horror, will release for PC and PS4 on September 22, developer Frictional Games – creator or Amnesia – has announced.
In SOMA players take on the role of a normal guy in a nightmarish world they don’t understand.
A new 12-minute gameplay video will give you a better idea of the kind of experience and scares on offer.
The game’s been in development for five years, so announcing a release date is a huge moment for the dev team. But why has the game taken so long to create? The studio’s creative director Thomas Grip explins.
“The biggest issue has been how to handle our themes properly. We didn’t want SOMA to be just another ‘run from the monster’-affair. While it does have that sort of thing too, as our gameplay video shows, the horror runs way deeper,” explains Grip.
“The aim with SOMA is to explore the unsettling aspects of subjects such as consciousness, identity and our very existence. We didn’t want to do this by simply having some ham-fisted exposition now and then, we wanted the player to experience this first-hand.
“Getting this right has been extremely hard as it’s not something you can easily iterate on. Creating that disturbing sense of existential horror just right takes hours of setup. It also requires a lot of assets to be in place before it can be tested properly. So while other games can make several iterations a week on their foundational elements, it’s taken us roughly a year for each iteration.”
SOMA is certainly looking worth the wait. The Two Cowards can’t wait to give it a go.
Source: Frictional Games
