I used to be largely nonplussed by Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, notably its relentless barrage of identikit fantasy motion video games that I struggled to inform aside. But one sport stood out like a rat-powered laptop in an elven glade, and that was Ontos, Frictional Games’ newest horror journey/existential disaster generator.
The Gamescom trailer was a barrage of unsettling, distinctive imagery, from rodent server-racks to slack-jawed dudes with electrodes protruding from their heads. I used to be immediately intrigued and eager to be taught extra, so I used to be delighted to find that Frictional graced us with an extended have a look at Ontos in motion.
The 10-minute showcase focuses on the identical a part of the sport because the shorter trailer. But it provides vital context to how Ontos performs and the sorts of challenges you will be coping with. It begins with the participant character—a girl named Aditi—arriving on the hospital wing of Ontos’ repurposed ‘Moon Hotel’ Samsara through an inner railway system, earlier than exploring the wing and unpicking an experiment run by a scientist referred to as Crombie.
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In moment-to-moment play, Ontos shares so much in widespread with most of Frictional’s different video games (the exception being Amnesia: The Bunker, which is more of a proto immersive sim). There’s a lot of tactile environment interaction, poking around computers for text logs, and a grisly sequence where Aditi plucks some electrodes out of a live rat’s exposed brain. On top of this is a sprinkling of stealth, as Aditi evades a security camera by throwing a box across the room. Interestingly, the camera tracks the box’s movement as it arcs through the air, which I’m sure must have featured in another game up to now. But I cannot recall an example of it.
Eventually, Aditi arrives at Crombie’s experiment, which entails the rat server-rack seen within the Gamescom trailer. Crombie, talking via the rat server, says he tried to create a duplicate of his character to be saved within the rat RAM, however by accident uploaded his consciousness from his personal physique, which sits slumped on a chair in the identical room in a near-vegetative state. He then asks Aditi to assist him return his consciousness to his physique. It’s an inexpensive request, supplied the voice within the rat laptop actually does belong to the unique Crombie.
Such philosophical dilemmas have been precisely what made SOMA such an excellent and strange horror sport, and the showcase has satisfied me that Ontos’ spin on these extra mental scares shall be value investigating the very least. The solely factor I’m not completely offered on is Aditi’s voice performing, which to me sounds a bit too chipper for somebody confronted with such traumatic, reality-defying imagery.
In any case, 2027 cannot come quickly sufficient. Yet whereas Ontos was my favorite sport proven at ONL, I wasn’t fairly the one factor that piqued my curiosity. Alien Isolation 2 appears to be shaping as much as be a worthy successor to the unique, as Joshua Wolens found in his hands-on demo. And naturally I’m up for one final journey as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, which Joshua additionally noticed in motion in Cologne final month.