I was largely nonplussed by Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, particularly its relentless barrage of identikit fantasy action games that I struggled to tell apart. But one game stood out like a rat-powered computer in an elven glade, and that was Ontos, Frictional Games’ latest horror adventure/existential crisis 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 was instantly intrigued and keen to learn more, so I was delighted to discover that Frictional graced us with a longer look at Ontos in action.
The 10-minute showcase focuses on the same part of the game as the shorter trailer. But it adds significant context to how Ontos plays and the kinds of challenges you’ll be dealing with. It starts with the player character—a woman named Aditi—arriving at the hospital wing of Ontos’ repurposed ‘Moon Hotel’ Samsara via an internal railway system, before exploring the wing and unpicking an experiment run by a scientist called Crombie.
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In moment-to-moment play, Ontos shares a lot in common with most of Frictional’s other 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.
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Eventually, Aditi arrives at Crombie’s experiment, which involves the rat server-rack seen in the Gamescom trailer. Crombie, speaking through the rat server, says he tried to create a copy of his personality to be stored in the rat RAM, but accidentally uploaded his consciousness from his own body, which sits slumped on a chair in the same room in a near-vegetative state. He then asks Aditi to help him return his consciousness to his body. It’s a reasonable request, provided the voice in the rat computer really does belong to the original Crombie.
Such philosophical dilemmas were exactly what made SOMA such a brilliant and unusual horror game, and the showcase has convinced me that Ontos’ spin on these more intellectual scares will be worth a investigating the very least. The only thing I’m not totally sold on is Aditi’s voice acting, which to me sounds a bit too chipper for someone confronted with such traumatic, reality-defying imagery.
In any case, 2027 can’t come soon enough. Yet while Ontos was my favourite game shown at ONL, I wasn’t quite the only thing that piqued my interest. Alien Isolation 2 seems to be shaping up to be a worthy successor to the original, as Joshua Wolens discovered in his hands-on demo. And naturally I’m up for one last adventure as Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, which Joshua also saw in action in Cologne last month.
