Ontos video reveals lunar lab horror and talking rat wall
A new video for Ontos, the upcoming horror game from the creators of Soma, reveals a creepy, puzzle-focused experience set in a lunar lab, featuring a
Ontos, the next philosophical horror game from Soma and Amnesia developer Frictional Games, is shaping up to be a creepy and deranging puzzler. A new 10-minute, loosely edited video preview reveals the game's setting: a mad science hotel on the moon filled with story-rich sci-fi ephemera.
According to Rock Paper Shotgun, the video suggests the experience will focus more on open-ended experimentation and environmental storytelling than on traditional monster-driven scares. The location is described as gorgeous, with curving padded walls, coloured pipes, bright utility signs, scratched metal, and glossy glass. It is not a nice place. Ominous details include a cheekily placed "no running" sign at the entrance to a dark area and paper lanterns that feel like foreshadowing, reminiscent of the porcine masks in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
The Puzzling Premise
The gameplay shown involves peaceably picking at terminals full of emails, whiteboards with layouts and blueprints, and chunky pronged dictaphones the size of your forearm. There is a fleeting suggestion of direct hostility from a swivelling security camera, which can be bamboozled by lobbing a cardboard box. The developers have framed Ontos as more of a puzzler than a game of jump scares. Journal entries seen in the video show overt plot connections to Frictional's previous game, Soma, discussing themes of clones and copies.
The Infamous Rat Wall
The video also features the game's most bizarre element: a talking AI server made out of rats, which rustled the internet's jimmies when the game was announced. The encounter begins with a single rat squirming on a table with gadgets stuck in its head, surrounded by instructions for their insertion or removal. The player then encounters the talking rat wall itself and is invited to perform a similar process of gruesome rewiring. The serried rat tails twitch like tongues while the entity talks. Rock Paper Shotgun notes that, according to a Steam blog by the developers, there are several ways to resolve this scenario.
The Verdict and Release
The source's current verdict on the game, based on the video, is positive, answering the overarching question of whether Ontos will be any good. The game is scheduled to launch next year. The preview concludes by stating the writer has already demanded the right to review it according to their publication's traditional selection ritual of "first person to be named Edwin, wins". The source also posed several unanswered questions about the rat wall, including whether it can run Doom or Crysis, summarise PDFs, or comment on real-life animal experimentation.
