Category: The Game Awards

Introducing Ontos – Frictional Games’ Spiritual Successor to Soma

Thomas Grip, Creative Director at Frictional Games

Summary

Ontos is a sci-fi mystery thriller coming to Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC as an Xbox Play Anywhere title in 2026.
A spiritual successor to Frictional Games’ Soma, explore a repurposed moon hotel and take part in morally complex Experiments.
Find out more from the Creative Director following its reveal at The Game Awards 2025.

Hi everyone – Thomas from Frictional Games here. We’re so excited to finally talk about our next game: Ontos, a sci-fi mystery thriller coming in 2026.

Since the release of Soma ten years ago, we’ve been hard at work trying to take that experience and bring it to the next level. Something that pushes our gameplay, design scope, and philosophical themes further than we’ve ever gone before, and we’re finally able to show a little more for you today.

In Ontos you’ll play as Aditi, who has received a message from her estranged father promising to reveal the mysteries of their shared past, including the truth about an inexplicable miracle from her childhood. Aditi’s quest for answers will lead her to the repurposed moon hotel Samsara, a shadow of its former glory. Aditi knows the journey ahead will be difficult, but she’s driven to get to the bottom of the impossible enigmas that have played on her mind, haunted her even, since she was a kid.

Every inch of Samsara is filled with mystery. We wanted it to feel lived-in and like a place players will want to explore every detail of. Every door can be opened, and every corner of the station has secrets that can lead to a deeper understanding of the story, clues on how to solve the next puzzle, and details revealing the truth of what happened there.

Players will come across a number of different characters and scenarios across Samsara that will challenge them in unexpected, and potentially horrifying, ways. Our troubled cast will introduce complex Experiments that will make you question your own morality. Ontos doesn’t hold your hand, and it’s important to pay attention to the environment, what characters are saying, and the clues around you to help decide what action you want to take next.

We worked hard to make these set piece Experiments nuanced and complex, with many potential outcomes and solutions. In many ways, they are one of the core elements of the game players will discover – engaging with these complicated, morally complex, scenarios that will challenge them in different ways as Aditi continues her search for the truth.

Experimentation, discovery, brute force… There are so many ways to pick apart these major encounters and discover unique solutions. For instance, you come across a person seemingly trapped in a bizarre computer server made of rats. Is he really who he says he is? Is the situation as clear cut and straightforward as he makes it out to be? I think these Experiments will be something players will talk about a lot – how they solved every situation, and the consequences that came with it.

When we first released Soma back in 2015, there were some lingering ideas of how we could push things further, both in terms of gameplay and also narratively. So, in some ways, this game takes the ideas we had in Soma and pushes them way, way further, acting as a spiritual successor of sorts. To assist with this, we have a whole new proprietary game engine, HPL4, which helps us get there. It helps make a big leap with the interconnectivity of the space – Samsara is this large, expansive area and we wanted it to feel like ‘if you can see something from a window – you can go there’. It’s by far the most densely detailed and complex world we’ve ever created and feels like a natural evolution for us in so many ways.

One thing we’ll be clear about though – Ontos is not really a horror game in a traditional sense. We’ve taken time to create a world and story that is unnerving and unsettling. While players will encounter horrific scenes, they won’t be chased all the time by monsters (like in some of our past games like Soma and Amnesia). Our game is complex and layered, and we want the tension to be more personal and cerebral rather than imminent danger from monsters – making players think “am I making the right decisions here? And if I’m not, what will the consequences be?” That’s our goal with Ontos.

We have a lot more to reveal in the future, but we’re very confident this will be a mind-bending experience unlike anything you’ve played before. You can wishlist the game now, and you can let us know what you think about Ontos by following our social pages here.