This week and last, Frictional Games began teasing a new sci-fi game. Two trailers were released, each showing unsettling footage of robots acting strangely. It seemed, based on the teaser site, that Frictional was set to tease the game for weeks. Today, however, the developer has officially unveiled Soma.
Soma will be another horror game from Frictional, which is best-known as the developer behind the popular Amnesia indie horror games. It will be coming to PlayStation 4 and PC sometime in 2015.
Players will take on the role of a normal person trapped in a “nightmarish” sci-fi world. Like previous Frictional games, gamers will have to use their wits to survive, rather than shoot everything in sight.
Thomas Grip, the creative director at Frictional, revealed a bit more about the game over at Sony’s PlayStation blog. He calls Soma a “proper” sci-fi game in which the themes of consciousness and free will are explored through strange creatures and settings, as well as unsettling machines. From the blog post:
The subject that SOMA will discuss is consciousness. Personally, I find it the most profound questions that it is possible to ask. “How can the feeling of subjective experience arise from a chunk of flesh?” Exploring this further takes us to questions such as “Can machines be conscious?” and “Do we have free will?” It quickly gets very disturbing, and is ideal for a futuristic horror setting. It is the kind of sci-fi that we want to make.
The first trailer for the game shows exactly what Grip is referring to. Technology, brains, blood, death, and unfeeling machines combine to make the game feel very unsettling: