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Frictional Wants ‘SOMA’ To “Chill You To Your Core”
Frictional Games, the makers of the terrifying Amnesia series, revealed their next horror game last week. It’s called SOMA, and it looks absolutely terrifying. A blend of sci-fi and horror, SOMA looks and plays like a Frictional game, but there’s something sinister about it that the developer hasn’t yet unveiled.
Frictional’s creative director Thomas Grip recently took to the PlayStation blog to chat about the upcoming game. See what he had to say about it after the jump.
The game’s been in development for three years now and it’s not due to release on PC and the PlayStation 4 until 2015, so the developer is obviously taking their time with it.
“SOMA is meant to chill you to your core, and confront you with questions about your very existence.” Grip wrote.
On the surface, SOMA is a first person horror game driven by a terrifying narrative. But it goes much deeper than that.
“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.”
Grip explained that Frictional’s previous efforts, which includes the Amnesia and Penumbra franchises, were built around a core mechanic, with the setting and themes being by-products. The gameplay came first and the story second.
With SOMA, the theme, story and setting take center stage. Frictional’s goal is “for SOMA to not just be another carnival ride of cheap scares. It is meant to chill you to your core, and confront you with questions about your very existence.”
I can’t wait.
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“She’s mine, and I’m hers.”
The prison movie is a cornerstone of the cinematic landscape. Often adjacent to horror, there’s something inherently horrific about a building full of “convicts” jockeying for power. Criminal masterminds and the wrongfully convicted alike become pawns in a dehumanizing system and struggle to stay alive in the restrictive environment. Claire Denis pushes this genre to its outer limits with sci-fi and horror elements comparing incarceration to the prison of the human body. Her 2018 film High Life follows a group of prisoners turned astronauts who struggle to retain their humanity after the world has cast them out.
When we first meet Monte (Robert Pattinson), he’s raising a toddler on an isolated space station in the galaxy’s outer reaches. His daughter Willow was conceived through assault by fellow inmate Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche) as a part of her mission to reproduce in space. As Denis unpacks the story of this troubled crew, they slowly realize they have been discarded and forgotten. Some find freedom to enact their violent agendas while others try to retain a semblance of normalcy in the extreme environment. Essentially guinea pigs, Monte and his crewmates hurtle through space and grope for a reason to keep existing.
The Lady Killers continue Killer Moms Month with Claire Denis’ beautifully complex film. Co-hosts Jenn Adams, Mae Shults, Rocco T. Thompson, and Sammie Kuykendall chart the mysteries of the cosmos in their quest to understand the glacial plot. They’ll chat about screaming babies, space gardens, black holes and spaghetti along with heavier themes like reproduction and bodily autonomy. Why is Dr. Dibbs so obsessed with pregnancy? Why doesn’t Monte partake of the sex box? Does Mia Goth actually have a big booty and what really happened on that spaceship filled with dogs? They’ll approach the black hole and try to withstand spaghettification while zeroing in on the unpleasant themes of this exceptional film.
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