Frictional Games returns to cerebral sci‑fi horror with ONTOS, a mind‑bending narrative mystery set in a crumbling hotel on the Moon, starring Stellan Skarsgård and positioned as the spiritual successor to SOMA.
ONTOS arrives carrying a very specific promise from Frictional Games: this is the spiritual successor to SOMA. Announced at The Game Awards 2025, the studio behind Amnesia and SOMA is returning to cerebral sci fi horror with a project it has quietly nurtured for more than a decade. ONTOS is pitched as a “mind-bending narrative mystery” about the nature of reality itself, and its debut trailer makes that ambition feel disturbingly tangible.
A hotel on the Moon, built on shifting ground
The trailer opens on Samsara, a hotel on the surface of the Moon that has been repurposed into something far stranger. At first pass it looks like a retro-futurist resort: sterile corridors washed in soft light, panoramic views of a dead lunar landscape, a lobby that feels more like a corporate retreat than a haunted house. Then the seams start to show.
Walls shudder and textures glitch, as if geometry itself is struggling to decide what shape to take. Familiar spaces loop back into themselves at impossible angles. Gravity seems to falter for a frame too long. It is classic Frictional environmental storytelling, but pulled into a setting that feels less like a dungeon and more like an off-world liminal space where reality is only partially installed.
You play as Aditi Amani, a resourceful engineer who arrives at Samsara chasing answers about her estranged father. The hotel is no longer a simple tourist trap; it is now a layered research site and memory palace, where personal history, corporate experimentation, and something more metaphysical have become entangled. The debut footage suggests a structure where every suite, service corridor and observation deck has a second meaning, like walking through a psych report you are only half-allowed to read.
Stellan Skarsgård as the voice of doubt
Frictional has always made strong use of voice work, but ONTOS is the first time the studio has led with a marquee actor. Stellan Skarsgård, known for everything from Chernobyl to Dune, features prominently in the reveal as a central figure in Aditi’s investigation.
The trailer hints at him as both authority and unreliable narrator. His voice threads through the footage like an audio log that refuses to stay in the past, cutting between paternal concern, clinical detachment and something close to pleading. In one moment he sounds like a scientist justifying a grand project to a skeptical board; in another, like a father trying to rationalise a betrayal.
Casting Skarsgård suggests ONTOS will lean heavily on performance to sell its reality-warping premise. SOMA’s most powerful moments came from low-key conversations with machines that thought they were people. Here, the emotional center looks more grounded and personal, with an award-winning actor anchoring the story as Frictional pushes deeper into filmed-drama territory.
From consciousness to reality itself
Creative director Thomas Grip has said that if SOMA was about consciousness, ONTOS is about “the very nature of reality.” That shift in focus is baked into the way the reveal is framed. SOMA asked what it means to be a mind copied, displaced or trapped. ONTOS widens the lens and questions whether the ground you stand on, the memories you trust and the cause-and-effect rules you rely on are stable at all.
In the trailer, Samsara behaves like a layered construct where multiple truths compete. Rooms appear to rewrite themselves as you cross a threshold. Windows show vistas that don’t match the station’s layout. There are flashes of impossible architecture, as if the world is streaming in from different save files at once. None of it is just for show. Frictional is promising that players will actively engage with its existential puzzles rather than passively watch them, implying that mechanics and narrative will be tightly intertwined.
Where Amnesia weaponised vulnerability and SOMA weaponised empathy, ONTOS looks poised to weaponise doubt. Every object you inspect and every log you replay risks contradicting your assumptions about what is real, or even when events are taking place.
Horror tone: between Amnesia’s panic and SOMA’s dread
Frictional calls ONTOS a sci fi thriller rather than a pure horror game, but the DNA of both Amnesia and SOMA is unmistakable. The lighting, sound design and pacing in the trailer are all calibrated for slow-burn unease. Long, empty hallways hum with off-screen machinery. A single flicker of emergency lighting does more work than a dozen jump scares.
Compared to Amnesia’s visceral terror, ONTOS feels more restrained. There are no loud chase scenes in the debut footage, no monsters crashing through doors. Horror here seems to come from anticipation: the sense that the rules might change at any second. Yet there are glimpses of more direct threat. A shadow slips out of sight just before the camera turns. A distorted figure stands in a doorway, its silhouette almost human but twisted by low lunar gravity and contradictory lighting.
In tone it sits closer to SOMA, where the scariest moments were often quiet realisations rather than overt attacks. The hotel setting reinforces that. Samsara is not a torture dungeon or a gore-slick lab; it is a place designed for comfort that has been corrupted into a psychological maze, which makes every overturned chair and broken ornament feel like evidence of something terribly personal having gone wrong.
A mind-bending mystery built over a decade
Grip has revealed that ONTOS has been in some form of development for over 10 years, evolving internally even as Frictional shipped later Amnesia entries. That long gestation explains why the project is described as the studio’s most ambitious yet in both scope and themes.
The trailer hints at systems that go beyond simple key-hunting puzzles. Environmental manipulation, reality shifts that respond to your choices, maybe even timelines that fold over each other as you dig deeper into Aditi’s past, all feel in play. Samsara itself seems structured like a layered puzzle box where each floor represents a different phase of the experiment or a different perspective on the same events.
Frictional’s promise of a “mind-bending narrative mystery” suggests that ONTOS wants you to solve more than just how to escape a room. You are meant to piece together what really happened at Samsara, what role Aditi’s father and Skarsgård’s character played, and what it even means to leave a place where reality is negotiable.
Why SOMA fans should pay attention
Labeling ONTOS a spiritual successor to SOMA sets an expectation that it will deliver the same blend of philosophical speculation and grounded human drama. The moon hotel setting is a clever evolution of SOMA’s underwater facility: both are isolated, constrained spaces where the outside world feels impossibly far away, but Samsara adds a layer of corporate luxury and spiritual symbolism that lets Frictional play with identity, memory and rebirth.
If Amnesia was about surviving terror and SOMA was about living with the consequences of being conscious, ONTOS looks like it will ask what you are willing to accept as real in order to stay sane. The reveal trailer does not drown itself in exposition; it just nudges you toward questions that linger long after the footage ends.
ONTOS is slated for release in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. For now, the debut trailer and early details already make it feel like the next essential chapter in Frictional’s slow, unsettling exploration of horror at the edges of human understanding.