Frictional has a new ‘SOMA-style’ game quietly in the works
Frictional has been busy scaring the wits out of us with Amnesia (opens in new tab) in recent years, but the studio hasn’t forgotten SOMA (opens in new tab), its rather excellent philosophical robo-horror from 2015. Although the Swedish developer is hard at work on Amnesia: the Bunker, the game’s creative lead Fredrik Olsson recently let slip in a chat with DualShockers (opens in new tab) that a project in SOMA’s heady mould is quietly in the works at the studio.
“We are still very much interested in doing more SOMA-style stuff,” Olsson told DS, noting that Frictional’s co-founder Thomas Grip is currently at work “on a bigger project that you can say has much more of this kind of philosophical stuff like you saw in SOMA”. That would jive with a job posting from the company last month (opens in new tab), which was explicitly looking for a narrative designer who “loves sci-fi and horror”.
So fear not, fans of being horrifically mutilated by androids, your time will come. It’ll probably just have to wait until after the next Amnesia game’s decidedly robot-free WW1 horror gets out the door. That’s set to be May 16 this year, after a “tough winter” at Frictional (opens in new tab) forced the studio to push the game back a little bit.
Look on the bright side, though, the Amnesia games have been pretty great so far, with the last one drawing praise in Leana Hafer’s Amnesia: Rebirth review (opens in new tab) in PCG for being “one of the most effective and mind-bending horror games ever made, just like its predecessor”. With any luck, the Bunker will live up to that stellar track record, and we can spend our time being irreparably traumatised by that while we wait for the pieces to fall into place on Frictional’s upcoming SOMA-like.
