Frictional Games has never made a monster as unsettling as a spreadsheet. Its new extended look at Ontos suggests the studio has finally found something worse than either: a rack of sixty live rats wired together to run a human mind, and a control panel that lets you poke at it.
The extended gameplay reveal is up on Frictional's own channel, and the developer followed it with a post breaking down what the footage is actually showing. It is the clearest look yet at a game that has been described in fairly abstract terms since its announcement, and it lands the studio's pitch better than any trailer has.
Samsara, and why you are there
You play Aditi Amani, drawn to a repurposed lunar hotel called Samsara by the legacy of an estranged father. The building is the game's whole stage, and the footage sells it as a place that was expensive and beautiful before it became something else - gilt reception desks, chandeliers, patterned tile, all of it now lit like a crime scene and littered with paper.
What replaced the hospitality business is human experimentation, and Samsara's remaining occupants are the people still running it.
Ontos keeps its hardware legible. The suit, the docking station and the status readout all tell you what they do before anything goes wrong.
The rat server
The centrepiece of the new footage is an experiment involving a man named Crombie, who is - or at least claims to be - trapped inside a computer built out of animals. Sixty rats are strapped into a server rack, and their combined activity simulates a person's consciousness.
Crombie came to Samsara looking for answers about what makes a self a self. The scene puts you on the other side of that question: there are probes attached to the subject's head, you are the one who moves them, and the experiment produces different outcomes depending on what you do. Frictional has said the sequence is replayable, that the objectives are not spelled out, and that the consequences vary - which makes it less a puzzle with a solution than an apparatus you are invited to run repeatedly and live with the results.
A second voice, Zike, comes through the intercom during the sequence, characterised as obsessed with locating the soul. Between the two of them the game states its thesis without a codex entry: everybody at Samsara wants to find the thing that makes a person a person, and none of them have agreed on where to look.
Slower than Amnesia, closer to Soma
Creative director Thomas Grip has called Ontos a spiritual successor to Soma, and the pacing in this footage matches that framing rather than the Amnesia one. Frictional describes the experience as weighted toward exploration, research and testing instead of action, with critical moral choices that depend on how well you have understood the people involved.
That last part is the interesting design claim. A moral choice you make because you recognise what a character actually wants is a very different mechanic from one presented as two labelled buttons, and it is the sort of thing that only works if the game trusts you to have been paying attention. It also raises the stakes on the replayable-experiment structure: rerunning the rat rack is not just content, it is how you learn enough to decide anything.
Queries labelled Alpha, Beta and a greyed-out Omega. Ontos tends to show you the interface before it explains what it is asking.
Hands, tools, and the rest of the hotel
The footage is not all interrogation rooms. Other sections show Aditi working with physical tools on the station's plumbing and wiring - a torch cutting into a service hatch, colour-coded pipework behind it, the kind of first-person manual labour Frictional has always used to build tension by keeping your hands busy and your eyes off the corridor behind you.
It is a familiar trick and it still works, particularly in a facility this dark. The difference from Amnesia is that the tools here look like they are for solving problems rather than for surviving something.
Release
Ontos is due in 2027 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. That is still a long wait, and Frictional's history suggests the date is a target rather than a promise - but the studio has now shown enough of the game's actual verbs to make the wait a different kind of frustrating.
The pitch, as of this footage, is a psychological horror game where the horror is procedural: someone has already done the terrible thing, the apparatus is still running, and your job is to understand it well enough to decide what to do with what is left. On the evidence of the rat rack, understanding it is going to be the hard part.
