The sinking terror that comes of having no fixed identity and being trapped alone thousands of metres beneath the ocean has been compacted into the soft, comforting (?) form of a plushie. Frictional Games, the creators of first-person horror game Soma, launched the soft toy depiction of the game's protagonist Simon on Makeship, aka Kickstarter for plushies. Normally, we don't report on merch - why would we? - but there is something deeply and darkly funny about making a fleece-coated fuzzy huggy wuggy about the psychologically harrowing experience of being forgotten under the sea. Then again, Frictional Games are not the first to do this sort of thing.
]]>How time flies, eh? We were so busy putting together The RPS 100 last month (including the first ever Reader Edition), that we clean ran out of time to do another RPS Time Capsule. But fear not! Our written repository of games we've deemed worthy of saving from the eternal hell bin of the future has returned, and this time it's a good 'un. The year is 2015, folks, and cor, has there ever been a better year for video games? Of course, with only 11 slots to fill in our RPS Time Capsule, it also means we're having to say goodbye to some real gems. Come and see what's transcended to the higher plane of Capsule existence.
]]>It may not be Halloween for a while, but there's no reason you can't celebrate horror as a genre all year round. In fact, it's one of our favourite genre of games, so we've put together our list of the 25 best horror games to play on PC right now. It really showcases the breadth of horror on PC right now, from visual novels to shooters to survival to weirdo demon games and text adventures, so it's a real joy to peruse.
]]>Is there anything scarier than buying products at below the recommended retail price? Almost certainly, which is why I'd hesitate to call the Epic Games Store Halloween Sale particularly spooky. It is, however, taking a massive knife to game prices across the platform, with some pretty hefty discounts of up to 80% going on a number of range of fantastic games until the sale wraps on November 3rd.
]]>The year is 1937, and you've just woken up in a crashed plane in the middle of a desert. You're not some sort of Indiana Jones-esque film though, I'm afraid, you're in a horror game - Amnesia: Rebirth, to be exact. It's the new survival horror from Frictional Games, the team behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma, and it's out today.
How can the horror of a traditionally dark and dingy series hold up under the bright desert sun? I talked with game director Thomas Grip and creative lead Fredrik Olsson to find out. We also discussed monsters and things they've learned from their old games, as well as how player choice can make horror that much more horrifying.
]]>If you've not heard, those folks who done underwater horror game Soma and haunted house horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent are working on another thing that is almost certainly a horror game. And look, it's a scary desert game this time around. Probably. We don't know for sure yet because so far they've led players on an ARG—that's alternate reality game—looking for clues about what their next proper video game might be. Today them super sleuths have uncovered another hidden video and this one looks like an actual game (teaser) trailer.
]]>"I should go check on the Frictional website," I thought to myself when I woke up this morning. I'll call it a premonition, though I clearly wasn't the first to have it. If you hadn't heard, Frictional Games, developers of Soma and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, recently updated their website nextfrictionalgame.com with a spooky pulsating little symbol. It morphed once already, and has morphed again, beginning a merry chase of YouTube videos and hints presumably related to Frictional's next game.
]]>Here we stand in the dark neo-year of 2020. The spam bots have risen to prominence, the governments of the world are bickering over follower counts, and history class has been renamed "meme studies". Somewhere, in a dusty room in the RPS treehouse, a rogue human is compiling a list article for a crumbling PC games website. It is a warning to all those who read it. A prophecy of the terrible things to come. Wars, invasions, disease, heat death. Videogames, it turns out, have predicted all this and more. Here we replicate this cautionary pre-chronicle, your guide to the harrowing times ahead. Here are the 11 worst years in our future history, according to games.
]]>The folks over at Frictional Games seem to have something new in the works. The studio has largely been quiet since releasing SOMA back in 2015 aside from adding a monster-free Safe Mode to the spooky underwater game. Frictional overhauled their old website just before taking a holiday break and in the update have added a new entry to the "games" tab simply called "Next Frictional Game."
]]>Mech love, not war. That is the lesson we must learn from the futuristic prophecies of the MechWarrior games. Yes, it is very noble to slam your big steel shoes upon a separatist’s bedroom, and to laser him in the head. But would it not bring greater valour, greater unity, greater enlightenment, if those same 65-ton brogues were used … to dance!
No. Here is a list of the 9 stompiest mechs in PC games. The heaviest, most murderous machines we know and trust with our frail human bods. But are they are all good at squashing?
]]>The Epic Games Store has a little Halloween treat for you, with both dress 'em up RPG Costume Quest and grim depths survival game Soma free for the next week. If you're going to grab a freebie for your kiddy-winks, I urge you to be very careful with your clicks or prepare for some long nights ahead. Epic also just announced a few new additions to their storefront, so let's take a look at that as well.
]]>Over the past several weeks I have sent a lot of interesting people who work in the games industry an email containing the following scenario:
"You enter a room. The door locks behind you. From a door opposite another you enters. This other you is a perfectly identical clone, created in the exact instant you entered the room, but as every second ticks by they are creating their own distinct personhood. The doors will unlock in 90 minutes. Nobody will ever know what happens in the room. What do you do? (assume the materials you need for whatever you want to do are in the room). Please show your working, if able."
]]>The old quote is wrong: neither death nor taxes are, it seems to me, as terrifyingly certain as the Steam Summer Sale. Yes, once more we can add to the heap that is our backlog by buying games for, what, five quid, on average? But there are so many to choose from that it's easy to get flustered, so who better than the staff of RPS to hand-pick the best ones for your consideration (rhetorical question; do not answer)?
Check out the full list below for a mix of games that should suit all pockets and tastes.
]]>Sit down at the boiling pot, stranger. Let me tell you a tale. A sordid tale, full of fascinating lands and captivating characters. A story of wonder and flame, strangeness and warmth. Would you like to hear it? Great. Just play this rubbish cover shooter for a half hour. I’ll start the introduction when you hit the first checkpoint.
Welcome to the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. This week we’re discussing some great stories that come packaged with terrible games.
]]>While Humble may offer a lot of bundles now, their Humble Indie Bundles are what first put the site on the map. Their 19th went live last night, offering their usual broad and colourful cross-section of what the indie development scene has to offer.
Featuring space adventure, train-based puzzling, VR bomb defusal and one of the most existentially unsettling horror games ever made, this bundle has a little something for everybody, assuming you're not a huge dork like me that automatically buys everything halfway interesting that crosses your path and already owns two thirds of these.
]]>From a publisher as huge as Ubisoft, and in a series as chart-dominating as Assassin’s Creed's Discovery Tour represents an unusual and welcome ambition. The mode, available as free DLC for Assassin’s Creed Origins or as a standalone game, strips out all the combat, levelling-up and collectibles in favour of a promised educational experience. It takes the strongest facet of Origins – its detailed and enormous depiction of Ancient Egypt – and adapts it into something almost entirely new.
Ubisoft isn’t alone in remixing its games in this way, however. The Discovery mode for Origins follows in the squelchy footsteps of Frictional’s Soma, which added a ‘Safe Mode’ last December that removes any mechanical threat from its monsters. Traditionally, the concept of ‘games’ has been closely tied with that of ‘challenge’, but these modes sidestep that. And in doing so, they remove a barrier to entry for less experienced players who want to explore their worlds. Even if the execution doesn't necessarily match the idea, this is a good thing.
]]>All right, picture this. There's five podcasts tied to a train track, and you're on a train speeding toward them. On another track, there's just one podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Do you swap tracks and kill one podcast to save the other five? Or do you forge ahead? Take your time, it's a difficult moral choice - exactly our topic this week. Think hard about it. No, listen, you should think about it very carefully. No, listen--
I know, but--
You can't just p--
Ha ha, okay, stop the train. Joke's over.
Stop the train.
STOP THE TRAIN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP THE TR--
]]>They lurk, they creep, they skulk and weep. Monsters in videogames can be as simple as a big spiky cyclops ball, or as unsettling as a sobbing woman in a rainy alleyway. This week on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, the team is talking about their favourites, from flaming skulls to digitally possessed diving suits, and the clever ways in which game monsters inspire heebies, jeebies, creeps and sometimes even willies.
]]>Being terrified in the sea is undignified. In space, no one can hear you scream but in the sea, everyone can feel you wee yourself. Thankfully Soma now has a 'Safe Mode' for people who want to be deeply unsettled in the 2015 undersea technohell from the makers of Amnesia but not full-on terrified from being chased by monsters. The dreadful monsters are still in the explore-o-horror game, mind, but they won't murder you to bits. Their presence will still be awful. As someone who hasn't finished Soma because they're a giant baby, I appreciate this.
]]>If you, like me, want so much to experience the undersea existential horror of Soma but you, like me, need to stand up, turn away, and go out for a brisk walk when the first monster lunges at you, there is hope. An official 'Safe Mode' is coming to Soma, which developers Frictional Game say will offer "the chance to explore the story without being eaten by monsters." One seahero has previously made a mod named Wuss Mode which stops monsters from eating your face, but Safe Mode will make your safety official.
]]>The Steam summer sale is in full blaze. For a while it even blazed so hot that the servers went on fire and all the price stickers peeled off the games. Either that or the store just got swamped with cheapskates looking for the best bargains. Cheapskates like you! Well, don’t worry. We’ve rounded up some recommendations - both general tips and some newly added staff choices.
Here are the things you should consider owning in your endless consumeristic lust for a happiness which always seems beyond reach. You're welcome.
]]>Lots of spaceships happening today, isn’t there? Here’s something that looks both calmer than the “murder aliens for engine parts” shtick, but also more unsettling. Tether [official site] will be a sci-fi horror about having children but then leaving those children so you can work in a spaceship and subsequently being caught up in some kind of psychologically distressing situation that means you’ll probably not be seeing those children ever again. Whoops.
]]>We are all familiar with the Turing Test, in which a computer and a man must engage in a freestyle rap battle to determine which one is “thinking”. But there’s also a videogame of the same name, which is out today. The Turing Test [official site] is a first-person puzzler set in a research base on Europa, in which you play astronaut Eva Turing as she tries to find out where everyone has gone. It’s part of Squeenix’s indie claw machine, the Square Enix Collective, and it looks like this.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Horror-fest SOMA [official site] is a game full of tricks and I'm still a little bitter about it. It's not that those tricks were cheap by any means, just that they so effectively managed to surprise me again and again.
]]>What if you could talk to the monsters? The Wuss Mode: Monsters Won't Attack mod for SOMA [official site] doesn't quite allow you to hold conversations with the denizens of Frictional's latest creation but it does prevent them from chasing you around the place until you die. I'm excited to try this because it might just improve the game significantly, simply by focusing on the fact that fear does not need to be followed by violence and death. Vague spoilers ahead for those who haven't played.
]]>While Frictional are exploring the depths of consciousness in their latest creep-fest Soma, other developers are continuing the story they began in Penumbra [official site] all those years ago. A team going by the name CounterCurrent Games released an unofficial total conversion going by the name Necrologue last Halloween and this year they finished the story with the fantastically-named Twilight of the Archaic [official site]. Just look at that title for a few seconds. It's magnificent. The games are built on Amnesia: The Dark Descent so you'll need that to play, and can then download both Necrologue and Teatime of the Archaic from ModDB or through Steam.
]]>Most video game trailers with real people acting are rubbish, but those for Soma [official site] were dreadful - in the good, unnerving, dread-y, wrong way. Little research reports from a then-mysterious lab, they had a fine SCP eeriness to them. Frictional may have now finished and released their first-person horror - it's flawed but pretty good - but the story continues, as today brings the first free episode of a live-action prequel miniseries inspired by the game.
]]>Merry weekend, one and all! May you have a wonderful Saturday, and a calm Boxing Day. Why, perhaps you'll even manage to get away from your friends, families, and loved ones after dinner to squeeze in a cheeky video game or two before you all wrap up and head out carolling! Here's what we'll be playing when we can sneak away:
]]>Five years ago, Frictional released Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a horror game that made us afraid of the water. That was five years ago. Now, with SOMA [official site], the studio have switched from gothic castles to science fiction and they're taking us right to the bottom of the ocean. I've faced my fears and here's wot I think.
]]>Next week, Frictional's Soma [official site] will finally be available. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is five years old and surely everyone is ready for another round of the first-person frighteners? I've already played a fairly large chunk of the game and will have a review ready for you before launch, so you can trust me when I say that the "story trailer" below has been carefully edited so as not to spoil any major parts of the story. There's an awful lot going on.
]]>If you're planning to play Soma [official site], the new terrible dreadful horror game from Amnesia creators Frictional Games, probably don't watch this new trailer. It shows a lot of the nasties you'll encounter in that dreadful seabase, and removes some of the power they'll hold over you if you encounter for the first time in-game.
If, like me, you are fascinated by the terrible things clearly afoot in Soma but know you're a colossal babby about horror games (despite being tough as nails and sharper than knives in every other respect, of course) and will probably never play much of it, hey, this trailer is pretty cool.
]]>Over the weekend, I played the first third of SOMA [official site], the new game from Frictional, the horror maestros behind Penumbra and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. If the tone and quality of the game remain approximately similar for the remainder of the running time, Frictional will have delivered their most accomplished title to date, but it might also be their least terrifying. That might be a good thing.
]]>It’s practically against the law for developers not to release a new trailer during E3. Even if we’ve already played and seen enough of the game to guarantee our purchase already. Soma [official site] devs Frictional Games have dodged their jail time by releasing this video of their upcoming underwater horror adventure ahead of its September 22nd release date.
]]>I'd presumed Frictional's upcoming SOMA was basically just sci-fi Amnesia: the night is dark and full of terrors, and all that. Turns out there's at least one major change to formula: you get to talk to people. And you know things about those people that they don't know themselves. And it's horrifying.
]]>Over at Frictional Games' official blog, creative director Thomas Grip has written an extensive and thoughtful analysis of Alien: Isolation. It's worth reading in full, providing a brief history of the 'horror simulator' genre that runs from 3D Monster Maze (1982) to the modern interpretations found in Slender and the like. Isolation gets a post-mortem treatment that begins simply - "Alien: Isolation is an interesting game" - then veers into a wham-bam takedown - "At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie" - and, BOOM - "it really is just a pure horror simulator, like Slender or 3D Monster Maze, just with more sections to play through".
Grip does have lots of positive things to say about Creative Assembly's game though and a few thoughts for the future. That's SOMA talk.
]]>I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent spiritual/ghooooostual successor SOMA, and it didn't really do it for me. That said, Frictional creative director Thomas Grip's plans for the wetter-is-deader stroll into the maw of madness are quite interesting, though whether he can pull it all off remains to be seen. Today we continue on from our previous discussion, pushing doggedly forward into Grip's plan for possibly the longest build-up (five hours!) in horror gaming history, YouTube culture's effect on horror, procedurally generated scares and why they both aid and mortally wound true terror, modern horror's over-reliance on samey settings and tropes, and where Grip sees the genre heading in the future.
Agree or disagree, the man has some extremely illuminating perspectives, and you can't fault him for wanting to break away from the played-out influence of his own previous game. It's all below.
]]>SOMA didn't scare the scuba suit off me, but I did find a creeping sort of potential in its soaked-to-the-bone corridors. Amnesia: The Dark Descent 2 this ain't. Or at least, it's not aiming to be. Currently, it still feels a lot like a slower-paced, less-monster-packed Amnesia in a different (though still very traditionally survival-horror-y) setting, but Frictional creative director Thomas Grip has big plans. I spoke with him about how he hopes to evolve the game, inevitable comparisons to the Big Daddy of gaming's small undersea pond, BioShock, why simple monster AI is better than more sophisticated options, the mundanity of death, and how SOMA's been pretty profoundly influenced by indie mega-hits like Dear Esther and Gone Home.
]]>It's not that I feel like SOMA is poorly made. On the contrary: for a demo of a game that's at least a year out, the Amnesia spiritual successor practically sparkles beneath its grimy, moss-encrusted shell. I just feel like, despite a very unexpected setting, I've been here before. Crept through these halls, turned these nobs, let these tidal waves of otherworldly sound crash into me as I press ever onward, slightly on-edge but no worse for the wear.
]]>Oh bother. I was inevitably going to find Frictional's SOMA a troubling proposition, having winced through Penumbra and Amnesia while trembling like a jelly in a jalopy. SOMA's sci-fi horrors creep me out on a level that spooky castles and mad alchemists don't - Amnesia was scary because it was dark and the sound design was excellent rather than because the setting or story peeled back the skin and twanged at the nerves. SOMA's experimentations fill me with dread though and the latest trailer reveals something that had previously been hidden from us. I'll let you find out for yourself while whimpering underneath my desk.
]]>Frictional have updated the SOMA blog with some information regarding the progress they're making on the sci-fi horror game. There's a short trailer as well, with voice acting that dismisses some of the doubts about the quality in the first in-game video, but the text contains the bulk of the information. As they say, 'words paint a thousand pictures'. There are a few paragraphs copied below, including more on world-building:
When creating Amnesia our setting was basically just “Old castle where supernatural stuff happens”. This allowed us to get away with just about anything and explain it with “because, magic”. But in SOMA we are building a world that is supposed to be tied into the real world and to make sense.
Because, science?
]]>Everyone knows that the scariest things aren't actually monsters themselves. It's the horrors lurking in our own runaway imaginations, creatures of such impossible (and impossibly specific) phobia that our only recourse is to head for the hills long before we ever see them. That's the power of a great horror environment. SOMA's Upsilon research facility, for instance, creaks, groans, and whines quietly to itself like a child who's afraid of the dark. From there, your mind does the heavy lifting. Watch below, and then read about Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Frictional's core design pillars for its sci-fi madhouse.
]]>Level With Me is a series of interviews with game developers about their games, work process, and design philosophy. At the end of each interview, they design part of a small first person game. You can play this game at the very end of the series.
Thomas Grip is creative director of Frictional Games, based in Helsingborg, Sweden. They're known mostly for the Penumbra (a first person horror game series) and Amnesia (another first person horror game series), and they're currently working on another first person horror game called SOMA (a first person horror game). Astute readers may sense a pattern.
]]>After two live action teasers, Frictional have released the first in-engine footage of SOMA. It's first-person sci-fi horror, as expected, although there's a Giger-esque quality to the dripping carapace walls and biomechanical brain-teasing tentacles that the previous media hadn't hinted at. Story-wise, there's something unpleasant and experimental happening and it seems to involve some manner of personality transference or sharing. Gray matter has been teased from skulls and yet thinks on. I could do without the main character's exclamations of the obvious but otherwise, it all looks jolly good. The greatest fear of all is pushed to one side at the end of the trailer, when a logo dismisses the mooted PS4 exclusivity.
]]>We still don't know much about SOMA, Amnesia developers Frictional's next game. But there is a general theme emerging from the teaser videos: the first video showed an engineer attempting to communicate with what appeared to be a H.R. Giger's CRT monitor. This new video shows the same engineer talking to a disassembled robot. In the game's fiction, it's a "standard UH3 articulated robot," and it "spontaneously developed a desire to socialize from observing human interaction." It gets creepier. Way creepier.
]]>I've spent the past few days F5ing Frictional's teaser site for their next game, which has been promising a new sci-fi game from Amnesia chaps. Well, my patience has finally been rewarded. The site is live with a scant amount of data about a thing called SOMA. All the information is based on the game's fiction, so there's no context to what we're seeing. All I know is it's sci-fi, and the machine at the heart of all this looks like a kid's TV bad guy: it is an evil monitor. Live action trailer entitled "Vivarium" is below.
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