Frictional Games, the developers behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent, have released a trailer for their upcoming horror game SOMA, which you can see below. The developers have also announced when the game will be released. Writing on the PlayStation blog, the Thomas Grip, one of the developers at Frictional Games, said:
“We at Frictional Games started working on SOMA in the autumn of 2010, so the game has been in development for almost five years now. This makes it extremely satisfying for us to finally be able to reveal a release date and to look forward to unleashing our creation upon the world.”
SOMA “Awakened”
The developers also spoke about why the game took so long to make – after all, it’s been five years. The developers said that they took so long due to the fact that they wanted to make the game the right way.
“The biggest issue has been how to handle our themes properly. We didn’t want SOMA to be just another ‘run from the monster’-affair. While it does have that sort of thing too, as our gameplay video shows, the horror runs way deeper. The aim with SOMA is to explore the unsettling aspects of subjects such as consciousness, identity and our very existence. We didn’t want to do this by simply having some ham-fisted exposition now and then, we wanted the player to experience this first-hand.
“Getting this right has been extremely hard as it’s not something you can easily iterate on. Creating that disturbing sense of existential horror just right takes hours of setup. It also requires a lot of assets to be in place before it can be tested properly. So while other games can make several iterations a week on their foundational elements, it’s taken us roughly a year for each iteration.”
SOMA is set to be released for both PC and PlayStation 4 on September 22. For more information about SOMA, you can head over to the PlayStation blog.