You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you’re reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here
Revealed at the Game Awards 2025, Ontos is a brand-new sci-fi mystery thriller and a spiritual successor to the survival horror great Soma. Playing as the protagonist Aditi, we will be exploring Moon Hotel Samsara, a frightening locale filled with experiments and psychological horror.
The trailer begins in a lab with a wall of rats being inhumanely experimented upon as a desperate voice claims he can explain what’s going on. We then enter the Moon Hotel Samsara, meeting various characters who each appear to have their own agendas and experiments they aim to perform. Versatile actor Stellan Skarsgård will play one of these pivotal characters, a smartly dressed gentleman who asks, ominously: “What is existence really?”
One small step for Aditi, one giant experiment for the hotel
This new title aims to include the lingering ideas of the developers that couldn’t be implemented in Soma. It also aims to explore a deeper narrative and build upon Soma’s immersive survival horror gameplay.
Thomas Grip from Frictional Games described Ontos as “not really a horror game in a traditional sense.”
Grip continued: “We’ve taken time to create a world and story that is unnerving and unsettling. While players will encounter horrific scenes, they won’t be chased all the time by monsters.”
The moral complexity and a deep dive into themes of consciousness and identity that this spiritual successor aims to provide suggest a disquieting, thought-provoking experience. If the environments within the Moon Hotel are just as horrific and mind-bending as the Pathos 2 facility from Soma, then we can expect to be satisfied and terrified by Ontos when it releases for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC in 2026.
