When Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma developers Frictional announced Ontos, their philosophical horror game set in a mad scientist hotel on the moon, people were disturbed by the presence of an AI server made up of rats. I have several questions for Frictional about this wall of talking rats, based on my unparalleled background in arts and technology journalism.
First, can the wall of rats run (or play) Doom? If so, can it run (or play) Crysis? Can he summarize the PDFs for me, and if so, can he also help me determine the hypothetical million dollar bonuses I might contractually owe to hypothetical sea survival game developers? Is Rat Wall a wise choice for gamers on a budget, or have Microdentsoft and Nvermindia already monopolized the world’s rat supply and driven prices through the roof? Is a wall of talking rats still “rat mischief,” or does the presence of networked intelligence require the invention of a new collective name? Are there any comments aimed at actual animal experiments, or are we firmly in the realm of Wacky? To have I been secretly a wall of talking rats all this time?
Ontos’ new, lightly edited 10-minute Frictional video provides no concrete answers to any of these questions. However, this goes some way to answering my other overarching question: Is Ontos going to be good? The current verdict: yes. Beware of mild spoilers if you click play.
Frictional presented Ontos as a creepy and disturbing puzzler rather than a game of munsters and intense heartbeats, and this shows in the video. There is the fleeting suggestion of direct hostility in the form of a swiveling security camera, easily bamboozled by throwing a cardboard box. Beyond that, the majority of the video consists of peacefully selecting story-rich sci-fi ephemera, possibly relevant to the puzzles: terminals full of emails; whiteboards with layouts and plans stuck on them; big dictaphones with teeth the size of your forearm. I can see some obvious connections to Frictional’s previous Soma in the journal entries about clones and copies.
The location itself is beautiful: curved, padded walls, colorful pipes and neon signs, striped metal and shiny glass. It’s not a Good place, mind you. There are some slight tugs on the nerve cords during exploration, such as the cheeky placement of a “no running” sign, just as you enter a dark and foreboding area. Also worrying: those paper lanterns, familiar from the game’s announcement teasers, which look like foreshadowing – I’m thinking of the pig masks from Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
And then there are the rats. It starts with one, writhing on a table with gadgets stuck in his head, surrounded by instructions as to the correct insertion or removal of said gadgets. Shortly after, you encounter the talking wall of rats and are asked to perform a similar process of gruesome rewiring. The tight rat tails twitch like tongues as the entity speaks to you.
In case it’s not obvious, there are several ways to resolve the scenario – the developers say a little more in a Steam blog. The game launches next year, and I’ve already requested the right to review it according to the traditional RPS selection ritual of “first person named Edwin wins.”
