Amnesia And SOMA Dev Teases New Game With ARG

Frictional Games, the studio behind horror titles Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA, is teasing its next game with an ARG. The developer’s official website currently links to a page for “Next Frictional Game,” which is home to a pulsating white object and little else. There’s also an odd symbol at the bottom of the page that looks like an unconventional take on the Eye of Horus hieroglyph, joining the usual links to social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and the rest.

As ResetEra users have found out, hovering over the strange icon reveals the end of a YouTube link. When inserted into a YouTube URL, the link takes you to a video called “Box 52, Tape 16.” The description reads: “Video Cassette 16/2/83, copy from a private collection. Marked Shetpe, KSSR.”

The brief nine-second video shows a bunch of large rocks, with some symbols etched into one of them. Checking the Frictional website’s source code also reveals another YouTube link, leading to a video titled “Box 7 Reel 2, Partial Success,” with the description, “Artefact 1/7/115, marked ‘Triple Crown’. Video unrecoverable, Audio track fragment reconstructed, denoised.” In this case, the video is blank, we just get some creepy screams

Much of the discussion is taking place on the Frictional Games Discord, with one user creating a Google Doc that’s compiling a list of all the possible ideas and theories generated by the community. These range from theories about the game being set in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (1936-1991) based on the first video’s description, to the “Triple Crown” hint in the second video possibly referring to the Egyptian Triple Atef or “Hemhem” crown–which would tie in nicely with the strange eye symbol.

Frictional Games previously used an ARG to market SOMA, with the end result being a 12-minute gameplay trailer. SOMA was already announced at that point, though, so this latest tease is altogether more mysterious. The studio announced in 2017 that it was working on two new projects, so it’s likely this is one of them.