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It's only been five years since Frictional Games unleashed Amnesia: The Dark Descent on unsuspecting PC gamers, revolutionising horror games in the process. Its combination of utter helplessness, disorientating sanity effects and physics-based interactions made for an experience that was unusually absorbing and truly scary. That it was light on story and simple in mechanics felt beside the point.In 2015, Frictional follows up its cult hit with a science fiction twist on a similar idea, but it arrives in a market forever changed by its previous game. Today, indie PC games in which you creep through loving rendered labyrinths, running away from monsters and cowering in corners, are impossible to miss. The trend has even cracked into the AAA space, thanks to Creative Assembly's chaotically terrifying Alien: Isolation.
What has Frictional done to stay ahead of the pack? Surprisingly, it's doubled down on the environmental narrative and pushed the horror sideways. That's not to say that SOMA isn't scary - when it wants you to be spooked, you will definitely be spooked - but it deploys the jolts far more sparingly, preferring instead to unnerve you with a story where the real horrors are of a moral and philosophical nature.
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