My New Favorite Horror Game Turns Reconnecting With Your Ex Into A Harrowing Experience

I’ve got a late addition to Kotaku‘s spooky week that’s really gonna intrigue the gamer that grew up loving Night Trap. Tenebris Somnia isn’t quite the game that was, deploying live-action cutscenes as a seasoning rather than the whole dish, but damn, when it does, it’s effective. Tenebris Somnia takes the simple, if fraught, act of catching up with your ex and turns it into a horror show. When Julia, wracked by nightmares of her ex-boyfriend, returns to their old apartment to check in on him, she’s confronted with broken glass, ruined mementos, and weird, possibly satanic symbols on the doors. Surprise! He’s fallen in with demons who want to use his flesh to return to corporeal form. And what forms they take! One of the enemies you fight is a man with melted candle wax for a head, and seeing him rendered in live action is seriously cool. I enjoy how the cutscenes mesh with the gameplay. In the game, Julia’s health is represented by an onscreen portrait of her that gets darker the more damage she takes. You can see that, too, in cutscenes where she starts off bright-eyed but slowly gets more tired-looking, with the bags under her eyes growing more prominent as the game goes on. I also love how random the cutscenes are; you never know when one is gonna show up and when one does, it feels like a reward for a job well done. Congratulations, here’s a scare as a treat. But the scares are not contained to the live-action bits, and in fact, the best scares aren’t in them at all. ©Saibot Studios Tenebris Somnia was made by a combination of game developers and an award winning Argentinean film crew, and it feels like the devs incorporated a horror movie trick or two they learned from the film crew. My favorite scare, one that caused me to yelp aloud and frighten my dog, was a case of classic horror movie misdirection. I was so primed for the jump scare I just knew was gonna come from in front of me that I was totally unprepared when it came from behind. Not to throw out another controversial game term sure to be discoursed to death in forums and on Bluesky, but I think the kids would call Tenebris Somnia a metroidbrainia. Julia has to work her way through her old apartment building floor by floor, with each floor taken over by the memories of her ex that she has to process like a monster-fighting therapist. One floor contains the memory of a screening the couple held for their short film, and watching the film provides a clue necessary to progress the game. Some puzzle solutions—combinations of items and where to use them require modest leaps in logic, but the game is generous enough to give you extra hints. Tenebris Somnia might be the only game I can think of where I’d prefer to bring a knife (or in this case a lead pipe) to a gunfight. You get a number of weapons with which to face the myriad monsters that stalk the halls of the apartment building, and while a revolver is useful for some of them, it just feels better to hit ’em and run. Also, save often. The ghost monsters hit hard, healing items aren’t the most plentiful, and there is no auto-save. You can lose big chunks of progression after getting jumped by a surprise fight. Don’t ask me how I know. I’m only three or so hours in but I get the feeling this shouldn’t take more than 10 or so hours to complete, assuming you heed the warning about saving often. When the director of the original Resident Evil 2 said the newer RE games were too damn scary, I felt that. Modern horror games feel like they trade on being over-the-top violent or hyper-realistically gross and I just don’t care for that type of horror game. Tenebris Somnia is perfectly tuned for folks who want the thrill of being scared without being disgusted.