Frictional Games shows extended gameplay for ONTOS, its moon-hotel horror

Frictional Games released an extended gameplay trailer for ONTOS, its next horror game, and the coverage arrived on 2 September 2026. GamingOnLinux published first at 11:59 UTC, describing the footage as a chance to get a real good look at the game. Rock Paper Shotgun followed at 16:30 UTC with a piece built around a single detail. DSOGaming posted its own item after the fact, noting that the trailer had slipped under its radar and had been out for about a week.

ONTOS comes from Frictional Games, the developer of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA. GamingOnLinux calls it the studio's next horror game. Rock Paper Shotgun goes further on the premise, describing a philosophical horror game set in a mad science hotel on the moon. The announcement already had one detail doing the rounds: an AI server assembled out of rats, which the internet treated as the most interesting thing in the reveal.

Rock Paper Shotgun's headline is explicit that players cannot pet the talking rat wall, and it floats the possibility that the server can run Doom. Its writer said they had several questions for Frictional about the rat wall and cited a record of arts and technology journalism as the basis for asking. That the rat server is still the hook in a trailer write-up says something about the setting: the moon hotel and its machinery have more pull than any single mechanic shown so far.

GamingOnLinux frames the new material as an extended look, and DSOGaming describes the same footage as an extended gameplay trailer. Frictional has shown more of ONTOS rather than announcing a different version of it. None of the three excerpts describe what the trailer contains beyond the fact of new gameplay footage, and none give its length. The DSOGaming item cuts off mid sentence as it begins to describe the game, which leaves the trailer's structure unverified in the available text.

DSOGaming calls ONTOS the spiritual successor to SOMA, tying it to the studio's earlier horror game. GamingOnLinux and Rock Paper Shotgun stop at calling it Frictional's next horror game, which is a narrower claim. The two descriptions can coexist, and the difference is one of emphasis.

The tone of the coverage splits the same way. GamingOnLinux stays with the trailer. Rock Paper Shotgun leads on the rat wall. DSOGaming's writer admits to being late to the party and shares the trailer as a fan of Frictional's titles. The site's post says the trailer went out the previous week, which places the footage ahead of the 2 September coverage cluster. Rock Paper Shotgun's questions to the studio have not been answered in the material reviewed here.

No release date, launch window, or target platform appears in any of the three pieces, and none of them state what the trailer depicts in detail. Whether Frictional answers the rat-server questions, and when ONTOS next surfaces, is not established by the sources available. The extended look is what players have for now.