Frictional Games, the independent Swedish studio who brought the psychological sci-fi consciousness-exploring hit SOMA and the survival horror series Amnesia, appears to be gearing up to announce their next project. Next Frictional Game, the developer’s official site for news and announcements from their studio, became active this week leading many to speculate that news on the developer’s next title is forthcoming.
So far, the Next Frictional Game website is just a black background with a blinking dot. It looks like some content is loading, but rest assured that that’s all there is to this site at the time of writing. The dot itself runs on a four-second loop and is currently non-interactable. Frictional Games has also updated their official homepage to unify information on all their titles for their fans.
Frictional Games has so far become notable for its strange and mysterious horror games that depend on a slow-burn style of plot development, so it’s possible that this is a deliberate but subtle way to let their fans and followers know an announcement is on the horizon. Amnesia: Machine for Pigs was virally marketed with an alternate-reality style campaign that has players use Google Maps and examine the code of the Next Frictional Game site itself to uncover the mystery of Machine for Pigs, the sequel to Amnesia: Dark Descent made in collaboration with award-winning developer The Chinese Room.
Since releasing SOMA in 2015, Frictional Games has reported that they are working on two new projects. Frictional Games described one of the projects as true to their practiced style and “horrific in nature” in a developer’s update blog post from 2017. The other project will be about “gaining an understanding of different concepts,” with the horror-style project being further along in its development cycle.
It’s been over four years since SOMA released, but the game’s impressive performance paired with the success of the Amnesia series indicates that gamers will happily wait a bit longer for some more news from Frictional Games, whatever that news ends up being.