Tenebris Somnia

I played through the public demo of Tenebris Somnia twice in one evening, which tells you everything you need to know about how it grabbed me. The premise is quietly devastating: Julia, a woman tormented by recurring nightmares of her ex-boyfriend Ivan being killed by monsters, visits his apartment and finds only wreckage, locked doors, and the creeping suspicion that the monsters followed her out of the dream. It is a 2D survival horror built in the vein of early Resident Evil and Clock Tower, played from a top-down pixel-art perspective, with exploration, item combination puzzles, and melee and ranged combat against the creatures that now haunt the building's corridors. On paper, that is a familiar pitch. Then the live-action cutscenes begin, and nothing is familiar anymore. What Andrés Borghi and Tobias Rusjan of Saibot Studios have built here is a genuine collision of media. At key story moments, the pixel world cuts entirely to professional film footage: real actors, practical makeup effects, moody cinematography from the award-winning Argentine film crew that Borghi - himself a working film director - assembled for this project. The contrast is jarring the first time it hits you, intentionally so. One moment Julia is a sprite navigating a hallway. The next, you are watching a woman who looks just like her move through a physical recreation of that same hallway, terror visible in her face. Previews have compared this tonal whiplash to the way Alan Wake II used live-action inserts, and that reference is earned. The production values in those filmed sequences are not indie-budget concessions. They are the centrepiece. The gameplay loop itself is patient. Tenebris Somnia uses sparse audio to build dread rather than relying on jump scares, and the pacing rewards players who treat each room as a puzzle before they treat it as a combat space. Item discovery feeds into classic point-and-click combination logic, and the demo's best moment involves crafting a makeshift solution to bypass a sealed door using nothing but found objects and common sense. Combat exists and has both melee and ranged options, but early community feedback noted the charge-and-release melee input is not as intuitive as it could be. Whether that has been refined ahead of the full release is an open question. The game received an Epic MegaGrant in 2023 and has toured BitSummit in Kyoto and major showcase events through 2025 and 2026, gathering consistent praise from the horror and indie circles that have seen it live. The clearest comparison point in New Blood Interactive's catalogue is FAITH: The Unholy Trinity - raw, handmade, psychologically uncomfortable horror that trusts a strange visual language over conventional production norms. Borghi has cited FAITH's Airdorf as an influence, and Airdorf is now a producer on the project. That creative lineage matters. It suggests a team that knows the difference between unsettling and gratuitous, and that is a meaningful distinction in a genre full of games that only know the second one. A release date is expected to be announced at Summer Game Fest 2026, so the wait may be almost over.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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