Sometime near the end of September, a website popped up advertising a luxury getaway locale called Hotel Samsara. Around the same time, Amnesia developer Frictional Games updated its 2015 sci-fi masterpiece, SOMA. One of the patch notes read, “Fixed faulty spam filters on Simon’s PC. Users may still receive suspicious correspondence due to treemail 0.1 filtering process issues.” After the update went live, players checking out the emails on SOMA protagonist Simon’s laptop were met with a link to HotelSamsara.com.
This hotel wasn’t real — it was part of an augmented reality game (ARG), and the end result led players to a teaser for Frictional’s next psychological thriller, which appears to be set in the fictional hotel. Initially, players started off by piecing together bolded letters in the text of the website’s landing page, and over the course of the next week, continued unraveling the puzzle’s strange clues, the last of which provided a link to a YouTube video uploaded by both Frictional Games and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 publisher Kepler Interactive.
Titled FRICTIONAL_NEXT_PROJECT.mp4, the 42-second video shows off various parts of what are, presumably, Hotel Samsara, and the teaser ends with the text “SOMETHING NEW” appearing on-screen, suggesting this new game may be unrelated to Amnesia, SOMA, and the studio’s other games (although players seem to have found a few SOMA references in the short clip).
Frictional hasn’t yet released any other official information on the game, what platforms it will launch on, or when it will come out, but the studio did share a message with players who took part in the ARG.
“Thank you so much for taking part in this ‘little’ journey we’ve all taken together,” the YouTube teaser’s description reads. “We really wanted to try and create something fun to show you a bit of what we’ve been working on. What we didn’t expect is just how much you would impress us with your ability to all come together as a community and work with each other to solve everything we threw at you. Admittedly, we did have to increase the difficulty when we realised the scale of the team we were up against, so give yourselves a pat on the back for that.”
“We can’t tell you how much fun we’ve had watching you all solve each step and create top-tier level memes and inside jokes,” the message continues. “It’s been a pleasure, waking up excited every morning to check the Discord and seeing which rabbit holes you ended up falling into. Hopefully, you enjoyed it as much as we did. You have reached the end of the path (for now). Thank you.”
