The hardware crisis has hit a new low: We’re now using rats for RAM

Good news from the near future: Space travel has apparently advanced enough to allow humanity to establish a hotel on the surface of the moon.

Bad news: The RAMpocalypse apparently continues unabated, forcing novel experimentation with alternate forms of computer memory not rendered wholly unaffordable by AI datacenters. Namely, rat computers.

This believable projection of the current miserable state of consumer hardware comes courtesy of Ontos, the next game from Amnesia developer Frictional Games. In the trailer above, a man strapped to a chair with electrodes stuck in his head is a bit freaky, though less so than another guy who’s missing everything from his upper teeth down; perhaps humanity in the future is so desperate for localized processing power that we’re resorting to shoving DisplayPort cables into our brains, too.

The strongest big of imagery in the trailer by far, though, is a computer the size of a wall with 60 rats connected to it in sequence. Or parallel? I’m not great on my circuitry fundamentals, but I know a rat computer when I see one.

I am instinctively scared of the rat computer and the unknown potential of 60 rat minds taking the place of random access asiago memory.

My fear is apparently warranted, given the ominous question posed in the trailer’s YouTube description is as follows:

“Do you follow the instructions given through the rodent machine?

Do you seek an alternative approach?

Or simply sabotage the experiment to satisfy your own morbid curiosity?”

The description claims there is “no right or wrong solution in Ontos,” but I think the subtext is clear: We must do whatever possible to avoid this future coming to pass. Let’s call off this whole AI thing before the next hardware generation arrives, lest Dire Digital Rattus 6 become the only memory accepted by motherboards by the year 2030.

Assuming we even have that much time. Ontos is out next year, and might be a banger; we loved Frictional’s last game, Amnesia: The Bunker, scoring it a 93%.