As I’m typing this, we’re in the final hellish days before the October 16 launch of TENEBRIS SOMNIA – the retro survival horror game with live-action cutscenes – coming at you from Andrés Borghi (The Black Heart) Saibot Studios (Hellbound), and published by New Blood Interactive. (FAITH: The Unholy Trinity, DUSK, Blood West).
In Tenebris Somnia you play as Julia, a young woman who is having nightmares about her ex-boyfriend being torn apart by horrible monsters. Hoping to find some peace, she goes to his apartment to check on him. What she discovers is a world of horror that descends beyond her darkest dreams. What if the nightmares are real…?
One night while filmmaker and indie game developer Andrés Borghi was streaming our previous horror game FAITH: The Unholy Trinity, he got the idea to make a pixel horror game of his own with a sinister twist: the cutscenes would be live action, with real actors in real locations and real spooky special effects.
So Andrés and Saibot Studios lead Tobías Rusjan got working on a demo. Then they pitched the full game to New Blood, the only studio crazy enough to give a horror filmmaker the budget to make a survival horror game.
And that’s just what we did! Shortly after inking the publishing deal, we traveled to Buenos Aires to see Andrés and the film crew in action. What we saw amazed us – a legit professional camera and production crew, practical monster effects supervised by the award-winning Marcos Berta (“When Evil Lurks”), the performance by Argentine scream queen Clara Kovacic as the game’s protagonista – all meticulously storyboarded and directed by Andrés.
We witnessed the floor of a 17th-century Argentine cathedral splattered with fake blood. We watched a boom operator sprint 20 meters – and slide on his knees the final 2 meters – to get the perfect lighting effect under an actor at the perfect moment. They even guerilla-filmed several shots on the subway in the middle of the night (but don’t tell anyone). This wasn’t the low-budget FMV approach you remember from classic horror-adventure games. It was high-quality movie magic happening right in front of us. And absolutely no generative AI was used anywhere at any point in production.
That’s right, we did it the old-fashioned way. Good old human slop. Practical special effects and limited CGI. Human produced and directed, human-translated localization into English, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese. In-game art and animation drawn by hand, pixel by pixel, frame by frame. Audio and music by an actual human composer. Real-life living breathing human programmers. Even if we had used generative AI to take shortcuts (not that we even know how) we wouldn’t be able to call it a New Blood Interactive game with a clear conscience. Would it have saved us some money? Probably, but we would incur a much steeper cost – the trust of our fans who look to us for sincerity and authenticity. It’s just not our brand. Our players and, quite frankly, games in general, deserve better than gen AI. But enough about that.
Back to the game’s incredible cutscenes. These aren’t just cutscenes for cutscenes’ sake. In a lot of retro games, cutscenes were often a reward for making it to the end. In Tenebris Somnia, the cutscenes are directly linked to the gameplay – you never know when a cutscene will begin or end. This not only shocks the player – because now they’re encountering the horrors of the game in gruesome detail – but it keeps them in suspense at all times. You never know if the cutscene will drop you right into an enemy encounter or start right after one!
Merging pixel horror gameplay and live-action cinematics didn’t come without its challenges, however. Film sets needed to match the in-game locations, requiring careful planning and a blend of practical set-dressing and seamless CGI. Thankfully Andrés is also a talented film editor and VFX artist! To make the monster effects believable, silicon masks and prosthetics were molded out of performer’s faces and then fitted back on with makeup – a process that took several hours each time just like in a major Hollywood-style production. You can see behind-the-scenes videos on how this was done on our YouTube and Instagram. We hope to release a full making-of documentary after the game is launched!
After nearly 4 years of production we’re extremely proud of this monster we’ve created together. Tenebris Somnia offers a classic survival horror experience – scary monsters, limited resources, brutal boss fights, great sound design, puzzles to solve, and a terrifying plot to uncover. In the words of Andrés, “I hope players will come to see the cutscenes, and stay to experience the story”! It also stands alone as a genuinely scary horror game with a truly unique identity – take it from me – the guy that made FAITH!
Tenebris Somnia is available now on XBOX Series X|S and XBOX on PC. PC. Play it on console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere.
Tenebris Somnia
New Blood Interactive
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