XOntos, the next game from acclaimed Amnesia horrorsmiths Frictional Games, is delayed—instead of being out later this year as originally planned, the studio said today that it will drop in 2027 instead.
No mention of Grand Theft Auto 6 was made in the delay announcement, although with the second half of 2026 now in full swing and Rockstar's colossus bearing down on the world with increasing speed, I tend to assume that it's at least on the periphery of any game delay into '27. In the case of Ontos, though, Frictional said it simply wants to get it right.
"Ontos is our most ambitious game to date, both in terms of its size and scale, and in the depth and layers of our story and gameplay," the studio wrote on X. "In order to deliver this vision, we have decided to push the release of Ontos to 2027. We look forward to sharing more updates about Ontos, our characters, and our world soon."
Frictional's Amnesia games are spectacularly scary, but also relatively conventional as these things go. Ontos, by contrast, will new more closely to the studio's 2015 release Soma: Frictional said in January that it is not trying to make Ontos "a stressful or scary game in the traditional sense," but that it wants players to "grapple with heavy and thought provoking themes. The goal is to evoke this deep existential terror that stays long after you finish playing."
That sure worked with Soma. The Amnesia games had me screaming, crying, and throwing up in the moment, but more than a decade down the road it's Soma that still makes me sit back in my chair every now and then and think, what the hell. (There were moments of screaming, crying, throwing up in that one too, but they were much fewer and farther-between.) So, yeah, definitely eager for more of that, and if it means waiting until next year, I'm happy to do it.
