Amnesia: Rebirth developers Frictional are teasing what appears to be a new sci-fi game by way of a sneaky update to their deep sea horror venture Soma. Whatever it is, it involves some godforsaken luxury hotel steeped in a sheeny corporate appropriation of sacred ideas about cyclical change – a hotel that promises “an out of this world experience”. Sounds like the Dark Descenders are getting into the Dead Space business.
On Monday, the developers quietly patched the decade-old Soma to fix “faulty spam filters” on protagonist Simon’s PC, which you can surf briefly at the very start of the game. “Users may still receive suspicious correspondence due to treemail 0.1 filtering process issues,” the changelog notes. Then, there’s a line of illegible text.
Dutifully firing up Soma and checking out Simon’s inbox, we find a new message with the subject line: “[Virus Error] You’ve Ea%ned it”. The email is addressed to [HIGH NET WORTH INDIVIDUAL], and is a garbled invitation to invest in something called “Hotel Samsara” (as helpfully deciphered by Youtuber CheeseYen). Hotel Samsara has a website with a sign-up page, and that website is hella creepy.
“Since time immemorial mankind has dreamt of the stars and what lies beyond,” reads the About section. “Now LuxuryNext is prepared to deliver on that promise. Introducing, Hotel Samsara. A place like no other. A promise like no other. Exclusive. Luxurious. In Samsara, wishes will come true. Interested in investing?” There is also a sinister animation of what appears to be the hotel lobby. It shows a circular golden wall decoration through shadowy, spiky ferns. My guess is that if you invest in Hotel Samsara, your dividends will take the form of dismemberment/mutation and a sense of cosmic despair.
The page also includes endorsements of LuxuryNext, written by western-sounding executives from various trust funds and hospitality cartels. “Return on investment, time and time and time again. I really do wonder what their secret is?” writes Deborah RD Tory of Gilded Greens Group. There is mention of a man called Felix, who appears to be head of LuxuryNext. The quotes portray him as a “fearless” maverick and risk-taker. Sounds like obvious villain material to me. Bet he has a secret laboratory of some kind. Bet he has funny ideas about reincarnation. It’s perhaps too easy to draw parallels with certain realworld billionaires who made a portion of their megabucks from very expensive hotels.
As for “samsara” or “saṃsāra”, I can say little beyond pointing you at the Wikipedia page, which characterises it as a Sanskrit term for the “cyclicity of all life, matter, and existence”. It suggests that the Hotel Samsara game will be another one of Frictional’s spooky philosophical thought experiments. The website also includes what appears to be in-game imagery of a circular geometric pattern that resembles a mandala or a bhavachakra.
I spoke to one of Frictional’s top brass at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last year. He mentioned that they had one or two unannounced projects on the boil, following the very good Amnesia: The Bunker. Given that it was teased in Soma, the Hotel Samsara game is likely to be a sequel, but it could also be a new Amnesia game – Amnesia has explored connections between its debts from Lovecraft and real-world religious concepts and folklore, as in the djinn passages from Rebirth. With all that in mind, I’m a little worried about the game being an orientalising dog’s dinner of ideas from Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, but I guess they’ve allowed for that by presenting it all as the queasy branding of a corporation in-game.
Who knows, perhaps we’ll get a trailer in the course of Tokyo Game Show this week – or tonight’s surprise State Of Play broadcast from Sony. In the meantime, there is probably more to glean or decipher from that website. Let me know if you stumble on any fresh details.
Update: Oh look at that – the hotel website privacy policy redirects to Kepler Interactive.
- Security Camera Installation – indoor/outdoor IP CCTV systems & video analytics
- Access Control Installation – key card, fob, biometric & cloud‑based door entry
- Business Security Systems – integrated alarms, surveillance & access control
- Structured Cabling Services – voice, data & fiber infrastructure for new or existing builds
- Video Monitoring Services – 24/7 remote surveillance and analytics monitoring
Author: 360 Technology Group
