Overview
Ontos is a sci-fi puzzle adventure about Aditi Amani's search for answers inside Samsara, a repurposed hotel on the moon. Her estranged father's legacy draws her into the facility, where her investigation connects his personal history with a series of disturbing scientific experiments.
Aditi's father is a brilliant thinker turned prophet, placing science and belief at the heart of her family mystery. Frictional Games develops and publishes Ontos, with Windows PC, PlayStation, and Xbox among its platforms.
How does Ontos play?
Ontos combines exploration, research, material scavenging, and direct interaction with machinery. Its puzzles involve analog systems that require careful calibration and hands-on operation, making equipment something to understand and manipulate.
- Material scavenging
- Analog system calibration
- Practical research
- Multiple problem-solving approaches
Challenges support different solutions, allowing players to work with the systems and resources involved. The objective is to make something of a situation, with ingenuity shaping the approach instead of every test demanding one prescribed answer.
Planning concerns both the materials collected and the way machinery is set up. Choosing an approach forms part of the challenge alongside carrying out the individual interactions.
Hands-on machinery drives the puzzle-solving.
Exploring Samsara's converted spaces
Samsara combines the remains of a failed mining colony with a once-luxurious hotel. The base forms an interconnected labyrinth, taking exploration through spaces whose current purpose differs sharply from their original design.
Laboratories occupy casinos and theater stages, while emptied swimming pools provide room for experiments. Scientific equipment shares these spaces with the architecture of leisure and performance, giving the research an unsettling domestic and public context.
Philosophical factions divide the base, bringing competing beliefs into its scientific setting. Strange machines also occupy ancient moon caves, extending the investigation beyond the hotel's converted interiors and into the surrounding lunar environment.
Former leisure spaces become experimental facilities.
Experiments with moral consequences
Ontos uses its experiments to examine questions about the soul, suffering, and existence. Solving a practical problem also means confronting the implications of the work, so technical understanding cannot settle every question an encounter raises.
Choices produce consequences that carry forward. An action taken with good intentions can still cause devastating results, making foresight important without turning moral judgment into a guarantee of safety. The disturbing encounters connect those stakes to decisions made during play.
Scientific trials carry ethical stakes.
The mystery ultimately concerns the nature of reality and Aditi's place within it. Its systems-driven puzzle gameplay puts those abstract questions into situations that demand action: operating equipment, pursuing an answer, and accepting the consequences of a chosen solution. Research and judgment share the same task, but they do not necessarily point toward a comfortable result.
