ONTOS: This Horrifying, Tantalizing Thriller Feels Like an Immersive Sim for Puzzle Gaming - XBOX Wire

ONTOS is the kind of game you don’t stop thinking about, even after you’ve turned it off. And not just because it offers you the horrifying reality of the question: “What if a man’s consciousness was stored in a server rack made of rats?”

I’ve played its first demo – shown to press and creators at gamescom 2026 – several times already. The game itself is centered on Aditi, drawn to a seemingly abandoned moon resort-turned-science lab, Samsara by her estranged father. This demo is built around a single puzzle – get a key from one of the base’s scientists, Crombie. Sounds simple enough…

The problem is that Crombie’s copied his mind into the aforementioned rat contraption and become incapacitated. The key is hung around his neck, trapped beneath a mess of probes and wires inserted directly into his brain. I’ve replayed that single scenario multiple times because it’s not so much about finding the ‘correct’ solution as it is finding which solution you want to try.

Like Frictional Games’ spiritual predecessor, SOMA, this game turns philosophical inquiry into weird science. Its characters are asking the big questions (‘What is the self? Are body and mind necessarily connected? What happens when I plug myself into The Rat-puter?’) and trying to answer them in increasingly grotesque ways.

But unlike SOMA, this isn’t built into the fabric of a traditional horror game. As far as I’ve seen, there are no stalking threats, no stealth – instead this is a game all about the puzzles you’re presented with, and the exploration in between. It almost skews closer to elements of immersive sims than it does a survival-horror, not least in how it lets you work out not just what you’re being asked to do, but how you want to do it.

In the case of Crombie, I’ve worked out how to turn off the server (R.I.P. rats) and bring his corporeal form back from the brink. I’ve also worked out how to take the copied consciousness and effectively overwrite Crombie’s original mind with its copy. And –  just for science you understand – I’ve cut the server without doing either of those things and accidentally killed them both, letting me just slip the key from around his neck. That last one leaves me to wonder – can I effectively play ONTOS as the horror game villain?

The game lets me take any of these paths, with very little overt direction, and reacts to it seamlessly. I’m left to agonize over whether I’ve made the “right” choice – and it will be fascinating to see how other characters in this world will react when faced with them.

There’s more beyond the puzzle setpieces themselves; I’m also discovering things in between all of these attempts. As I travel to the rat server, there’s a lot more to find – scattered terminals and audio logs give me a sense of the wider story, and clue me into exactly what’s happening in the experiment. I’ve found locked cabinets containing extra clues, and even a test rat-server that helped me explore how the machine’s various probes and machinery worked, giving me insight into the full-scale puzzle later.

There’s also a certain amount of resource management here – you need a blowtorch to cut server wires, but it’s limited by the number of oxygen canisters you can find. In one run, I suddenly realised that I’d gotten to the main puzzle knowing how to get to the solution I wanted, but without the ammunition to actually do it, forcing me to improvise. It’s a neat way to encourage you to look off the beaten path, and understand the world around the puzzles.

Samsara is a marvellously tactile place – doors need to be manually unlatched and heaved open, giving you just enough time to worry what you’re going to see on the other side. Drawers are physically pulled open, and almost every item can be picked up and inspected, allowing you to make a real mess as you heave and throw away potential clues while you ransack rooms. It all adds to the vibe that anything could be a clue to a later puzzle – you’re compelled to understand the place just in case it leads you to new theories.

It also means that, despite having played the same sequence multiple times, I’m positive there’s more to be discovered here. There will be clues I haven’t seen, and there are definitely solutions I haven’t intuited. Even within the solutions I have found, there are nuances in how you solve them, variations that can unlock different voice lines or reactions.

The reason I can’t stop thinking about ONTOS isn’t really because of the horrors and wonders it presents – it’s because I can’t stop my brain ticking over about how I could have engaged with them differently. There seem to be so many ways to solve a single puzzle. When spread out over the course of an entire game, that’s a massively intriguing prospect.

ONTOS arrives in 2027 for XBOX Series X|S and XBOX on PC. Play it on both console and PC at no additional cost with XBOX Play Anywhere.