The brief preview of Frictional Games’ upcoming release has been mutating, and nobody else seems to have noticed.
Hear me out, I swear I’m not crazy.
At the end of December, the developers of SOMA and the Amnesia series released a short, ambiguous video clip on the website NextFrictionalGame.com. The looping one-second clip showed some sort of tiny, neuron-like mass, pulsing irregularly. The unidentified mass was only 65 pixels tall at its largest, but hinted at an unsettling game that had something to do with the strange imagery on display.
Sometime after this, the mass… changed. It grew larger – 80 pixels high – and its nucleus became more bean-shaped, while the network of tendrils became almost invisibly thin and more interconnected with a number of bright spots scattered among them.
Nobody seems to have been tracking the page, so it’s unclear if this is the first time that the video has changed, but the video file names do offer a hint about how frequently Frictional has updated the page. On January 5th, when TheGamer first published information about the teaser, the filename of the looping video was “1230.mp4,” implying that it was posted on December 30th. The filename for the new video is “0106.MP4,” which appears to mean that it was posted January 6th – one week after the first one.
With this in mind, it seems likely that the changes to the site will update weekly, slowly unveiling what nightmare Frictional Games has in store for us next – and, since Frictional announced that they would be on vacation up until January 7th, it also likely means that the updates are automated.
Frictional Games’ social media accounts haven’t yet acknowledged that anything has happened to the website, so either they’re being deliberately mysterious about the whole thing, or they just haven’t noticed as their website has secretly become a slowly growing organism that somehow takes the form of occasionally-updating digital videos.
TheGamer will keep an eye on the website and provide updates when the site changes further.