Link to the code: brain-emulation GitHub repository

Ontos: Frictional Games Returns to the Question of What Is Real

In 2015, Frictional Games released SOMA — a game about a man who wakes up in an underwater research station to discover he has been scanned and instantiated in a new body. The game’s central horror was not monsters. It was the copy problem: the realization that consciousness transfer creates copies, not continuity. Simon, the protagonist, is confronted with the fact that the original Simon still exists while he is experiencing the world as a copy. When the original is destroyed, the copy’s survival does not feel like salvation. It feels like watching someone else die.

SOMA remains one of the most philosophically precise treatments of mind uploading in any medium. Its analysis of the copy problem — played out through environmental storytelling, audio logs, and a handful of wrenching moral choices — connects directly to the academic literature on personal identity in ways that most science fiction does not bother to attempt.

Frictional Games is back in 2026 with Ontos, and the philosophical territory has shifted.

What Ontos Is About

Ontos takes place in the Samsara Hotel: a luxury facility built on the Moon, constructed over the site of a failed mining colony. Engineer Aditi Amani arrives at the hotel to investigate the disappearance of her estranged father, who worked there before contact was lost.

What Aditi finds disturbs her understanding not of who she is, but of whether what she perceives is real.

The game is described by Frictional Games as a philosophical horror experience in the tradition of SOMA — not action horror or survival horror, but the horror that emerges from confronting questions that cannot be answered without consequence. SOMA asked: what does it mean to be you? Ontos asks: what does it mean for the world you inhabit to be real?

Stellan Skarsgård provides voice work for a key character, adding to the production’s ambition.

The Philosophical Shift: From Identity to Reality

The question Ontos raises — is perceived reality authentic? — is related to the mind uploading question but distinct from it. SOMA dealt with uploading and continuity. Ontos deals with the relationship between consciousness and the reality it inhabits.

This is, in philosophical terms, the shift from personal identity theory to epistemology and philosophy of perception. Can a conscious mind be reliably deceived about the nature of the reality it inhabits? And if so, what does that mean for the value of experience?

These questions connect to digital consciousness research in a specific way. Any mind uploading scenario involves instantiating a mind in a substrate — silicon, neuromorphic hardware, some future computational medium — that is not the environment the mind evolved to inhabit. The digital mind would receive inputs not from biological sensory organs but from simulated or synthesized sensory data. The world it inhabits would be, in a literal sense, constructed for it.

Whether a mind can be meaningfully conscious in a constructed reality — whether simulated experience has the same value as experience arising from direct physical engagement with an external world — is not a question that the current WBE technical literature addresses. It is the question Ontos is asking.

The Samsara Setting and Layers of Reality

The choice of “Samsara” as the hotel’s name is not accidental. In Buddhist philosophy, samsara refers to the cycle of death and rebirth — but also, in its broader sense, to the realm of conditioned existence: the world of appearances that ordinary consciousness takes as real without recognizing its constructed, contingent character. The enlightenment that Buddhist practice aims at involves seeing through samsara — recognizing the constructed nature of ordinary perception.

The hotel built over a failed mining colony implies layers: a failed reality (the colony that did not work), covered over by a constructed luxury environment (the hotel), built on the Moon (physically removed from Earth, from ordinary life). Aditi enters this structure looking for her father and finds that the layers extend further than she expected.

This architecture — nested realities, constructed environments, a truth hidden beneath the apparent — maps onto the digital consciousness question in instructive ways. A mind upload inhabiting a simulated environment is, in a structural sense, in a position analogous to Aditi’s: in a constructed reality, looking for what is authentic, uncertain whether the distinction between real and simulated can be maintained.

The biological computationalism framework argues that consciousness is not substrate-neutral. If that is right, then a mind in a simulated environment is not simply a mind in a different kind of real environment — it is a mind in a qualitatively different situation, where the physics of experience are altered in ways that matter for what the experience actually is.

Frictional Games’ Formal Philosophy of Horror

Frictional Games has developed, over their catalog (Penumbra, Amnesia, SOMA, and now Ontos), a distinctive approach to horror that is worth articulating because it differs from genre convention.

Conventional horror uses threat to generate fear: monsters, violence, death, the unknown. Frictional’s horror uses philosophical dissolution. The scariest moment in SOMA is not a creature encounter. It is a logic puzzle: if there are two of you and you can only save one, which one is you? The fear is not physical danger but cognitive vertigo — the moment when the concepts you use to understand yourself stop working.

Ontos extends this approach to reality perception. The most disturbing possibility the game explores is not that something wants to harm Aditi, but that the framework she uses to distinguish real from unreal, true from constructed, might be unreliable in ways she cannot detect.

For players who came to Ontos via SOMA — a substantial audience given SOMA’s cult following — the experience is continuous. SOMA unsettled personal identity. Ontos unsettles reality itself. The two games are not a series in the conventional sense, but they form a philosophical sequence.

What Ontos Adds to the WBE Conversation

The mind uploading research agenda focuses almost entirely on the transfer question: how to capture a mind, instantiate it in a new substrate, and verify that the instantiation is accurate. It gives less attention to the subsequent question: what is the life of that instantiated mind like?

A mind uploaded into a digital substrate will inhabit a constructed reality — simulated physics, synthesized sensory data, artificial social environments — from the moment of instantiation. Whether that reality can provide the same kind of grounding for consciousness as biological reality is an open question. The 4E cognition framework suggests that cognitive processes are constitutively embedded in a real physical and social environment; a constructed environment may not provide equivalent cognitive support.

Ontos does not answer this question. It makes it felt. The game puts the player in the position of a mind in a constructed environment, with mounting evidence that the construction is less transparent than it appeared. The phenomenology of that position — the specific texture of being unable to trust the reality you inhabit — is what the game conveys.

That phenomenology may be the most accurate available description of what digital consciousness would actually be like.

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