Frictional Games have announced that their upcoming sci-fi horror game, SOMA, has hit beta testing this week. The minds behind the absolutely terrifying Amnesia and Penumbra series have put the new game into the hands of 40 beta testers, to iron out any last bugs and dole out some last minute polish. But apart from that, the game is “pretty much” feature complete.
“After much blood, sweat and tears we can now inform you all that SOMA is finally in the Beta stage!” said Frictional Games. “This is a huge thing for us and easily the biggest milestone prior to the actual release of the game.”
SOMA has been a tricky game to create according to Frictional Games, but now the end is in sight after at least five years of development. How close the end, and the release of SOMA depends on the closed beta results however.
“So what does it mean?” asked Frictional Games. “Well it means that we now have a build of SOMA that contains all of our desired features. There are still a few bits of art, a few sounds etc. missing, but the game is pretty much complete content-wise. We’ve sent this build out to around 40 people to test and once we start getting feedback in we’ll discuss how best to spend our remaining development time.
“At this time in development there isn’t much room to make big changes. If it turns out that something doesn’t work at all, we need to figure out a not-too-drastic tweak that can make it work, or consider cutting it entirely.”
Unfortunately, the beta is private, and can’t be accessed by the public. But then again, for a horror game from Frictional Games, it’s probably best to leave your experience fresh for release.