Tenebris Somnia Review: 2D Horror Game Brought to Life with Live Action Cinematics

From the teams that gave us FAITH: The Unholy Trinity comes a new 2D retro survival horror game: Tenebris Somnia. 

Tenebris Somnia draws from classics in the horror genre like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, which already caught my interest, but what really stole my attention and put this game on my watchlist were the live-action scenes. That’s not something you see much these days, and I’m a sucker for traditional effects in this very digital era.  Would they feel like a gimmick? Would they add to or take away from the experience? 

Plus, who doesn’t love a horror game during the Halloween season?

Exes are a Nightmare. 

The game starts with our main character, Julia, being haunted by nightmares of terrible things happening to her ex-boyfriend. With the nightmares becoming more frequent and disturbing, she decides to go check on him. Shortly after arriving at the apartment they used to share, it’s obvious that something is amiss. What if the nightmares aren’t actually nightmares after all?

Enemies and creatures feel fairly manageable for the most part, and like in most survival horror game, running and simply evading are always an option. The revolver, for instance, was only used early on as I acclimated to how aiming and shooting works and how many shots took down a monster, and I later settled on evading and saving my ammo for later encounters. Which I’m thankful I did, because I was shown that what I thought were a good amount of resources turned out to be just enough to survive, and then it was back to searching every drawer in every new room I entered. But that’s the survival part, right? Being lured into a false sense of security with a pocket full of ammo and healing items, only to (potentially) use it all. 

The combat does its job, but it’s not a very complex system; you take aim and then either swing a melee weapon or shoot. I did long for a dodge at some points, but once I had a good grasp of enemy patterns, sprinting out of the way and around attacks worked well.