Don't go down there

Amnesia: The Dark Descent may have been surpassed by P.T. in the survival horror stakes, but Frictional Games can win back its thorny crown with SOMA starting 22nd September. Due out as a digital-only title for the PlayStation 4, the underwater sci-fi horror is looking every inch the unsettling successor to the Swedish studio's breakout hit.

The 12 minutes of gameplay footage really set the scene; there are no jump scares here, just a really disturbing, dilapidated facility. You will find yourself chased by a glitchy grunt, but it's the dialogue between the main character and a robot that insists that it's human that really freaked us out – and it's what's taken the developer almost five years to get right.

"Creating that disturbing sense of existential horror just right takes hours of setup," Thomas Grip explained. "It also requires a lot of assets to be in place before it can be tested properly. So while other games can make several iterations a week on their foundational elements, it's taken us roughly a year for each iteration."

The date's currently only been posted on the European PlayStation Blog, but given the high-profile nature of this title, we fully expect it to release on the same day in North America, too. You've got a good four months to mentally prepare yourself, then. The question is: do you think that you can handle this? Try not to scream in the comments section below.

[source blog.eu.playstation.com]