Project Hail Mary landed in 2026 and became an enormous success, which anyone who’d read the book saw coming from a mile off. Sci-fi fans got exactly what they wanted. And then, predictably, they wanted more.
That’s the problem with a film that good. It leaves a Rocky-sized hole where your heart used to be, and nothing on your watchlist quite fills it.
The upside is that the film’s success has dragged a pile of other sci-fi projects out of the woodwork, plus a wave of new releases borrowing from its core narrative and themes. One of them looks set to be a genuine spiritual successor, and it isn’t a film at all.
The gap nobody was filling
There are plenty of films and shows like Project Hail Mary. Video games that adopt its themes and narrative elements? Not really. If you wanted something more interactive and immersive in the same register, you were out of luck.
Enter ONTOS, recently announced and aiming squarely at that gap. It takes the Andy Weir template and stirs in a dash of The X-Files and its penchant for the surreal, the horrific and the mysterious.
ONTOS is a first-person narrative-focused puzzle game. You explore a repurposed moon hotel looking for answers.
What you find instead: unspeakable horrors, a myriad of bizarre experiments and a shocking, compromised truth that will almost certainly prove to be an astounding revelation.
Why the pedigree matters here
This comes from the studio behind SOMA, the sci-fi horror adventure that pulled off similarly surreal set-pieces inside a horrifying world teeming with mystery. That’s Frictional Games, the same team responsible for Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
SOMA proved Frictional could build a compelling sci-fi universe and hang a mystery inside it that’s both fun to solve and worth solving. Those are two different achievements, and most studios manage neither.
ONTOS reads like the evolution of everything the team learned on SOMA and the recent Amnesia titles. Sci-fi people and horror people should both be paying attention.
Where the comparison holds, and where it breaks
Let’s be precise about this. Project Hail Mary has tense scenes and an abundance of existential dread, but calling it a horror film would be a stretch.
The real overlap is elsewhere: hard sci-fi, isolated settings, and one person trying to solve a seemingly impossible problem in a harsh environment that seems hell-bent on stopping them.
ONTOS takes the isolation and the horrors that come with it, then dials the whole thing up to eleven by welding on those X-Files mystery elements.
That combination is what could ultimately make ONTOS one of the best sci-fi games ever made. Big claim. The track record supports it.
The wait just got longer
We won’t know for sure until ONTOS is released, and that’s further off than it was. The game was originally intended to drop in 2026 and has now been officially delayed to 2027.
No firm release date has been confirmed. So it’ll be a while before anyone gets to experience that tantalizing mix of Project Hail Mary isolation and X-Files mystery.
There’s a silver lining in the delay, and it’s a practical one. You’ve got time.
Go play SOMA. Work through the other Project Hail Mary-adjacent things sitting unwatched on your list. By the time ONTOS opens the doors of that repurposed moon hotel, you’ll know exactly what kind of studio is waiting inside.
