On console and PC
If you play on both console and PC, Xbox Play Anywhere is the key detail here. Tenebris Somnia supports play on both devices at no additional cost through the programme, giving you more flexibility over where to play. The available platforms are Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC.
That benefit applies to playing on console and PC; it does not mean the game itself is free. It helps to separate two things at the outset: how you access the game and the kind of horror waiting inside.
Julia’s nightmares
You play as Julia, a young woman haunted by nightmares of monsters tearing her ex-boyfriend apart. That is the starting point for the story, a premise personal and unsettling enough to set the tone without any further explanation of the threat.
Tenebris Somnia is a retro 2D survival horror adventure with live-action cutscenes. Clara Kovacic plays Julia in those scenes. The same protagonist connects the game’s pixelated world with filmed scenes featuring actors.
That combination is what interests us most: retro visuals and live-action horror offer two different ways of portraying the same nightmare. For us, the appeal lies in the shift in visual style, with Julia’s story providing the common thread.
Pixels and practical effects
The in-game art and animation were drawn by hand, pixel by pixel and frame by frame. The live-action side has its own counterpart to that work: Marcos Berta supervised the practical monster effects.
These are two concrete techniques behind the game’s look. One shapes characters and movement within the 2D visuals, while the other gives the monsters physical form in the live-action scenes. Both deserve attention when discussing the visual identity of Tenebris Somnia.
To us, practical effects make a particularly interesting companion to hand-drawn animation here. In both cases, the craft draws our attention, and bringing those techniques together gives this horror concept a distinctive idea.
The people behind the production
Andrés Borghi and Saibot Studios lead Tobías Rusjan worked on the demo. The game spent nearly four years in production, and human translators handled the English, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese localisations.
Xbox Wire explicitly states that no generative AI was used at any point in production. The source’s claim covers the entire production, alongside specific details about hand-drawn artwork and human translation.
The publisher is New Blood Interactive, and Xbox Wire lists October 16 as the release date.