Tenebris Somnia Review

For all its retro-inspired origins, this is a game that eschews point-and-click movement in favor of using WASD on mouse & keyboard. Interacting with objects is done with a left-click. And in most scenarios you just ‘EQUIP’, ‘CONSUME’, or ‘COMBINE’ items. When Julia interacts with the few NPCs of this world, dialogue options allow you to ask multiple questions and exhaust them. It’s a streamlined interface that doesn’t offer options that are dead ends. Julia is surprisingly agile, able to walk or run in eight directions, but is quick enough to dodge incoming attacks from demons without a dedicated dodge button. Julia can wield melee weapons like a wrench with one hand, or a pipe later on that requires two hands. In order to attack, you have to hold right-click to raise the weapon, and then left-click to attack. The difference between the melee weapons doesn’t affect Julia’s movement, but the time it takes for her to charge an attack, with the heavier of the two taking an extra animation step. Julia will also have access to firearms, and similarly needs to hold right-click to aim, and then left-click to shoot them.

The scares don’t happen too often, but when they do, they are carefully balanced between the in-game action and the impressively well-made full-motion videos (FMVs). The FMV is not only really well done, but it transitions smoothly and feels cohesive with the gameplay you were just in, utilizing incredibly high bit-rate videos that fit in so well. Now, if anyone was wondering, you can pause cutscenes, or skip them. The FMVs being done by an “award-winning film crew from Argentina” really shows; it’s absolutely gorgeous cinematography and in a brilliant stylistic choice, they are not voiced – to their benefit. The cutscenes are visually dense and able to tell a story without anyone saying a word.

Julia will get hurt, and if you open your inventory you’ll see her “Doomguy” status bar, accompanied by a range of colors: green means she’s perfectly healthy, and degrades to green-yellow, yellow, yellow-orange, orange, and then red meaning she’s almost dead. There’s a surprising and bountiful amount of healing items, two types, a partial and full amount. However, resources like health vials go from plentiful to scarce in a bad run. Such as in an early boss fight, I’d saved every bullet but I ended up using them all, with the last one delivering the kill. Julia’s inventory is seemingly limitless, able to carry any and all items that are deemed important, from guns, ammo, heals, keys, notes, film, screwdrivers, and so on. I do appreciate that there’s not a limited inventory or something you have to swap between a stash and what you have on you, this would really bog the game down otherwise. It’s a great quality-of-life feature, and the game still maintains its survival horror tension by making the actual drops (health and ammo) scarce. There are some smartly placed save points, especially near upcoming bosses, and they feel very Goldilocks in that they’re “just right” in terms of how many exist.

Backtracking can sometimes be a chore to solve some of the game’s grander puzzles, and while it’s kinda par for the course for the genre, Tenebris Somnia at least makes it interesting by offering a jump scare or two. During all of this, the game does great things in its levels to offer context clues and very subtle things to help keep the player focused and always progressing whenever possible. I don’t think veteran adventure game enthusiasts will be stumped, but newcomers might appreciate the wink-and-nod to help you through it.

While exploring the environment and solving puzzles is highly rewarding, the survival horror combat can sometimes be a frustrating experience. If you fire all the bullets for your gun, you’ll need to reload it. There’s not a dedicated button for this; you simply left-click to shoot again to trigger the reload, meaning you’ll have to do this out of range from an enemy’s attack. If you mistime it, there’s no reload cancel, so this can lead to some undesired deaths while fumbling around. There are also a few enemies where you can be killed in one-hit, it’s not fun but there’s something to learn there. It’s something I came to deal with or outright avoid, but no less discouraging when it happens, especially during a boss fight.

The entirety of the game takes place in a parallel dimension of Ivan’s apartment building. The way the environment shapes itself to fit the game’s needs is smartly designed to make the space feel much bigger than it actually is. In most cases, you can’t clear floors as enemies will respawn or add additional enemies, and for the most part, I was able to avoid them unless fighting them was necessary. The game is full of little touches, like how the sound of footsteps changes based on the surface you’re on.

Actually, there are no graphics options whatsoever here. The game plays just fine, and there’s no lame CRT filter or post-processing to worry about. It displays in 16:9 but with some creative uses of 4:3 aspect ratio, and hits a rock-solid 60fps at all times. I will note that since I played this on Linux, I had to use Proton 6.3-8 (compatibility layer) to get the game to even play.

Tenebris Somnia translates to ‘dreams in darkness,’ the literal catalyst that pulls Julia into this nightmare. While the game embraces a retro aesthetic, it never relies on cheap nostalgia, and modernizes its design exactly where it matters. Progressing requires genuine deductions, keen observations, and actual note-taking – capturing the glory days of 90s PC gaming when you’d insert a multimedia CD-ROM for the newest adventure game. The cinematic FMVs are worth the price of admission alone, but thankfully, the adventure game and survival horror mechanics have the teeth to match. Tenebris Somnia is a new horror classic.