Project Hail Mary arrived in 2026 and turned into a massive hit, an outcome that nobody who had read the novel found remotely surprising. Sci-fi audiences were handed precisely what they’d been hoping for. And then, inevitably, they started asking for more.
Such is the curse of a film that lands this well. It carves out a Rocky-shaped cavity where your heart used to sit, and nothing else queued up on your watchlist quite plugs the gap.
The good news is that the movie’s performance has pulled a whole stack of other sci-fi projects into the open, alongside a fresh crop of releases cribbing from its central themes and story beats. One of these is shaping up as a true spiritual heir, and it isn’t a movie.
The gap nobody was filling
Films and shows in the Project Hail Mary mould are hardly scarce. Games that pick up its themes and narrative DNA? Barely any. Anyone after something more interactive and immersive in that same key had nowhere to turn.
Which brings us to ONTOS, freshly announced and pointed directly at that empty space. It borrows the Andy Weir blueprint and mixes in a measure of The X-Files, complete with that show’s taste for the surreal, the horrific and the mysterious.
Structurally, ONTOS is a first-person puzzle game built around narrative. The setting is a repurposed moon hotel, and you’re combing through it in search of answers.
What turns up 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
The developer here is the studio responsible for SOMA, the sci-fi horror adventure that landed comparably surreal set-pieces within a horrifying, mystery-soaked world. That would be Frictional Games, also the team behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
With SOMA, Frictional demonstrated it could construct a convincing sci-fi universe and suspend a mystery within it that is both enjoyable to unravel and worth unravelling. Those are separate accomplishments, and most studios pull off neither one.
ONTOS looks like everything the team absorbed making SOMA and the more recent Amnesia games, carried forward. Both the sci-fi crowd and the horror crowd have reason to watch this one.
Where the comparison holds, and where it breaks
Some precision is warranted. Yes, Project Hail Mary has its share of tense sequences and no shortage of existential dread, but labelling it a horror film would be pushing it.
The genuine common ground lies 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 grabs that isolation along with the horrors it breeds, then pushes the dial to eleven by bolting on the X-Files mystery angle.
It’s that blend that could end up placing ONTOS among the finest sci-fi games ever produced. A bold claim, admittedly. The studio’s history backs it up.
The wait just got longer
Certainty will have to wait until ONTOS actually ships, and that horizon has receded. The game was originally intended to drop in 2026 and has now been officially delayed to 2027.
There’s still no firm release date on the books. So the tantalizing fusion of Project Hail Mary isolation and X-Files mystery remains some way out of reach.
The delay does come with a consolation, and a practical one at that. You’ve been handed time.
Play SOMA. Chip away at the other Project Hail Mary-adjacent titles gathering dust on your list. By the time ONTOS swings open the doors of that repurposed moon hotel, you’ll understand exactly what sort of studio is waiting on the other side.