I’ve got a late addition to Kotaku‘s spooky week that’s really gonna intrigue the gamer that grew up loving Night Trap. Tenebris Somnia isn’t quite the game that was, deploying live-action cutscenes as a seasoning rather than the whole dish, but damn, when it does, it’s effective. Tenebris Somnia takes the simple, if fraught, act of catching up with your ex and turns it into a horror show. When Julia, wracked by nightmares of her ex-boyfriend, returns to their old apartment to check in on him, she’s confronted with broken glass, ruined mementos, and weird, possibly satanic symbols on the doors. Surprise! He’s fallen in with demons who want to use his flesh to return to corporeal form.

And what forms they take! One of the enemies you fight is a man with melted candle wax for a head, and seeing him rendered in live action is seriously cool. I enjoy how the cutscenes mesh with the gameplay. In the game, Julia’s health is represented by an onscreen portrait of her that gets darker the more damage she takes. You can see that, too, in cutscenes where she starts off bright-eyed but slowly gets more tired-looking, with the bags under her eyes growing more prominent as the game goes on.

I also love how random the cutscenes are; you never know when one is gonna show up and when one does, it feels like a reward for a job well done. Congratulations, here’s a scare as a treat.

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