Tenebris Somnia Launches, Splicing Retro Pixel Horror With Live-Action Cutscenes
Saibot Studios and New Blood Interactive splice retro survival horror with live-action cutscenes from an award-winning Argentine crew, out now on PC and consoles.
A small Buenos Aires studio just shipped one of the stranger horror hybrids of the year. Tenebris Somnia, developed by Andrés Borghi and Saibot Studios and published by New Blood Interactive, launched October 16 on Steam, GOG, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch and Switch 2. The pitch is simple to state and hard to pull off: a retro 2D survival-horror adventure that periodically cuts away from its pixel art into live-action footage shot by a professional Argentine film crew.
A nightmare in two formats
Tenebris Somnia casts players as Julia, a woman who becomes trapped in a nightmare of monsters and puzzle-locked rooms rendered in a deliberately chunky 8- and 16-bit style, the kind of look New Blood's audience already associates with throwback shooters like DUSK and Amid Evil. The game draws openly from Silent Hill and Resident Evil's survival-horror template: manage limited ammo and healing items, solve inventory puzzles, and avoid or fight creatures that stalk fixed, pre-rendered rooms.
What breaks the formula is what happens at the story's key turns. Instead of a pixel-art cutscene, the game drops into full live-action footage with real actors, practical makeup effects and set design standing in for the exact location Julia was just exploring in sprite form. It is a technique New Blood has flirted with before in Airdorf's FAITH series, but never to this degree, and the studio is betting that the tonal whiplash between retro game and horror short film is the hook rather than a gimmick.
A director who builds practical monsters for a living
Tenebris Somnia is directed, written and produced by Andrés Borghi, a visual-effects producer whose film credits include creature and makeup work on the horror feature When Evil Lurks. Saibot Studios, his development outfit, previously co-created the 2021 fighting game The Black Heart, but this is its first horror adventure and its first project built around practical, in-camera effects rather than game-only art.
New Blood signed the project after its co-founder Dave Oshry connected Borghi with Airdorf, the pseudonymous creator of New Blood's own FAITH: The Unholy Trinity horror series, who came on as executive producer. The pairing clicked quickly, according to Airdorf, who pointed to Borghi's short-film work as the reason he joined without much convincing.
Where the pixels give way to film
Saibot's film unit shot the live-action sequences on practical sets dressed to mirror the game's pixel-art rooms almost beat for beat, down to matching camera angles and prop placement, so the cut between formats reads as a literal plunge into the nightmare rather than a disconnected cutscene reel. New Blood has described the approach as the game's real "secret," withheld from most pre-release marketing until Tenebris Somnia's reveal at the Day of the Devs showcase alongside Summer Game Fest on June 5.
“Andrés was the director of one of my favorite horror short films, Alexia,”Airdorf, executive producer on Tenebris Somnia and creator of FAITH: The Unholy Trinity
That reveal also confirmed the game's platform spread and its physical release, which New Blood is handling through Lost in Cult rather than a mainstream retail partner, keeping the release squarely in collector and boutique-publisher territory even as it ships day one on five platforms.
Price, platforms and the demo already in players' hands
Tenebris Somnia is priced at $24.99 on Steam, discounted to $19.99 for its launch week, with matching listings live on GOG as a DRM-free build. Console versions are confirmed for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch and Switch 2. Anyone unsure about the pixel-to-film swap can still try before buying: a free demo covering the game's opening stretch has been available on Steam and GOG since before launch, and New Blood has left it up as a permanent preview rather than pulling it at release.
A low-budget outlier in New Blood's horror lineup
Tenebris Somnia slots into a New Blood catalog that already leans hard into throwback horror and shooters, from Airdorf's own FAITH trilogy to retro-styled releases like DUSK and ULTRAKILL, but it is the publisher's first release built around a working film crew rather than a game studio alone. For a publisher whose identity is largely "retro aesthetics as a design choice," betting a launch slot on a two-person collaboration between a VFX director and a fighting-game studio is a genuine swing, and an unusually literal way of saying a game can look like two different decades at once.
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Sam writes about small studios and the games they ship against the odds, and turns the hardest parts of them into guides that get to the point.
