Tenebris Somnia's Launch Trailer Blends Live-Action Horror With Retro Pixel Art
New Blood Interactive's launch trailer for Tenebris Somnia mixes live-action film with hand-drawn pixel art, and the survival horror game is out now on five platforms.
New Blood Interactive has shipped the launch trailer for Tenebris Somnia, a survival horror adventure that stitches live-action footage directly into hand-drawn pixel art, and the two-minute cut makes the game's gimmick look less like a gimmick and more like a dare. One second the camera is tracking a retro sprite down a cramped apartment hallway; the next, a practical-effects monster fills the screen in full film grain, close enough to count pores. The game launched October 16 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, and the trailer is the clearest pitch yet for why a studio would bother mixing formats at all.
A story told in two textures
Tenebris Somnia follows Julia, who starts getting nightmares about her ex-boyfriend and goes to check on him in person. What she finds instead is a crumbling, monster-infested version of his apartment building, and the game's tagline asks the obvious question outright: what if the nightmares are real? The trailer leans on that uncertainty by refusing to settle into one visual register. Exploration, puzzles and combat play out in crisp 2D pixel art, while key story beats cut without warning into filmed, costumed, practically-lit cutscenes starring actor Clara Kovacic as Julia.
That whiplash is deliberate. According to Xbox Wire's launch-day feature, the cutscenes are tied directly to gameplay triggers rather than scheduled cleanly between levels, so one can open or close right before or after an enemy encounter. The effect, intentionally, is that the player is never quite sure which version of the game they are about to be in.
A filmmaker directing a survival horror game
The project is led by Andrés Borghi, an Argentine filmmaker and indie developer previously known for the short film The Black Heart, who wrote and directed Tenebris Somnia for developer Saibot Studios, led by Tobías Rusjan, and publisher New Blood Interactive. Borghi also worked as an editor and VFX artist on the live-action segments, which explains why the cutscenes read like short films rather than cutscene filler: they're shot, lit and blocked with the same care as the trailer's standalone horror beats.
"I hope players will come to see the cutscenes, and stay to experience the story," Borghi said in the Xbox Wire write-up marking the game's launch.
Practical monsters, no generative shortcuts
The trailer's creature design is built from physical prosthetics rather than CGI layers, with effects artist Marcos Berta supervising monster suits molded from the performers' own faces. Xbox Wire's post is explicit that the production used no generative AI anywhere in the pixel art, animation or cutscenes, framing the hand-built approach as part of the game's identity rather than a budget constraint. For a horror game trying to sell dread through texture, that distinction matters: the monsters in the live-action segments have the slightly-off physicality of a rubber suit on a real body, not the uncanny smoothness of a rendered model.
“I hope players will come to see the cutscenes, and stay to experience the story.”Andrés Borghi, director, Tenebris Somnia
Where the pixel-art half gets its teeth
Strip away the FMV novelty and Tenebris Somnia is still a fairly traditional survival horror build: limited resources, environmental puzzles tied to a single apartment building's layout, and boss fights the marketing describes as brutal rather than merely tense. The Steam listing backs that up with a short list of mechanical pillars — scavenged items, backtracking through a map that keeps changing meaning, and encounters built to punish players who treat every room like it's safe. The pixel art itself is hand-drawn frame by frame, which is part of why the cuts into live action land as a shock instead of a style downgrade; both halves are clearly made by people, just with different tools.
Launch details
Tenebris Somnia is out now on PC via Steam and GOG, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC through Xbox Play Anywhere, and Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. New Blood Interactive has not announced any post-launch content for the game, and nothing beyond the shipped build has been confirmed, so anything about a sequel or expansion at this point is speculation rather than reporting.
- Developer: Saibot Studios
- Publisher: New Blood Interactive
- Platforms: PC (Steam, GOG), PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox Play Anywhere, Switch, Switch 2
- Release date: October 16, 2026
Official links
Mira leads previews at Gamers6. She has spent fifteen years playing co-op shooters badly and writing about them well, and she still keeps a spreadsheet of every weapon reload animation worth the frame count.
