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Frictional Games

The Swedish studio behind Penumbra, Amnesia and SOMA

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Thomas Grip and Jens Nilsson founded Frictional Games in Sweden in 2007, after a student tech demo grew into Penumbra: Overture, a physics-driven horror game made by four people. Its Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) took away the player's weapons and taught a generation of horror games to make the player hide. SOMA followed in 2015 and Amnesia: Rebirth in 2020, and the studio has released the source code of its first two engines.

Frictional Games makes horror games in which the player is usually too weak to fight. Its best-known game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), gave its hero a lantern and no weapons at all, and the sight of players running and hiding from its monsters, posted as videos on YouTube, shaped first-person horror for the decade after. The studio got there by trial and error. Its first game let the player fight, players fought badly, and Frictional took the weapons away.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 2007, in Helsingborg, Sweden, by Thomas Grip and Jens Nilsson; based in Malmö since 2017.
  • Games: the Penumbra series (2007–2008), Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), SOMA (2015), Amnesia: Rebirth (2020) and Amnesia: The Bunker (2023); it published The Chinese Room’s Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (2013).
  • Engine: its own HPL engine, through several versions.
  • Source code: Penumbra: Overture and the first HPL engine released under the GNU GPL in 2010; Amnesia: The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs in 2020.

Penumbra

Grip and Nilsson had worked together at university, and their Penumbra tech demo, made for a course, did well enough that they planned a commercial game around it. Frictional, by its own account, “started out in 2007 as a virtual company, with employees scattered across Europe”, with only a nominal base in Helsingborg.

Edge previewed the result, Penumbra: Overture, in February 2007, under the line “As game credits regularly stretch into the hundreds, four Swedes prove it doesn’t have to be that way”. It called the game a “pacifist’s Half-Life 2”: a first-person adventure built from physics puzzles, stacking boxes and fitting parts together, using the Newton Game Dynamics physics engine. Edge thought it remarkable that “such a physically astute game could have been developed by just four people”, and noted that it would sell for just £15. Edge listed Lexicon Entertainment as its publisher, and Paradox Interactive published the sequel, Penumbra: Black Plague, in 2008.

Physics was the studio’s idea of interaction. “Using physics for all interaction came out of the simple idea that the player should be able to open drawers,” Grip told Gamasutra in 2008, “and we figured that animations would be too expensive.” Edge found the handling of objects “sensitive and precise”. Overture also had a little melee combat, and that went less well: players fought the monsters head-on although the designers had not meant them to, and, Grip said, “many thought the fighting system was really bad, even though that was a design choice”. For Black Plague, Frictional removed the weapons.

Amnesia

Frictional’s next game was Amnesia: The Dark Descent, released in September 2010 for Windows, Mac and Linux, and published by the studio itself. Before release it asked fans to fill a “preorder-o-meter” on its website with 2,000 pre-orders to unlock extra content. The hero, Daniel, has no way to fight; darkness and the sight of monsters drain his sanity, so the player must choose between hiding in the dark and keeping his mind. The Amnesia entry tells that story in full: how it cost $360,000, sold 1.36 million copies within two years counting bundles, and fed a stream of YouTube videos and fan-made mods that, by Grip’s account, kept it selling.

Its influence reached well beyond the studio. Edge said Red Barrels’ Outlast (2013) “owes much to Amnesia”, and in 2019 Wireframe wrote of “the first-person horror mode popularised by more recent games like Amnesia and Outlast”. Frictional handed the sequel to The Chinese Room, the studio behind Dear Esther, and published its Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs in 2013.

SOMA and later games

SOMA (2015) moved the studio from Gothic castles to science fiction. Its hero wakes in PATHOS-II, a research station on the sea bed, after a comet has wrecked the surface of the Earth, and the game asks, as Wireframe put it, “What makes us human?” Wireframe called it Frictional’s “underappreciated first-person horror set beneath the sea” and found it “just as scary as its Amnesia series”. In December 2017, when SOMA came to the Xbox One, Frictional added a Safe Mode on the console and on PC, in which the monsters still roam but cannot kill the player. Grip said it was for “a group of people that either disliked the monster encounters or didn’t feel horror was their genre but still really wanted to play Soma”, and that “it worked way better than we expected”.

Amnesia: Rebirth (2020) returned to the series, and Wireframe gave it 87%. Amnesia: The Bunker followed in 2023. In December 2025 Frictional and the publisher Kepler Interactive announced Ontos, described as a spiritual successor to SOMA; in July 2026 it was delayed to 2027.

Released source code

Frictional has published the code of its older games. In May 2010, after the first Humble Indie Bundle passed $1 million in sales, it released the source code of Penumbra: Overture and its HPL1 engine on GitHub under the GNU General Public Licence version 3. In September 2020, for Amnesia‘s tenth anniversary, it released the code of The Dark Descent and A Machine for Pigs under the same licence. The 2020 release left out the games’ art, sound and other content, so players still need a copy of the game.

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