Tenebris Pictura: Everything We Know

If you’re a fan of paranormal action, then we have an upcoming game you’ll want to look out for in the coming months. Tagged Tenebris Pictura, the game plunges players back to the Victorian era, where a supernatural mystery and extra-terrestrial beings have suddenly appeared. Puzzles, ghost hunting, and exploration will all intertwine in the gameplay. It’ll also make its way to nearly all the consoles on the market.

Tenebris Pictura is slated for an August 31, 2023, release, barely a few weeks from now. But what do we know of the new game’s story and gameplay? Is there a trailer where you can glimpse the supernatural action ahead of launch day? Check out our Tenebris Pictura: Everything We Know article to find out.

What is Tenebris Pictura?

Tenebris Pictura is an upcoming ultra-corporeal action-adventure game slated for release on August 31, 2023. The game is currently in development by Pentadimensional Games, an indie developer best known for creating Megaton Rainfall. It’s a strange game with a charming visual style, focusing solely on paranormal action and unlocking the secrets of a Victorian fantasy island.

Story

Players will take on the role of a paranormal investigator in the Victorian era. An old friend invites you to investigate his daughter’s disappearance. You arrive on a misty, convoluted island with supernatural mysteries linked to a shady sect. Soon, extra-terrestrial beings start to appear, which you discover are leaping out of a collection of paintings with strange origins. 

The story seems to offer a mix of personal interrelationships and supernatural mysteries. On the action frontier, it may take players wits and courage to solve the mysteries and stop the supernatural from hatching their plans.

Gameplay

Tenebris Pictura will have three gameplay elements: exploration, puzzle solving, and ghost hunting. 

Exploration

You’ll spend considerable time exploring worlds within worlds, where a collection of paintings within Tenebris Pictura’s unique island offer pathways to new worlds. Using your psychic power, you’ll search for clues that give you more information about the future. 

The Aether Pendulum will help you identify extra-terrestrial beings hiding in plain sight. By trekking across the island, you’ll find potential hiding spots in spooky basements, misty forests, or infested mansions. Some places used to be laboratories for the paranormal, so you’ll spend time investigating the mysteries and unlocking the secrets of Tenebris Pictura’s Victorian fantasy island.

Puzzle Solving

During exploration, you’ll discover puzzles that defy the laws of nature: “trans-dimensional puzzles,” according to Steam’s description. Floors will give way to open up faraway galaxies. Walls will move around, creating illusions that disrupt normalcy. 

New environments will form that demand entirely new ways of puzzle-solving. All the paintings in the game are possible entryways to new worlds. The nonlinearity can be overwhelming. Fortunately, there are no hard and fast rules to solve them, encouraging you to think outside the box and devise one of multiple solutions. 

Ghost Hunting

No guns or swords exist; only psychic energy blasts do, as best seen in the announcement trailer. Using psychic powers, you’ll move objects within your surroundings to strategic defense positions and even conjure moving walls. You can dodge incoming attacks or protect yourself from harm. Meanwhile, you’ll have to separate your soul from your body to fight the supernatural. Despite their massive numbers, a proper divide-and-conquer strategy will get you through to the end, as well as mastering your newly acquired strange skills.

Development

Indie developer Pentadimensional Games is currently working on Tenebris Pictura. The studio is most popular for creating Megaton Rainfall, a superhero action hit from 2017. While the graphics in the trailer aren’t quite strong, they do have a unique charm that depicts a clear vision and original lore. 

Perhaps the game is most comparable to Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. It’s still a strange game with odd details that may perhaps employ dark fantasy rather than the traditional jump scares. Pentadimensional Games will publish the game, too. Hopefully, the game will launch on August 31, 2023, as planned.

Trailer

In an officially released 1:44-minute announcement trailer, you can catch a glimpse of Tenebris Pictura’s early footage. Right off the bat, the low budget for indie developer Pentadimensional Games starts to show. Yet it doesn’t look too bad, with a peculiarly compelling charm. 

Further, the trailer shows the protagonist jumping off a painting and into a large room. A dark, misty atmosphere looms over the environment. And then things get really weird, as an extraterrestrial being jumps off a painting. Walls move around, and floors cave in, giving way to new worlds. Lights and illusions disrupt normalcy, as “worlds within paintings,” open up the island to stranger things.

There are certainly plenty of hazy and strange happenings akin to Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. The protagonist will need to use his psychic abilities to search for clues in the strange land and use paranormal action to survive. He also encounters a few puzzles, with plenty more non-linear trans-dimensional ones to expect once the game drops.

Release Date, Platforms & Editions

Tenebris Pictura is officially slated for an August 31, 2023 release. The game will launch on several platforms, including PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. As of now, we don’t have confirmation of a Switch port release.

You can add Tenebris Pictura to your wishlist as early as now via Steam or the Epic Games Store. Alternatively, Xbox One or Xbox Series X/S owners can pre-order the game. PlayStation console users, however, will have to wait to pre-order at a later date. 

As for the editions on offer, it seems only the standard edition is available and none other. You can always keep track of Alfonso del Cerro’s (Founder at Pentadimensional Games) Twitter handle for more updates. Meanwhile, we’ll also keep an eye out for new information and let you know as soon as it comes up.

So, what’s your take? Will you be grabbing a copy of Tenebris Pictura when it drops? Let us know over on our socials here.