Bloober Team has been on a hot streak lately, bringing Silent Hill back into the positive-convo zeitgeist with its Silent Hill 2 remake in 2024, followed by another survival-horror hit last year, Cronos: The New Dawn (which is getting an action-focused DLC called Lazarus this year, too). All of this is on the heels of other Bloober games like The Medium and the team’s original Layers of Fear series. Regardless of how you feel about the Poland-based studio’s horror output, you can’t deny it stays busy, so it came as no surprise to see yet another new Bloober game revealed during a Nintendo Direct earlier this month.
Dubbed Onyx: The Dark Grip, this 2.5D “dark adventure” game is launching exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 sometime next year. After speaking with Bloober’s senior brand manager Dawid Podgorski, I’m convinced this is one of the most Nintendo-sounding games hitting the console in 2027, and that’s courtesy of a suite of console-specific gestures and mechanics that remind me of the Wii and DS era.
Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno started selling Nintendo games at a local game shop 15 to 20 years ago, becoming one of the first to do so in Poland, where Nintendo hardware and software had barely entered the market. Babieno even organized the first Nintendo fan convention in Poland during the GameCube era, “so we’ve always had an idea to make something specifically for Nintendo,” Podgorski tells me, explaining Bloober’s Nintendo history.
Podgorski works for Bloober, but Onyx: The Dark Grip is actually in development at the studio’s subsidiary Broken Mirror Games, which Podgorski says Bloober uses to “make a game we cannot make on our own.” Broken Mirror Games consists of Bloober specialists and external devs – it’s also behind the upcoming 3v1 asymmetrical horror game Saw: Genesis. Onyx: The Dark Grip could only exist as a Switch 2 exclusive, Podgorski explains, and that much is very clear after my quick 20-minute meeting.
“Survive as the Vessel, Intervene as the Player” is the slideshow pitch for Onyx: The Dark Grip, and that’s because you possess Holden, a “regular guy” human whom you, as a god-like creature, need to find something. Onyx: The Dark Grip is set in a small, isolated town gripped by a relentless winter, based on Poland’s real-world Bieruń. However, curiously, Holden doesn’t know he’s possessed – he only feels that he needs to keep going (to where you drive him to) but has no idea why.
The game has been in development for three years and is an homage to classic Nintendo consoles and experiences found on the Wii and DS and other consoles like the PlayStation Vita, all of which uniquely took advantage of what the consoles could do. As the Vessel – Holden – you will explore the town, solve puzzles, and fight using melee and ranged attacks. Podgorski stops short of calling it a full-on horror game, instead calling it a “dark adventure” experience, but the reveal trailer suggests Onyx: The Dark Grip will, at the very least, be spooky. As the god, you will manipulate reality to accomplish what you need using Holden, and that’s where all the Nintendo-sounding things happen.
Players will use god-like powers to move things in Holden’s world, allowing him to progress forward; you will touch the screen with both thumbs to act as an electrical conductor for the generator Holden is interacting with in the game; you will have to whistle and blow into the microphone to make Holden warmer when he gets cold; and when Holden’s mental health is afflicted by terror and fear, moths will cover the screen, and you will need to swipe those away to clear the screen and Holden’s headspace.
You can even read NPC minds as a god and put your own thoughts into their brains. Plus, you can use what is essentially a “Talk With The Dead” spell to learn key information from corpses in the town, and you can also swipe the screen to throw fireballs and start fires with sparks. Podgorski says your “Void” ability also lets you crush enemies emerging from beyond by tilting the Switch 2 back and forth using the built-in gyroscope.
Podgorski emphasizes that you are not playing as the character on the screen, but as yourself too – the god of Holden’s world. And, like you with a Switch 2 in hand, Onyx: The Dark Grip’s god, as it were, will play with Holden’s world like a handheld game device, metaphorically. “Everything happening there is there, and you can intervene, but you are not there,” Podgorski tells me about Holden’s world.
Inspirations for Onyx: The Dark Grip include Eternal Darkness (horror that breaks the fourth wall), Silent Hill (psychological instability and perception horror), Inside (2.5D cinematic clarity and restraint), Resident Evil 2 (pressure and pacing), and True Detective: Night Country (winter isolation and grounded dread). Polish composer and multi-instrumentalist Jan Borysewicz will back the adventure with a score recorded with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.
That’s a lot to be excited about for Onyx: The Dark Grip, but I didn’t get to see the game in action; I only learned these things from Bloober’s senior brand manager (a point Podgorski acknowledged). That said, the premise is enough to keep it on my radar as we head into 2027. The more games that remind me of the Vita, Wii, and DS era, the better, and Onyx: The Dark Grip seems set on doing just that.