Sony Interactive Entertainment Spain has been showcasing various indie games through its PlayStation Talents initiative, one of which is Luto—a new psychological horror game developed by Spain-based Broken Bird Games. A new trailer on the PlayStation España official YouTube channel gives viewers a glimpse into the game’s premise and themes. While there’s not much to go off of, below is a breakdown of a few of the things we do know about the game.
Luto, which means “Mourning” in Spanish, looks to be a horror game heavily inspired by Hideo Kojima’s P.T. demo released back in 2014. While P.T. was eventually scrapped after Silent Hills was canceled and Kojima left Konami in 2015, it inspired a wave of psychological horror games even after its removal from the PS Store. Luto looks to continue this legacy with many narrative and design similarities, from tight stretching hallways to dimly-lit corners and stairwells.
According to a press release from February 2021 (via Gamasutra), Luto is developed with the help of Spanish game publisher Lanzadera, which is working in conjunction with SIE Spain to incubate games “to be released as PS5-exclusive titles” In the same release, Luto is described as “a narrative adventure that tries to reflect on themes such as depression and anxiety in the darkest of settings.”
To add to this, the narration used in the trailer is actually taken from a series of psychiatric interviews from a 1959 documentary, titled “Faces of Depression”. In it, a doctor compares depression to “hell”, stating that “the worst part about hell isn’t the flames, its the hopelessness.” As the audio gets further distorted, he adds that this hopelessness is what “a person with depression really tastes.” In Broken Bird Studios’ own uploaded teaser trailer, they describe Luto as a narrative experience where “you will take on the role of an individual unable to leave his own home.”
While Broken Bird Studios states in its Twitter bio that the game is coming out for PlayStation consoles and PC, the previous Gamasutra press release makes it likely that the game will release exclusively for the PlayStation 5 at some point in the future. We’ll continue to keep readers up to date on information about the Luto horror game.
