Image: Andrés Borghi, Saibot Studios & New Blood Interactive

The '90s heyday of FMV games might be long past, but a growing number of indies (plus some big Chinese studios, but that's another story) still see the appeal in creature-feature makeup and amateur film production. The third big horror release today–after Dreadline Express and Penguin Colony–is Tenebris Somnia, a long-awaited survival horror game that punctuates its Clock Tower-esque pixelated adventuring with live-action film segments, featuring some delightfully grody nightmare monsters.

Initial reviews of Tenebris Somnia are mostly glowing, and that's not exactly surprising given the game's much-loved demo. Film is a core theme of the game, with you playing as Julia, a woman wracked with nightmares who finds herself now hunted through the real world by monsters reflecting the films she's worked on.

It's classic movie magic meets pixel weirdness, and I really cannot understate how good the creature makeup is when it crops up in the cutscenes, as the game seamlessly switches between FMV and traditional gameplay.

There's something uniquely charming about the spritework too. The game is retro in the truest sense, and were it not for the slightly too-rich color palette (and the fact that the FMV looks pin-sharp and modern), this could pass for a Mega-CD game, with a stark black background on the inventory screen, fine shading used sparingly on background details, and chunky dithering used instead of transparencies where appropriate.

The quality isn't too surprising, given that this is the work of Andres Borghi, developer of indie horror fighting game The Black Heart, so we know his sprite game is on point. Still, there was a bit of an enthusiastic amateur edge to that previous game, while the art here feels like a work of great restraint and self-imposed limitation.

Mechanically, this is modern survival horror through-and-through, mixing exploration, puzzle-solving and combat with limited resources against monsters that are sometimes best just avoided. But initial reviews have praised it for keeping up the tension in the combat all the way through, and there's some tricky boss battles too. This just feels like an excellent package, and it's great to see retro pixels and film merged like this. Rare even in its day, and almost unique now.

Tenebris Somnia is out now for £18/$25, with a 20% launch discount running until October 30th. It's also part of several discount bundles, including today's also-excellent Penguin Colony, which you can read about here.