The world is a person, and that person talks to you
The host goes about an ordinary life: eating, sleeping, running, drinking coffee, getting scared. All of it changes the world around you. And you can ask the host for help.
SOMANAUT
The body is a planet
An open-world survival adventure the size of a single human being. You pilot a nano-avatar 200 nanometres tall, with 37 trillion cells all around you.
In development · Steam · 2027
37 trillioncells in a single world
×8,500,000how much bigger everything is than you
14,450 kmlength of the body at game scale
200 nmyour height
01The idea
The ocean you dive into is a human being
One twin is sick with something the scanners cannot see. The other lies down in a capsule and steers a virus-sized nano-avatar through their sibling's veins. A routine six-hour sortie turns into an expedition that lasts for days.
Swim through blood vessels, enter organs and cells, gather resources, tame bacteriophages and learn to get along with an immune system that sees you as an intruder. You can follow the story, or forget about it and simply live in this world.
An immune system instead of the police
You are a foreign body. Antibodies tag you and phagocytes hunt you. But trust can be earned, and then the body's army fights on your side.
Size is a tool
Grow to the size of a cell and swallow bacteria whole. Shrink back down and slip through a pore into the nucleus, all the way to the DNA.
02The host
Ask the host
Here the heartbeat is the tide, hormones are the weather, and sleep and waking are night and day. The host knows you are inside and can hear you. Pick a request and watch what happens to this page.
Host pulse
62bpm
StateAt rest
The pulse is steady and the current is calm. You can swim against it and look around.
Every request has a price and a cooldown. And if the host sneezes, you may be blown right out.
Explore
Swim on a flagellar motor, ride the current, walk across the surface of cells. You can race along a nerve behind an impulse, which is the fastest way to travel in the game.
Survive
You are smaller than almost everything around you, so you win with knowledge. Every enemy has a weakness, and each one is taken from real microbiology.
Evolve
Absorb an organism, read its genome and get a blueprint. A bacterium gives you a flagellar motor, a virus gives you capsid armour. Your gear is printed on a ribosome.
03Scale
Why a body is bigger than a planet
The avatar is 200 nanometres tall. Treat that as a familiar 1.7 metres and everything around you grows 8.5 million times. A human stretches to 14,450 kilometres. The Earth is 12,742 kilometres across.
In reality → To youWhat it becomes
DNA strand, thicknessA rope
AntibodyA tag you can throw
RibosomeA desktop printer
Flu virusA spiky ball up to your waist
T4 bacteriophageyour heightA mount as tall as you
E. coliA bus
Cell nucleusA cathedral
Red blood cellA stadium
CapillaryA tunnel
MacrophageA kaiju
AortaAn ocean
HumanA planet
The game compresses distances, like any open world, but keeps the relative sizes of creatures honest.
04World
Thirteen regions, each with a character of its own
Every region has its own palette, its own physics and its own illness that you can cure.
Bloodstream
The transport network and the centre of the world: fast arteries, slow veins, tight capillaries.
Heart
The valves open on every beat. You have to move in rhythm.
Lungs
The only place where there is air. And wind on every breath.
Gut
The most populated region: trillions of bacteria with factions of their own.
Liver
Strict honeycomb geometry and the main forge of the game.
Kidneys
Filters, water slides of tubules and a crystal dungeon.
Brain
A forest of neurons behind a barrier. At night, dreams play here.
Eye
The only window to the outside: the retina shows whatever the host is looking at.
Ear
Sound is visible as a wave, and gravity depends on the tilt of the head.
Bone marrow
A quiet place where blood and immune cells are born.
Lymph nodes
The cities of the immune system, where trust is earned.
Skin
The edge of the world. A cut means a breach, daylight and an invasion.
Inside a cell
You can only get in at your smallest size. Highways, power stations and an archive of DNA.
05Inhabitants
Neighbours, allies, and things that want to eat you
The immune system fights bacteria with or without you. You step in, and the result is a story worth retelling.
Kaiju · 170 m
Macrophage
Your first encounter with the immune system. It eats bacteria and cannot tell you apart from them.
Mount · 1.7 m
Bacteriophage
It ignores you and hunts only bacteria. It can be tamed.
Swarm
Viruses
Anywhere from dog-sized to human-sized, dangerous in numbers. Ordinary soap dissolves their envelope.
Air strike
Neutrophils
They cover bacterial colonies with nets made of their own DNA. You can call them in with a flare.
World boss
Helminth
At game scale it stretches for thousands of kilometres. Weapons will not bring it down.
Dark zone
Tumour
The body's own cells, gone wrong. Little oxygen, and guards that have been bought off.
Five steps of trust
The immune system works like a wanted system, except it runs on real biology. Antibodies tag you, and dendritic cells carry a report on you to the lymph node. But bring a sample of an enemy there yourself, and the body starts making antibodies against it instead.
- Intruder
- Suspect
- Tolerated
- One of us
- Commander
06Heroes
Mira and Kai
Twins, both 25. You choose which one to play. The other becomes the world of the game: everything happens inside their body.
A somanaut does not shrink. The pilot lies in a capsule while their mind steers an avatar 200 nanometres tall. If the avatar dies, the capsule prints a new one.
The host knows you are inside. You can hear their voice in the cochlea of the ear. And through the retina of their eye you can see the room where your own body is lying.
“Soma” is Greek for body. “Naut” means voyager, as in astronaut.
07In engine
First frames from the engine
An early build in Unreal Engine 5: a vein, a valve, the mouth of a capillary and the way out into tissue. Everything is still going to change.
All other images on this site are concept art.
Steam 2027
The dive begins
The game is in development. Release is planned on Steam in 2027.