Ultrasound to be heard from in 2026

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Medical-themed first-person 3D sci-fi body horror adventure unveiled for Windows PC

If you found yourself all alone on a spaceship with a deadly alien menace aboard, what weapon of choice would you prefer? Some kind of gun or blaster? An axe? Chances are you wouldn't pick an ultrasound machine, but sometimes you've got to make do with what you've got to the best of your highly trained abilities, like in Here Below Studios' upcoming sci-fi body horror adventure, Ultrasound.

When a "grotesque alien infection" begins spreading aboard a "long haul space freighter hurtling towards a star," it's up to Medical Officer Dana Voss to stop it. As the infection grows, even the ship's most critical systems are at risk of shutting down and sending the vessel ever closer towards a "fatal cosmic collision." But as the failures are organic in nature rather than mechanical, ordinary tools won't suffice to deal with them. Instead, players will need to use "an array of surgical apparatus and a portable ultrasound machine to scan, identify and diagnose" each individual problem before performing the required "tense and gruesome procedures" to exterminate the "starship-eating infection." As the alien evolves, so too must your equipment, meaning that "new medical tools must be found, upgrades must be made and strange injections must be formulated to deal with ever-expanding growths and unwanted mutations." If you fail, the ship's destruction is assured, and what's worse: "something will be born."

A first-person adventure using node-based mechanics with 360-degree camera panning, Ultrasound features a relatively early 3D look in presenting a "dread-soaked interstellar experience ... laden with difficult decisions and disgusting discoveries." The danger here comes not from facehuggers springing from the shadows, but rather the ship's own catastrophic breakdowns. It's your responsibility to maintain key functions such as "life support, power, cargo manifests, and more," whose respective malfunctions have "drastic effects on your play experience." Success depends on you learning to adapt to the problems as they come and "manage resources effectively." That's where the ultrasound comes in, as well as other instruments that allow you to "craft strange medicines to heal and eradicate foreign growths." Both your decisions and your skill matter, as there are multiple potential endings possible, though a complete playthrough is only expected to take 1-2 hours and the game is designed to be highly replayable, so experimentation is encouraged.

Ultrasound is the debut adventure from Here Below Studios, but its two-man development team is no stranger to horror games, as lead developer Walter Woods was also the creator of last year's psychological thriller Dark and Deep. There is no firm target release date for the new game just yet, but it's on track to be launched on Steam sometime in 2026 for Windows PC, with a playable demo to arrive first.