In this interestingly surreal game, indie dev Matthieu Fiorilli of Strange Shift Studio used fractal math to create bizarre, octopus-laden environments.
Chasing the Unseen launched in March 2024 on Steam and has kind of disappeared into obscurity since then. We finally got round to playing it and found a curious time of it, with unique ideas, some flaws, but plenty of big monsters.
Scale the Squid in Chasing the Unseen
Fractal math is, essentially, a never-ending pattern. Infinitely complex, repeating patterns built with recursive feedback loops. Matthieu Fiorilli documented this in a November 2022 tech blog post leveraging fractal math to generate environments in Chasing the Unseen:
“My creatures are made in Houdini using a variety of tools. Taking the octopus as an example, I use Houdini’s traditional tools to procedurally model it, and then I simulate it using Houdini’s recent multi-solver called Vellum. The simulation gives me very natural and fluid deformations. Then the challenge is to bring that into Unreal Engine and make it climbable. For this task, I leveraged the powerful tool Dem Bones. My octopus simulation in Houdini is heavy; each point of the geometry has its own animation, and it’s not something that can be simply ingested by a game engine at this point. What Dem Bones allows me to do, is to procedurally generate a set of bones and skinning to reconstruct the simulation with game engine-friendly data. That means that instead of having an animation on every single one of my 128,000 vertices/points for the octopus, I can have an animation on about only 600 bones …
This begs the question, how do you bring fractals into gaming? Through the symbiosis of Houdini and Unreal Engine, I’m able to solve that problem. In Houdini, I am using Juraj Tomori’s graduation project VFX Fractal Toolkit to generate the fractals, and then I developed a pipeline around it to prepare the geometry to make it ready to be ingested in Unreal Engine. This pipeline is used on fractals and other procedural mesh generation methods (depending on the level).”
The end result is a surrealist exploration game where a doomed figured explores deranged landscapes, scaling giant monsters in the process (Shadow of the Colossus style). It’s all in the philosophical sense of the absurd and, across two hours, players don’t have many specific goals.
A short game, then, and one we find mysterious. It had quite a bit of buzz about it prior to launch several years back, but didn’t get a huge amount of attention after launch is rarely ever talked about in the indie scene.
It looks startling and dramatic, but as a gameplay experience it’s more solid than spectacular. This is likely why it’s not talked about more.
Chasing the Unseen is a curiously relaxing time of it, though, as you romp around weird artistic landscapes and scale those beats. It’s like a therapeutic session of… therapy.
Plus, there’s a nifty little score to go with things. But like with much about the game, we can’t any online music samples of the soundtrack, and the solo dev responsible for this game has clearly since moved on to different projects. The game’s social media accounts cut off with updates from the game’s March 2024 launch.
THUS! This is worth your time if you want a weirdly relaxing ran through a bizarre landscape. Just maybe wait until it’s on sale before comitting.
