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Jusant and Shadow Of The Colossus lovers should try Chasing The Unseen’s expanded playtestSquid Game
Squid Game
Image credit:Strange Shift Studio
Image credit:Strange Shift Studio
If you’ve been enjoyingJusant, Don’t Nod’s post-apocalyptic climbing sim, you might also like the alpha playtest forChasing The Unseen, which has just been updated with a new level. It doesn’t have Jusant’s quietly innovative grip and abseiling mechanics – the climbing is closer toShadow Of The Colossus, consisting of just one button you hold to cling on till your stamina runs out. Nor does it have the Don’t Nod game’s beautifully nested chunks of backstory - no seashells you can press your ear to, alas. But it does have massive flying cephalopods, giant red mushrooms, and floating, fractured landscapes of rock and grass.
I wrote about Chasing The Unseen forEurogamera few months back. Its creator, Matthieu Fiorilli, is a creature artist and animator for such films as Avatar: The Way of Water and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. The game blends techniques from those projects with ideas from Buddhism and Fiorilli’s love of fractals. Its menagerie includes a peculiar mangrove-adjacent lifeform with electrical fixtures, and a winding golden snake. There’s no killing or earning, just vibes. No, you can’t pet the megafauna, but youcanclimb on then, as in SOTC, and hitching a lift is an efficient way of reaching the summit of each level. Unless you fall off, which I generally do.
Chasing the Unseen - Announcement Trailer (Now Out on Steam)Watch on YouTube
Chasing the Unseen - Announcement Trailer (Now Out on Steam)
Between Jusant, Chasing The Unseen, and the likes ofLorn’s Lure, I’m fondly hoping that we’re on the verge of a renaissance of climbing mechanics in games. I think these games offer useful resistance to the tendency of many blockbuster projects to manufacture worlds that are at once detailed and disposable.
Open world action games, especially, can be strangely self-defeating in that they give you lush landscapes while simultaneously being designed so that you travel through those landscapes as quickly and mindlessly as possible, because the whole point is to keep the player cycling between quests and encounters. Hence (in part) the social media uproar from a few weeks ago about the trend ofsplashing paint on everything interactive, so there’s minimal ambiguity during exploration. Climbing sims, of course, force you to slow down and read the surfaces, and the result, for me, is a greater feeling of appreciation for the developer’s craft. Until I fall off, anyway.
Here’sthe Steam page for Chasing the Unseen. It doesn’t have a release date yet. For a wholly different take on the octopus, check outthisfrom thecatamites.
