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Find them all to unlock – well, I'll let you discover that yourself. Behemoths aside, each level also contains a handful of normal-sized and understandably stressed-looking capybara. The latter makes me think of Éric Chahi's otherworldly VR sim Paper Beast. Later in the game there's a winding golden snake, and a silver-barked "mangrove creature" made up of flickering electrical points you can (seemingly) touch to guide its motions. You'll often need to interact with these strange, oversized entities to make headway – for example, leaping onto a drifting tentacle as the octopus orbits under a spar, then hauling yourself up to its bulging, crimson head and balancing just long enough to replenish your stamina before gliding to another platform. Chasing the Unseen's worlds are home to enormous creatures who, as Fiorilli hints, "evoke certain qualities and moods that connect with the story". The sweeping geography cries out to be traversed in one fell swoop, much like the alien planets of Exo One, and the boy has something of the careless momentum of Sonic the Hedgehog, tumbling uncontrollably if you land too fast, without taking damage.īut all that's before you meet your first giant flying octopus.

It's always tempting to be cocky in Chasing the Unseen. There's nothing to fight, and no hazards beyond the vast, cloudy void beneath, always ready to engulf you if you're a little too cocky about running along a sloped surface. You can also pop out a Breath of the Wildy parachute to glide, which again consumes stamina, and save your progress at stone cairns, which can be topped up with collectible stones for extra continues. You have no other objective here than to ascend, using sticky, stamina-based climbing mechanics familiar from Shadow of the Colossus to haul yourself up textured surfaces such as scaly, glowing trees. Watch on YouTube Here's Chasing the Unseen's announcement trailer to show it in action.

Slicks of grass denote securely walkable surfaces, while patches of dense sunlight serve as end-of-level teleporters. "You rarely see this level of complexity coming out of something so simple." Endlessly self-similar geometry may not lend itself to easy navigation, of course, so these generated archipelagoes have been carefully sculpted, their eccentricities reined in and segmented to form digestible platforming routes. "You have these surprisingly short math formulas that yield these complex and infinite shapes," he enthuses. Montreal, Quebec-based solo developer Matthieu Fiorilli is fascinated by them. Playing through a Steam demo, I was reminded by turns of Journey's sand dunes, Halo's loopy Forerunner skyboxes and the sinewy architecture of the recent Scorn.Ĭhasing the Unseen's landscapes are based on fractals – briefly, mathematical shapes whose parts look the same as the whole, however far you zoom in. It's an exercise in unhurried curiosity with just a touch of eeriness and threat. So it proves for Chasing the Unseen, which casts you as a little boy gadding about tapering, airborne islands of rock, soil and vegetation, wrapped around each other in a silty underwater haze. Often all you really need in a video game is the world itself and some basic encouragement to explore it.