It’s an exercise in unhurried curiosity with just a touch of eeriness and threat.
Montreal, Quebec-based solo developer Matthieu Fiorilli is fascinated by them.
“You have these surprisingly short math formulas that yield these complex and infinite shapes,” he enthuses.
“You rarely see this level of complexity coming out of something so simple.”
Slicks of grass denote securely walkable surfaces, while patches of dense sunlight serve as end-of-level teleporters.
It’s always tempting to be cocky in Chasing the Unseen.
But all that’s before you meet your first giant flying octopus.
The latter makes me think of Eric Chahi’s otherworldly VR simPaper Beast.
Behemoths aside, each level also contains a handful of normal-sized and understandably stressed-looking capybara.
Find them all to unlock well, I’ll let you discover that yourself.
The mangrove creature is quietly horrendous: I’m not sure it has a head.
I very much doubt there’s a “pet the octopus” achievement in Chasing the Unseen.
The game’s explicit avoidance of bloodshed reflects its debts to Buddhist philosophy.
More mysteriously, there’sa fractal rendering method named for the Buddha.
But he’s had to beat fresh paths with Chasing the Unseen.
“The rigger understands what the animator needs and then creates a setup for the creature to be animated.
Kind of like a puppet.
The animator takes that and animates it.
For this game I’m using procedural techniques to create the animation.
The mangrove is a good example of that, I’m not manually moving the limbs one by one.
I created a system that moves the limbs on the ground and takes care of that.”
