Hunt ghosts with sound in Chasing Static, a creepy new horror game with a neat lo-fi aesthetic
I don't like the sound of that.
Whether it's games like The Black Iris, Bleakshore, or the upcoming Compound Fracture, I can't get enough of horror games with crunchy PlayStation-inspired visuals. There's just something about that lo-fi aesthetic that makes it perfect for the genre, and Chasing Static makes excellent use of it.
Set in rural Wales, a setting you don't often see in videogames, the story concerns Chris Selwood, a man who seeks refuge from a storm in a remote roadside cafe, before things take a turn, inevitably, for the creepy.
I played a very short demo of the game, in which I visited the cafe after driving through a rainstorm, met a friendly local waitress, then watched in horror as she was attacked by some nightmarish beast with glowing eyes. There wasn't enough in the demo to get a feel for what the game actually is, or how it plays, but the atmosphere, visuals, and scene-setting are all top notch.
"Inspired by '80s sci-fi horror and contemporary surrealist cinema, Chasing Static delivers a unique take on the narrative adventure genre through new audio driven gameplay mechanics and non-linear exploration," reads the game's Steam page. "Explore the untouched wilderness of rural Wales as you uncover the forgotten remains of a mysterious facility and try to piece together what happened to the missing villagers of Hearth."
Developer Headware Games says Chasing Static will tell a self-contained two-hour story in a world you can explore at your leisure. But the thing I'm most intrigued by is the 'sonic exploration' system. "Audio driven gameplay mechanics have you hunting anomalies with an experimental Frequency Displacement Monitoring Device," reads the Steam page, which sounds like a unique take on the spooky walking sim.
No release date has been set for Chasing Static yet, but you can expect it at some point this year.