Often all you really need in a video game is the world itself and some basic encouragement to explore it. 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. It's an exercise in unhurried curiosity with just a touch of eeriness and threat. 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.
Chasing the Unseen's landscapes are based on fractals – briefly, mathematical shapes whose parts look the same as the whole, however far you zoom in. 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." 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. Slicks of grass denote securely walkable surfaces, while patches of dense sunlight serve as end-of-level teleporters.
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. 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.