Chasing Static Review (PC)

A directional microphone and a Geiger counter-looking contraption allow me to spy on figures from the past. They’re not quite memories and they are not actually ghosts. Sometimes they have information about the weird world my character has to navigate. And I am genuinely curious about the echoes, the containment, the missing people. It’s just that I have to run over a bunch of stairs yet again to get to a place that might contain the item I need to make some progress. Chasing Static has an interesting mystery at its core but makes the player work quite a bit to uncover it.

The title was created by Headware Games and published by Ratalaika Games. I played the title on Steam on the PC, but you can also pick a copy on the Nintendo Switch, as well as on both current and older generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft. This is a mystery-driven experience that wants to impress with its story and scares.

Chris is the protagonist, a seemingly normal guy who gets lost while returning from the funeral of his father. To make things worse a supernatural incident means he is trapped in a seemingly alternate version of our own world. A mystery voice appears on the radio, and he soon discovers a facility, with an authority figure asking him to complete tasks that will allow humanity to contain the incident. The narrative does have some good twists and turns.

The game does not resort to cheap jump scares, but some moments are strange and frightening. Unfortunately, despite a good premise, towards the end, everything collapses towards very familiar tropes. Even worse is that the developers aim for ambiguity rather than delivering a clear, satisfying conclusion.

+4more

The unique gameplay concept of Chasing Static is the Frequency Displacement Monitoring Device. This is a directional microphone hooked up to some advanced tech that’s indistinguishable from magic that allows players to pick up weird signals. Once the FDMD locks into some static the player needs to move closer to its point of origin to get to view a piece of the past made real. These are usually littler scenes between two scientists, talking about the anomaly. Some of them are crucial for progress, telling gamers how to make progress. Others only add to the atmosphere and give more context.

Chris can just move around searching for these echoes. But he actually needs to activate three pieces of equipment to contain this supernatural anomaly to have a chance to escape the area he is trapped in. This involves dealing with puzzles, most of them centered on getting the right object to open up a particular route or area. The weird thing is that even if I have something in my inventory that can only be used in one way in one area Chasing Static wants the player to go into his inventory and then select said item, making it all feel more cumbersome than it should.

Play Video

The game also features quite a bit of backtracking, long runs down corridors that don’t serve any purpose other than adding time to the experience. This is not a long game. But it needed more actual content, more puzzles, more interactions, rather than artificial ways to pad the running time.

Chasing Static looks like an original PlayStation title, which is what the development team aimed for. The look fits the mystery and tragedy-tinged story to some extent. I am sure people who still have a PS1 or have fond memories of one will be happy with it. But the world is too small and barren to make these retro-looking graphics feel weird. It just feels empty and low fidelity. If the game had more to offer in terms of echoes or storytelling, then it might get away with the PS1 graphics. Neither the voice work (which needed more heavy Welsh accents) nor the music manage to pick up the slack in the presentation department, unfortunately.

+4more

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion