Free horror game Fractal Sailor is about flying an airship through infinite godflesh while eluding a monster
Slender meets Yedoma Globula
If ever there were a game not to play on a Monday when you've had minimal sleep and basically want to crawl under the table and eat three-day-old pizza, that game - or rather, free "tech demo" - is Fractal Sailor. The work of Struct9 founder Matej Vanco, it hands you a distressingly unwieldy and roofless hovership and cuts you adrift in a vast ocean of malevolent mathematics.
Your task is to visit and gather energy from a series of bulging, biomechanical power stations while avoiding the attentions of... something. Said something is deaf, meaning it won't hear the frantic beeping of your proximity indicator, but it isn't blind, so be sure to switch off that bowlight once the proximity indicator starts a-singing. Other telltale signs that the creature is near include a hideous dirge, like the sound of a billion buzzsaws carving a hole into a neighbouring reality. Hmm, I wonder if it's a cousin of the Maw?
As the title suggests, the game's 3D world is made up of fractals - shapes and patterns that repeat themselves endlessly at smaller and larger scales, and which part and congeal unnervingly around you as you guide your rustbucket airship from station to station. The obvious comparison is the amazing Yedoma Globula, but Fractal Sailor is much more focussed. It's Slender: The Eight Pages by way of Iron Lung - an awkward scramble to meddle with every last interactive fixture while maintaining a low profile.
Your ship can travel both horizontally and vertically, and it's easy to get lost in the ebb and flow of Stygian geometry. You've got a radar pulse that highlights stations (and your monstrous pursuer) as holograms, but gauging the range and the exact tangibility of intervening objects is tricky. I also found docking with stations to siphon energy a struggle: you've got to line up your ship with the correct bit. You can disengage with the steering controls to trot around your vessel, but as far as I'm aware, it's not possible to fall off. I fell out of my airship once in Yedoma Globula and it was an... intriguing experience, but at least that game didn't have an antagonist. All you had to worry about was existential vertigo.
Again, not a game to play on a Monday when you're absolutely shattered and just want to clamber into the bath with a steaming flagon of Tescos pasta sauce, but I just can't help myself. This is exactly my brand of cosmic horror catnip - I do hope Vanco turns it into a full game, though I suspect adding too much to this formula would spoil it. Fractals, eh! For a friendlier/tastier spin on the concept, there's always Infinite Pizza.