That Which Gave Chase: Cosmic Horror in the Deep Cold

When you die enough times in the stampede segment of That Which Gave Chase, a light appears and speaks directly to you: "I understand your confusion. Yet you made it through that descent unharmed. You must have. You would not be here." This moment—hidden behind repeated failure—reveals the game's central trick: you are not experiencing events as they happen. You are reliving a memory, one that has already concluded, over and over again.

The Surface Story

The game, made by developer Aslac Carlson Howlith for about $5 on Steam, opens with a musher driving a dog sled across an Arctic landscape, guided by a mysterious scientist. The scientist has hired the musher to find a lost expedition team somewhere in the ice. The journey is fragmented—match cuts jump between day and night, between locations, between moments of calm and sudden violence. The scientist speaks in riddles about "the deathless deer" and "the sieve," a place where all imagined woes are left behind.