Chasing Light

Chasing Light is an experimental 2D side-scrolling action-platformer that deconstructs the very nature of video games. You play as a game developer tasked with creating a game called ‘Chase Light’, making critical decisions about its design, music, enemy behavior, and mechanics. Set in a fantasy world, this third-person journey is a seven-day process of exploring the physical properties of games while uncovering profound themes about human nature and society, serving as a meta-commentary on game development itself.

Chasing Light: A Descent into the Labyrinth of Creation and Despair

In the vast, often predictable ocean of the indie game scene, a singular, haunting siren call emerged in 2020. It was not a call to victory, nor to power, but to a profound and painful introspection on the very nature of games, art, and the human spirit. Chasing Light, the debut title from the microscopic South Korean studio Vittgen Inc., is less a traditional game and more a raw, unfiltered nerve exposed to the player. It is a meta-narrative masterpiece born from the brink of oblivion, a work that challenges every convention and asks the most dangerous question of all: what are we chasing when we create?

Development History & Context: A Road Back from Death

To understand Chasing Light is to understand the crucible in which it was forged. Vittgen Inc., founded by the prodigiously multi-talented Bae Sang Hyun, began more as a passionate university club than a formal company. Over five years, Bae and his small team saw seven ambitious projects crumble and fail to launch, casualties of the harsh realities of indie development and the departure of collaborators. By 2019, this cycle of hope and despair had pushed its director to the absolute edge. As Bae revealed in a devastatingly candid 2021 interview, “Chasing Light started with my death… I decided to commit suicide, and the last work I planned with the thought of leaving after making a single game before dying was Chasing Light.”

This was not a marketing ploy; it was the foundational ethos of the project. Developed on the Unity engine, the game was built not with a commercial target in mind, but as a final, cathartic exorcism. Bae served not just as director, but as the project’s sole writer, artist, composer, sound designer, and even the voice actor for every character—a testament to both a shoestring budget and a singular, uncompromising vision. The visual assets were often hand-drawn with ink pens and scanned, the videos captured with his own camera. This created an intensely personal, almost tactile feel, as if the player is sifting through the pages of a private journal.

Released into a gaming landscape dominated by polished AAA titles and comfortably formulaic indies, Chasing Light was an anomaly. It arrived on May 5, 2020, on Windows (with Macintosh and Nintendo Switch ports to follow), not with a roar, but with a whisper. Initial sales were catastrophically low—reportedly fewer than thirty copies. It was a creation destined to be stillborn, a final, unanswered question. Yet, its sheer, unvarnished artistry could not be ignored for long.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Seven-Day Crucible

On its surface, Chasing Light presents a simple framing device: the player assumes the role of a game director overseeing a seven-day development cycle for a title called “Chase Light.” You are joined by a seasoned, hit-making Senior and a shrewd Producer, an Oxford graduate who left a lucrative finance career at Goldman Sachs. Together, you must make a litany of decisions: selecting music and sound effects, tuning enemy spawn rates, balancing attack speeds—all to achieve a 100% box office hit rate.

But this managerial sim framework is merely the vessel for a far deeper, more turbulent journey. The game swiftly dismantles the fourth wall, transforming from a game about making a game into a profound exploration of creative compromise, commercial pressure, and existential dread. The characters, rendered in stark, minimalist black and white without discernible facial features (named only as ?), become archetypes and antagonists. The Senior represents the crushing weight of industry expectations; the Investor proposes crass, market-driven changes like inserting sexual minorities for trendiness; the Game Critic embodies the capricious power of media reception.

Bae Sang Hyun vehemently denied the game is a strict autobiography, insisting it is a “story about humans and society” on a universal “stage of all human beings who live passionately.” Yet, the themes are undeniably drawn from lived experience: the pain of abandoned projects, the betrayal of departing colleagues, the suffocating pressure to conform. The narrative spirals into darker territories, touching on self-harm and suicidal ideation, as the director’s inner world collapses under the strain.

The core thematic pursuit is the nature of “Light” itself. Bae offers a hint: “as you can see from the fact that this work started from my death, it is very closely related to ‘Life’ itself.” The “Light” is hope, purpose, creative fulfillment, redemption—the destination in an ocean with no clear destination. The game doesn’t provide easy answers but forces the player to question their own chase. The dialogue is sharp, philosophical, and often confrontational, delivered entirely through Bae’s own impressive, albeit non-professional, vocal range—a feat that adds another layer of intimate vulnerability.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: Deconstructing the Fourth Wall

Chasing Light defies easy genre classification. MobyGames lists it as an Action, Platformer with Puzzle elements, but this is a reductive description of its experimental nature. The gameplay is intentionally fractured and meta, reflecting its themes.

The core loop involves switching between two primary modes:
1. The Producer Role: Here, the game adopts a menu-driven interface. You allocate a limited budget to various game elements (sound, enemies, etc.), each choice directly impacting the next phase. This simulates the cold, mathematical reality of game production.
2. The Director Role: This shifts the perspective into a 2D, third-person platforming environment that represents the game-within-a-game, “Chase Light.” This section is where the thematic and narrative weight is delivered. It’s not a test of skill but of perception. The platforming is simple, almost rudimentary; its purpose is not to challenge your reflexes but to serve as a canvas for the game’s stark visual and auditory storytelling.

The most innovative and flawed system is its relentless deconstruction. Code snippets flash on screen, the developer’s own hands appear to manipulate the world, and the narrative constantly breaks its own reality. This is not a flaw but a deliberate design choice. As Bae stated, he wanted to “start with only the skeleton left… to get closer to the essence.” The UI is minimal, the explanations are deliberately scarce, forcing the player to imbue the abstract visuals with their own meaning.

Some players criticized this approach, finding the messages “flow quickly without giving the user time to think.” However, this pace is the point—it mirrors the frantic, often overwhelming pressure of creation and the speed at which life, and despair, can overtake one. The game’s ultimate mechanic is questioning. It makes the player an active participant in its philosophical inquiry, with key decisions (like accepting a large investment from the Senior) branching the narrative towards different conclusions, including a path where no one must be “killed.”

World-Building, Art & Sound: The Beauty of the Bare Essence

The aesthetic of Chasing Light is its most immediately striking feature. It is a world rendered almost entirely in monochrome. Characters are faceless silhouettes, environments are sketched with minimalistic detail, and live-action video clips of the developer’s hands are seamlessly woven into the digital tapestry. This is not a choice born purely of artistic pretension but of thematic necessity. The lack of detailed visuals strips away all distraction, focusing the player entirely on the emotional and philosophical core of each scene.

The sound design is equally masterful and personal. The soundtrack, largely composed and produced by Bae, is a haunting blend of melancholic piano melodies and atmospheric electronic tones. It is the emotional heartbeat of the experience, guiding the player from tension to despair to fleeting moments of hope. The near-constant, insightful voiceover—all delivered by Bae—functions as both narration and internal monologue, creating an unsettling and intimate connection between the creator and the player.

The world-building is not about constructing a fictional kingdom but about building a state of mind. The “world” is the claustrophobic office of a startup, the bleak landscapes of the game-within-a-game, and the fragmented psyche of the director. The atmosphere is one of profound isolation, punctuated by moments of intense confrontation. It is a world that feels both incredibly specific in its pain and universally relatable in its themes of struggle.

Reception & Legacy: From Obscurity to Acclaim

Chasing Light‘s journey from commercial failure to critical darling is a story in itself. After its dismal launch, word-of-mouth praise from streamers and players who resonated with its raw message began to spread. Its quality could not be ignored by the industry’s most prestigious institutions.

The game was showered with accolades:
* 2021 IGF Nuovo Award Finalist (An Oscar equivalent for indie game innovation)
* 2021 Korea Game Awards Finalist for Indie Game Award and Good Game Award
* 2020 BIC Awards Excellence In Experimental
* 2020 GIGDC Bronze Prize
* 2020 Seoul Government G-RANK Challenge Seoul Prize

It was also officially selected for numerous film festivals, a rare honor for a video game, and is noted as the first game to be played in its entirety at a film festival. Critical analysis praised its brave thematic depth, unique aesthetic, and powerful music, though it remains a divisive experience due to its abrasive, non-traditional structure.

Its legacy is one of profound influence rather than mass imitation. Chasing Light stands as a towering example of the video game as a personal, auteur-driven art form. It paved the way for a more introspective and deconstructive strand of indie games, proving that commercial success is not the only metric of value. It demonstrated that games could tackle the most sensitive, personal subjects—mental health, creative struggle, existential doubt—with a rawness rarely seen in any medium.

Conclusion: The Unforgettable, Essential Question

Chasing Light is not a game for everyone. It is an arduous, emotionally draining, and often deliberately frustrating experience. It is a game that refuses to comfort the player, instead holding up a dark mirror to the struggles of creation and existence.

Yet, it is an essential piece of video game history. It is a monument to the power of art born from pure necessity, a testament to the idea that the most powerful works often come from the darkest places. Bae Sang Hyun did not set out to make a fun product; he set out to save his own life, and in doing so, he created a work that asks every player to examine their own “Light.”

Five years after its release, Bae confirmed in a poignant Steam post that the game’s financial success never materialized, leading his friends to pursue other careers and leaving him to continue the chase alone. This real-world postscript only deepens the game’s resonance. Chasing Light is more than a game; it is a permanent, haunting question etched into the medium’s canon. It is a brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable journey that proves, unequivocally, that video games can be great art.