download the beta
ELLERY HOLDINGS ORDER 4417-C

a new first-person psychological horror

CHUNK SURFER

a haunting at ellery conservatory

Five rooms. Five clean takes and you're done... or so you think.

Record the sound of empty rooms in a condemned conservatory. Stay still. Stay silent. Finish before demolition begins.

download the beta itch.io ↗
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AUDIOCORPFIELD VIEW
SOURCETHOUGHT
Current-build field view of a flashlight illuminating the condemned Ellery Conservatory
  • mac APPLE SILICON
  • windows X64 + NVIDIA CUDA
  • linux appimage/deb X64 + NVIDIA CUDA
  • beta unsigned

first person audio-reactive horror

The job is to record nothing.

Chunk Surfer is a short first-person psychological horror game about sound recording. As a field recordist in the condemned Ellery Conservatory, your job is to capture five clean room sounds as you evade invisible entities, confront your murky past, and figure our what happened to the previous recordist who tried to do this gig first.

Monitor each space, roll the recorder, then stay still and silent – or, rather, vulnerable – for a whole minute. Movement or noise can invalidate the take. An optional computer microphone adds noise from your real room through local loudness analysis only; audio is never recorded or uploaded.

offline shader diffusion over traditional PBR maps

A UNIQUE VISUAL IDENTITY.

Chunk Surfer is perhaps the first 3D psychological horror game with a local Stable Diffusion material renderer that keeps generating during play.

TECHNICAL JARGON: It does not redraw the camera image or replace the game’s regular 3D texture maps. Instead, it layers machine learning hallucinations over authored PBR materials; every 5–15 seconds, when the frame budget permits, one visible surface is re-hallucinated and crossfaded into the building over 6–12 seconds. On top of traditional PBR maps sits this hallucination engine, which itself sits under an 8-bit mesh.

The result is a unique low-resolution look that is neither 8bit nor diffused nor traditional PBR texturing, bit a mix of the three.

Geometry, lighting, depth, movement, and UI remain native, while reaction-diffusion, VFD pixel-mesh, datamosh, and glass shaders complete the stack. The entire visual lens runs locally and offline on the player’s GPU. No image is uploaded to a cloud service.

local + offline intenionally generated shader (for hallucination specifically) with authored PBR textures underneath NO CLOUD IMAGE UPLOAD
Flashlight beam on a basement conservatory doorway with the field HUD active
camera view

LISTEN. RECORD. DO NOT MOVE.

Your movement betrays you.

Monitor each assigned space before committing to a take. Once the recorder rolls, light and movement become liabilities. A clean recording advances the work order. A contaminated one must be attempted again, and a loud mistake can give whatever else's in the building someone to follow.

Your torch makes the conservatory visible but its battery is finite and its beam attracts attention. Footsteps, handling, and injuries make noise. Corridors outside your sight and hearing can change, so a remembered route may not remain the route you return to.

A transcript redaction encounter with selectable text and hostile marks
redaction battle screen

redaction turn-based combat

Pick up the pieces.

Inspect the packet left by the previous contractor and play back what your recorder captured. Later encounters turn transcript redaction into a physical struggle: choose what to black out, protect what remains readable, and live with the record you produce.

a game of redaction. black out the words that change your reality to favorable odds.

source space

The game's own files become the map

The investigation eventually ruptures into literal source-code space, where the game’s own files become terrain, passages, and surfaces that can be altered.

source space

LET YOUR ROOM INTO THE GAME—OR DO NOT

Your microphone is optional. Its consequences are not cosmetic.

When enabled, Chunk Surfer measures loudness locally while a take is rolling. Noise in your real room can contaminate a take or provoke an in-game response. It never records, stores, transmits, uploads, or plays back microphone audio.

You can deny or revoke permission and complete the game without microphone input.

PUBLIC BETA

Now out for public beta testing.

This game is in its nascient stages. Expect some bugs. Dialog is very likely to change, story is not. Expected bugs list and feedback links incoming soon.

play on itch.io ↗

install

  • macOS: Apple Silicon.
  • Windows: x64 with NVIDIA/CUDA-capable hardware.
  • Linux: x64 AppImage and Debian package with NVIDIA/CUDA-capable hardware.
  • Signing: Desktop beta builds are unsigned; your operating system may show a warning.

content warning (general horror)

Sustained dread, sudden loud sounds, a small number of deliberate jumpscares, and flashing or high-contrast strobing effects. Settings can reduce or disable intense physical presentation effects.

microphone

Permission is optional. Loudness analysis is local. Audio is never recorded, stored, transmitted, uploaded, or played through the game.

press + reference

Chunk Surfer at a glance.

A short first-person psychological horror game about recording five clean room tones in a condemned conservatory—while the player’s optional computer microphone and a continuously mutating local Stable Diffusion material layer let two different kinds of reality leak in.

developer
SEB SUAREZ
status
PUBLIC BETA
genre
FIRST-PERSON PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
available platforms
MACOS · WINDOWS · LINUX
renderer
NATIVE 3D + LOCAL STABLE DIFFUSION MATERIAL LAYER
permalink
CBASSUAREZ.COM/LABS/CHUNK-SURFER

order 4417-C remains open

Five rooms. Five clean takes.

Do you take the gig?

play now ↗