Byte Chaser

Byte Chaser follows Agein Han, who becomes trapped in a virtual world she built to test her full-immersion system after it glitches. To escape, you run through fractured levels, collect keys and search for clues to a password while trying to survive. Along the way, you learn how the AI she left in charge understands reality.

The virtual world

Agein’s world is disorganized, error-prone and lonely. The game presents it as an imperfect system assembled from online data and other APIs that sometimes fail or do not work well together. Its sound is built around grating bytes, and its overblown narration is intended to keep you moving.

Choices and purpose

The game leaves your actions open-ended while providing a clear path. You can follow it or choose otherwise. Its story reflects on mortality, personal choice, inherited values and the search for purpose; Agein’s own goals are to make life better for the people she encounters and to believe in God.

Systems and features

The tutorial can be skipped and is described as deliberately unhelpful. You can build your own things using an arcane system, and some levels let you die to win. Progress is kept in your memory rather than saved to disk, and the game can reach states where you cannot continue; restarting is the suggested way to proceed. It can run with a VR headset, though it does not work well in VR.