C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D.
A downloadable anthology for Windows
Status | Released |
Platforms | Windows |
Rating | Rated 4.6 out of 5 stars (105 total ratings) |
Authors | papercookies, colter, O Culto?, Lunar Finch, davidrodmad, specium, Neurobew, Cuttlefresh, VladimereLhore, Neil Makes Games, kurethedead, pastasfuture, drurylain, Bryce Bucher, Kevin Hutchins, Nikita Vychuzhanin, VichoSoft, iwilliams, RazorFinger, VaporShark, devlog98, The Haunted PS1 |
Genre | Adventure |
Tags | anthology, Horror, Multiple Endings, Narrative, Singleplayer |
Average session | A few minutes |
Languages | English |
Inputs | Keyboard, Mouse |
Download
Download
C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. v1.4 2.4 GB
Install instructions
Please make sure to extract the zip before launching the game!
Development log
- Team InterviewMar 04, 2024
- minor update v1.4Jun 14, 2023
- minor update v1.3Jun 12, 2023
- minor update v1.2Jun 08, 2023
- minor update v1.1Jun 07, 2023
Comments
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How did you make background animated?
Google "Hyperplexed" for similar stuff. They probably used a tiled GIF for the background, but you can use similar effects via CSS maybe.
can confirm it's just a tiled gif :) i recorded it from the game. in the game itself it's texture of a dark noise cloud slowly panning, overlaid on top of a pattern of interweaved lines that changes position constantly.
Holy shit I absolutely loved this, you guys very much "cooked"
Is anything supposed to happen in LUCY aside from a single phone call? After the very first phone call nothing happens and I can't do anything.
there´s like one tile that lets you proceed with the story, i think its somewhere on left lower side, i didn´t really like that one either tho cuz its almost luck based wether you find it or not
what if this was just changed but cooler and isn't a fetish game
the variety here is absolutely crazy
Hello
Looks nice
thank you!
okay, theres a LOT to unpack here. but first i want to start with some rankings.
THE BEST
DEJA VOID
DAMIENT
THE END OF IT ALL (PINK SWIRL GAME)
THE ND
GREAT
SUNK COSTS
UNBOUND
S.S.C
KYOTO 1986
VESSEL
GENESIS
LUCYFACE
DISTANT STATIC
IF I COULD START AGAIN
SHOWDOWN
BACK HOME
OUROS
THE UNRAVELLING
TAXI
WHAT LIES IN WAIT
TRANSPORT STRUGGLE
GOOD
BLUE LIGHT
EXECUTIVE ORDER
ASCEND
SUNK COST
HOLY HALLS OF GOD
BAD
TIME HARRIER
FALLEN FROM GRACE
DECISIONS
FUCKING TERRIBLE
THE GOLF WAR
I KNOW THE END
SCRATCHED OUT
UNPLAYABLE
WEIGHT OF THE GENERATIONS
LUCY
I LAUGHED OUT LOUD
FIN.
so, now the rankings are out of the way, lets talk about the story
fuck yeah the story is good
somehow, in some way, you guys made a somewhat coherent (disregard hall of the god) story. i loved every second of it and i loved the in universe explanation for why everything is so fucked up in every universe, lucky to play the kyoto branch first, i loved catherines character and i loved the fucken weirdness of damien and chronos,
buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut
you guys shouldnt have added the gold branch.
it ends the game on a sour and shitty note,
the game is like a fine wine, only getting sweeter towards the ends of the branches (mostly)
but right as you reach the actual end, someone puts a pile of dogshit in the bottle of wine. its been ruined. youll still remember how good the wine was, but its ultimately overshadowed by the dogshit in the oh-so beautiful bottle.
tl:dr mmmmm game good except for fucking gold branch 8.5/10
You have shared my exact thoughts about the end to this all.
Although, with the time passing, I personally got to appreciate it a little bit, as it was intended to be Meta and, at least partially, it is pretty funny. I now feel that it's more of a "me problem" and so is "you problem" than an actual downside, cuz it's we who took it way too seriously, but that also shows just how powerful and creative everything else was.
Where can i find the main menu music for this?
Such an amazing concept and opening, the first 10 minutes or so of this game and the menu system is a 12/10 with how good it is. I chose the Wyoming path unfortunately, and it completely soured me on playing any of the rest of the titles in this collection. Some of the games on the Wyoming path are truly terrible and it hurts me to say that because of how promising this was in the intro. This is a painful 2 stars at best.
An absolutely genius concept, this was very fun to play and it was just a delight to see all the different styles mixing so nicely. Congrats to all of the many developers that worked on this, it's truly something special. I did not encounter any bugs (as far as I know) and the only thing I thought was missing was a way to alter the volume. Other than that, it was a very fun experience and I'd definitely recommend playing it!
"Kill Themis" tape doesn't work, it launches, loading few seconds and then closes to main game. It's even don't show any errors
Does Fall from Grace have any choices at the end? After you kill Satan it's just a black screen with music. You can open a menu by right clicking, but that's it. The game keeps running so it isn't clear if it's the end of the path or if it's bugged.
I have finally finished the collection after 1.5 days of playing.
I love almost every second of it, with games being even more inventive with narrative actually truly cohesive and pretty much almost never really conflicting with each other and even when such would arrive it all could be explained by parallel lines.
…and then, today, I got to the N/A branch, and I got even more hyped and I absolutely adored the first games of it and how it tied all of other branches together…
…and then came the Endings, and I have completely lost all of my enthusiasm, with 3 of them not being games at all, one being LITERALLY A SINGLE SENTENCE (it may make sense in-the-narrative BUT THERE STILL COULD BE DONE MORE WITH THIS THAN JUST "okay you let go"), and the only game out of the four, and a really good experience with that, DOESN'T EVEN HAVE TO DO ANYTHING WITH THE PRIOR NARRATIVE AT ALL!
I wanted to sing this collection praises, for doing right everything C.H.A.I.N. couldn't, for games being even more innovative, creative, fun and narratively both cohesive and interesting and not even clashing with each other despite there being so many of them and so many branches, and the N/A branch tying them together even more!
Only for all this greatness to just… end like this, leaving me absolutely deflated, desolated, emptied out, destroyed, hollow.
I can't even feel angry, I'm that blue balled.
I can't even think of how why it would all end like this except it all being one big joke, and one of the branches already ended with a very silly and very fun one.
As much as I was bummed out by C.H.A.I.N.'s complete lack of the cohesive narrative except for the first few games which I still absolutely adore for a storyline that could've been, at least it also provided an amazing ending that looped it all on itself!
I don't know what to feel about C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D. anymore. I wanted to love it, I loved it, and now… I feel nothing. Betrayal, even. I understand how utterly silly it all sounds, but it really made me feel, and now it feels like it just played with my feelings.
I'm sorry.
hey!! thank you so much for checking out and playing both collections, that's really a lot of dedication! i'm sorry to hear you were dissapointed with the ending games in the extra branch. I can clarify the intention there a bit if that helps: I don't think the intention was that the endings on the extra branch were supposed to be the "true endings", it's more of an extra timeline as a reward for playing the other games. also, these games were the only ones made with full context of all the other games, so hence they're all a bit more meta. any ending in any branch could be considered the "true" ending if you think about it. I'm sorry if you feel like everything was building up to those last games and it didn't deliver! Thanks for playing :)
I should say that I'm sorry for getting so emotional, cuz… I did love almost every other game this much and the entire narrative, I got invested, hard, especially since it spoke to me on a personal level, the whole thing being about a mother trying to save her child, and as a mother figure myself it always hits very close whenever I experience such a story.
It's all on me in the end and I should've seen the extra endings beings mostly meta, but again, got too invested. And this means that the project worked, and worked far too well, and I don't see this being repeated ever again in the future just for how... working it is, but hey, I really want to find myself mistaken in some future.
I do wonder still what the Sin(e)s game was about in the end cuz it's really cool but so confusing, man.I almost completed every game and I'm loving this.
There's just a little thing i wanna say, and it's about it's optimization. It's just not normal to have the launcher take 60-70% of my gpu when it's in the idle "launching game" state, it's just too big of a waste, especially for low end pcs. Please patch this.
hey! that's a really good point, we have to keep the launcher active so that it can listen for when the player is done with the game. but i didn't think about the impact it had! thanks very much for the feedback :)
Glad to help! I hope to see more CHAIN games in the future
'Twas an enjoyable romp through time and space. Great work everyone!
Anybody got the system requirements? Would this run at 60 FPS on a 4 GB system with an Intel i3 8th gen processor + Intel UHD 620 graphics card?
It's a mixed bag for performance, tbh. Some of these use unreal engine, some unity, some godot, some gamemaker. I have a midrange system from 2013 and got through it all fine. My system chugged on the two most intensive games. I'd consider trying it out at 720p to smooth out the highest end.
I tried out the first few games and unfortunately they don't run on my potato. Thanks for your comment though, it might be useful to someone.
If you close CHAINGED after launching a game you get about a 50% performance boost, maybe that will help
Ive noticed that theres a game made by the same people that created this game called "C.H.A.I.N." Is this game a sequel to that game and i have to play it to understand this one, or am I able to play this without worrying about it?
it's a similar format, but there's no overarching storyline or anything so you can go into this one without having played CHAIN :)
I like it a lot so far, but I can't figure out how to save. Does the game autosave?
it does between games!!
We really need the soundtrack for this game to be released I love it keep making horror games
Pastasfuture game really seemed out of place and didn't seem like it connected with anything really
Was mmm's game I Know The End do anything or just that.
Easily one of the best games I've ever played. I don't usually review games, but I felt this one deserved it. An incredible job 10/10
cool in concept but in reality it would appear almost everyone in the wyoming branch didn't want to make a haunted ps1 game at all, most of them are glorified cutscenes that lead to a choice almost to shove it onto another developer most of them don't even go for being "ps1" instead opting for sharp edged low poly unity games. Sadly almost the entirety of the actual meat for the game is in the kyoto branch writing off half of the project, I made sure to look through every branch from wyoming but none of them did anything interesting, cool, and definitely had a massive lack of writing.
I really do appreciate the kyoto branches though, a fair few of them try to be inventive and some of them do fall through but it seemed more out of a lack of time or want to really flesh out what they had rather than a lack of ability. kyoto itself had an interesting first person melee mechanic that was a cool proof of concept, there was the animal crossing like one that also seemed like an experiment to make something like animal crossing which all of the props to them for that. I also really enjoyed the one where you go back to where you started that played with ambience and space rather than mechanics.
main issues: all of these were extremely short and bite sized segments that had little to nothing, almost all of these were working from the initial game which sets it up but it really breaks my heart that none of them wanted to deviate from this, they would all focus on the god of time, the antichrist as the main characters and try to set up twists and turns without the real time investment to do so. I'm sure the setup was just so there would be a plot device for everyone to set their own game in their own setting while easily being able to tie it back in, but instead of actually branching out, all of these games seemingly loop back into each other instead.
I think the main issues could've occurred due to a lack of time and pressure, only being able to work on a bite size thing for a buddy who's working on a large scale collaborative project and needing to also write something meaningful to that project means they can't work on a big scale project that they would personally be invested in and both their idea for a game and story suffer for it.
I would absolutely be extremely interested if another project was made that gave these devs as much time as they needed and if they had extra emphasis on being able to be as loose as they want to be with this game. I would hope though that if this happens there are a fair bit more people not to oversee everything but more because I think having a chaining sequence of haunted ps1 games and not trying to mess with it in a unique way seems like a lack of both potential and possible creativity, maybe linking multiple branches to unlock an extra haunted secret branch, 4th wall breaks, things like that.
Most importantly this game has a majority based on psuedo ps1 games masquerading low quality for aesthetic without the tailoring done to make it actually fit, the story premise trying to leave everything as open as possible instead made everything a christian mythos inspired matrix parody instead of something that could've been unique.
AGAIN I really do love this concept put together but I would be much more interested in another try at this with more foresight. Thank you for making this regardless.
Nah
You can give all the caveats you like with 'again, i really love the concept' and 'thank you for making this' but at the end of the day you went out of your way to leave a lengthy negative review on something that is free you absolute total muppet.
I went out of my way to criticize something that I now care about, making me care about something is a plus but that doesn't mean it was great, I want to leave criticism to make anything else they do better. Assuming that the people that made this won't go on to do anything else would be depressing, I want everyone who made this to know what was good and bad about what they made for anything they work on in the future.
Yeah i'm sorry I was in a bad mood : ( I'll delete my comment later..
oh no worries you can leave it, I get heated all the time ,>_<
i know what you're saying, and you're not wrong with the points you make but; to make a project like this feasible, let alone *fun* to make, you need to give individual devs some liberty. i tried my best to strain away from too much direction and let things develop naturally, a lot of people in the wyoming branch did focus on doing more narrative stuff, but I think that's the magic of a project / experiment like this. as the organiser for the project, every small bit of constraint you add makes for a lot more opportunities where things can fall apart. this was already a lot of work, i can't imagine the amount of work it would be to also *direct* every single game.
what i'm saying is, it's already a miracle this even worked out as flawlessly as it did. managing more than 50 devs to make a thing like this happen is hard!! quite simply, the project you are describing is not possible as a free collaboration, that would be a full-time job for multiple people, would not be as fun to make for the devs, and would most certainly not be free :-)
Oh absolutely, I would love to pay money for a project bigger than this that goes smoothly, I only left this comment in the first place more out of frustration. I don't like leaving reviews and especially not for something that wasn't for me, but if i play something that I didn't like but had all the puzzle pieces I just really want to see it go further.
A project of this scale with this many people that is monetised is insane, and borderline not feasible...
I think these are a fair critiques and they pick up on tensions that have always been in play with these large collaborative projects. - I'd say generally what you point out as negatives are areas where developer comfort and interest have been prioritized over the player's experience. This is not an accident, but an intentional decision, although the consequence is this opens us up for obvious critique when the player experience is lacking.
In the end, these collabs are a bit more like game jams than full projects with strong directions, and that's intentional. I think it's a good sign these projects are at the point they are judged with high expectations, rather than treated as oddities. It shows that the collabs ARE getting more cohesive and compelling, although there's always room to improve. In the end, I think Chain2 was structurally and thematically more successful than Chain1 as a whole. I'm excited to see how we can improve the next collab using what we learned here.
We are listening and reading everything. All player feedback, good and bad, goes into consideration the next time around.
well put colter!!!
I appear to have a small issue: the "Choices" tape appears to crash on start-up? I am unsure why and I request quick assistance.
does it show an error?
No, it just sort of quits after few seconds of loading when I try to launch it.
I have the same problem. In case it's helpful for anyone, I found the following messages in the logs: https://pastebin.com/09ZUABdr
HoT DAMN THAT WAS GOOD! Although the only resolution i had was one screen, it still felt like enough. genuinely great game. 15/10 will be telling friends about nonstop
the rpgmaker one is horribly put together. the encounters have zero depth, you can beat them by spamming z, the visuals feel lazy, it feels against the ps1 aesthetic the games are meant to have, and on a technical level its held together with duct tape and you can refight the final boss of it by just moving around in the void and spamming z. i also hate the narrative of it all, but when the first game they're all based on has a shit story in a project like this its not the fault of the dev, they weren't given anything good to work with. i played the right half of the collection then uninstalled.
yo, but shut up tho
shut up omori fan
bro shut up
shut up stupid, its free.
chill dog go play triple A if your looking for that its just a game they put out for free not that serious this isn't even constructive at the end of the day
For the people telling him to shut up because it's free.
Just because a game is free doesn't make it exmpet from criticism Sythe's game on the pack literally makes you have to blindly click to find a way to progress this isn't good that's bad.
it was fun, but i came across a game that i physically could not play because of the amount of lag.
Nice stuff...so creative!
Part 3 ->
This has to be the most feverish dream game I've ever played. Awesome job there, guys!
What an impressive project from the HPS1 community. Its like a game of telephone with your favorite psx devs
Thank You all so much for the experience once again!
Full Playthrough All Games and Chains (NO Commentary) w/ game tags
i need all soundtracks on youtube or soundcloud
Super interesting concept and AMAZING work from all of the devs involved! I can't even imagine how much work goes into organizing such a large project like this. I only went down two routes (that I'm fully convinced took me to the bad endings, haha), but I'm definetly hoping to explore some more branches in the future!
(ps if you're curious which pathways I took, check out my video!)
How does the weight of the generations tape work? I genuinely can't tell if I'm making any progress on it or not
Try not shooting anyone. I don't know exactly what I did but not shooting and walking around for a while seemed to work.
I'm having too much fun with the game
The ''Showdown'' game is one of the only ones I'm still having trouble playing, it seems to take a lot out of my GPU, as strange as that is because I managed to play it perfectly once, opening it directly through the game files, without being by ''Laucher'' (don't know what to call it) By Game C.H.A.I.N.G.E.D.
But I'm loving the Game.
BIG SHOUTOUT TO ALL THE DEVELOPERS INVOLVED IN THIS CRAZY PROJECT. I just made a video on this and have every full intention to go through the whole things, this is truly an amazing concept and can't wait to see where this crazy story goes!
Thanks to the developers of the haunted PS1 Community for making such a fun game.
Aight, I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, but here goes (SPOILERS FOR THE LATEGAME)
Aight, so basically, when [SPOILER CHARACTER] lets me view various TVs to learn the deeper meaning of each point in the timeline... there are three that are missing, despite the fact that I've gotten verification marks for playing them. Is something bugged? Then again, the Attic game WAS bugged as I couldn't seem to progress past the phone call... And I DID beat the Ascend and "Kill Satan" games (those are the three TVs that are missing). What's going on?
hey! i will be pushing an update soon with the missing tvs
Gotcha! Gotta say, REALLY loved this experience, it really was something else, and the way everything flows together in the end is just... awesome. You all did great work on this!
Heyo! Sorry for giving you extra work, but there's one final game that won't open and it's the game "Choices"
This one i'm certain it's a problem on my end since i've seen videos of people playing It, hope you can give me a solution. Hopefully I'm not too late before the update!
Here are my pc specs just in case:
Wish I could play this but the first game opens SteamVR rendering the entire pack unplayable. looks really cool though, so that sucks :/
**EDIT: Changing the name of the SteamVR folder seems to have fixed this issue!
-My SteamVR was located in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common"
-locate the SteamVR folder and rename it. This will just be temporary, I simply put an "a" at the end changing it to "SteamVRa"
-Now the game pack shouldn't detect the SteamVR and should run normally on flatscreen, hope this helps!
yes it's really annoying, i will ask the developer to get it fixed. normally you can just ignore the steamvr popup and open the game window from the taskbar