transient worlds

recently a friend showed me Oasis, a playable AI video model based off of Minecraft.

its marketing material touts it as capable of "[understanding] complex game mechanics, such as building, lighting physics, inventory management, object understanding, and more". they believe that deep learning models like Oasis will form the basis of a new generation of games whose text, audio, and/or graphics is entirely generated by generative AI.¹

it is, of course, none of these things. it is a total failure as a coherent video game in Minecraft's genre. the voxelized world you are ostensibly exploring and interacting with expands, shrinks, and shimmers as you move. items in your inventory multiply and disappear, and objects in the world do random things when you right click on them -- usually nothing, but sometimes spawning indescript foliage, scrambled blocks, or just outright "teleporting" you elsewhere. needless to say, in the sandbox-survival category it is a ludic dead end, just the latest trash off the conveyor belt of the AI bubble.

this total disconnect between what they're promising and what they've delivered is most easily explained by the fact that they've received $21 million in VC funds from a firm that is trying to position them as the next Google. saying "we built a cool video-game-like-thing" just doesn't have the same promise of future returns on that investment as "this is the next generation of gaming as we know it".

but... the frustrating thing is that this failure is only evident if you're trying to play Oasis as if you would Minecraft. it's not a sandbox building game, but it is an art object in the medium of video games, and as one, it is something i genuinely find fascinating on its own merits, despite the words of its creators and benefactors. it's a really good game in a genre that i haven't seen anyone else try to classify.

maybe in order to make that case i need to start from the top:

Oasis (2024)

Oasis is a 2024 video game based off of Minecraft (2011). gameplay of Oasis consists of looking at, and moving around inside of, a world visually similar to that of Minecraft, but in Oasis, the entire game has no persistence whatsoever. objects and geometry that leave your camera frustrum are gone, lost forever; should you attempt to do a double take at anything, it will have already been replaced by a fresh batch of pixels, eventually resolving into a mountain, or perhaps a lake, or maybe even a stone wall as you find yourself spontaneously placed underground.

this total lack of persistence extends not only to the world you find yourself in, but your own body too. attempting opening up your inventory may reveal that you're now Steve, or Alex, or a writhing blob of pixels actively spilling out into the inventory UI like a thick sludge. (finally, some voidpunk representation.)

the video feed is incredibly noisy, resulting in a fine haze of video-compression-esque grain being smeared across both screen-space and world-space. textures blend and warp and shift color over time, with trees turning to stone, to dirt, to grass, and back to trees.

if you are at all interested in playing Oasis, i highly recommend you do so now, as my own skepticism about the economics of generative AI lead me to believe that it's more likely to go down and disappear entirely in the next two years than not. (if they find some way to monetize it, they would be the exceptions to the rule.)

so what?

there are lots of open-world games that feature exploration as part of their core gameplay loop. usually exploration is combined with some other system of gameplay, such as puzzles, combat, platforming, or survival.

it is fairly uncommon for games to present exploration as their primary or even only means of interaction. possibly the most well-known example is Yume Nikki from 2004, though that game escapes this article's particular analysis by virtue of having a world that is consistent between players and play sessions.

but what about exploration games that aren't consistent or persistent? what about worlds that you can really only explore once? lots of games feature procedural generation, but that is usually in service of some other genre of gameplay (e.g. survival, in the case of Minecraft). are there games that give you a procedurally generated world and only ask you to explore it?

i wanted to assemble a list of games along this theme, and also along the way include some smaller projects, tech demos, and less-well-known games that fit that description.

LSD: Dream Emulator (1998)

LSD: Dream Emulator is very similar to Oasis on paper. like Oasis, its world is transient and ever-shifting, featuring surreal environments, landscapes, and objects. it even features the same countdown timer, spontaneously pulling the player out from their session after some time, though LSD uses it for intentional artistic effect, compared to Oasis, where it is almost certainly just for the conservation of expensive GPU-time.

unlike Oasis, however, its experience is not delivered as a continuous, novel stream. its doorways, characters, and even the walls serve as transition points, causing fadeouts to other scenes on contact. these scenes are re-used and re-populated with various characters and textures.

(these videos have sound if you unmute the clips below.)

LSD stands out on this list for being the only example of this genre i can think of that isn't an indie title. Its producer, Osamu Sato, credits the approval of its production to the Playstation's recent launch, when there were lots of people experimenting with the console and its possibilities.²

in a slop era of big-budget video games where it seems companies are only willing to fund the "safe bets" of whatever open-world action game or team-based shooter, remixed and rebooted from whatever IP they have on hand, it seems almost unfathomable for something like this to get greenlit by a major studio today.³

i think the gameplay is compelling enough on its own, though i find that after a couple hours of play the seams of the engine start to show. it's neat the first time you can recognize an area you've encountered before from the landmarks, but once it starts to happen every transition, it's hard to stay engaged. it shifts from exploring and enjoying the landscape to just hoping that some rare event happens so this isn't the fifth uneventful trip to the apartment building.

when playing it, there's a sense of urgency in LSD: Dream Emulator that really isn't present anywhere else on this list. Oasis has a timer, yes, but you can always see the duration right at the top of the screen, which -- if anything -- feels more like it's gently asking you to cap off the end of your adventure as the ending ticks closer. but because you can't see the timer in LSD, the experience is one of suddenly getting ripped out of a cool dream you were having. eventually you develop a sense of anxiety when standing still, like the next door could have something really cool, or that something interesting and rare could be happening around the corner and you aren't looking for it. LSD is not a game that invites you to linger.

out of this list, LSD's dynamic range of atmosphere definitely helps it stand out. some areas are completely surrealistic and poisonously cheery, others are dark and gritty. when the procedurally-generated soundtrack lines up well with the visuals, it works very well.

LSD is actually unique on this list for having actual, bona-fide music. Oasis has a slow ambient drone on its queueing screen and the first load-in is accompanied by futuristic_whooshes.mp3, but is otherwise quiet. for an example of the other end of the sound spectrum is the completely silent...

Wave Function Collapse (2019)

Marian Kleineberg's game is named rather straightforwardly after the algorithm that generates its infinite world. based on the project's commit history, it looks like it was originally concieved of sometime in mid-2018, with bursts of development activity during two game jams in 2018 and 2019 for games featuring procedural generation in some fashion or another. (The jam is also straightforwardly named: PROCJAM.)

it's probably the Mirror's Edge fan in me that this game's aesthetic captivates me as much as it does. it's dead simple: untextured white architecture against a default Unity sky with the occasional splashes of color in the form of foliage -- that last bit being something that i almost missed because the latest Linux build hadn't been updated with trees. (protontricks to the rescue!)

WFC's world is randomly-generated, but stable (for the most part). it won't disappear if you look away or even walk away, and for quite some ways too. since there are no waypoints or really any kind of reliable landmarks, a neat-little self-imposed challenge i find myself instinctively falling back to is looking look for somewhat-recognizable bits of buildings and giving them names, and then trying to recite them as i run back and forth through them. fish, temple, L-shape, arrow; arrow, L-shape, temple, fish...

it is possible that the world generator can back itself into a corner. a backtracking algorithm resolves contradictions on the horizon, and if you keep an eye out for it, you can even watch it Ctrl-Z over a building and replace it with a patio or something. if you run in a wide enough circle it's possible that the constraint solver can't find a solution for the center of the circle. in that case, you can to run around and play in the broken mess of ever-shifting voxels as chunks are generated, discarded, and generated over again.

and if playing in the broken mess sounds like its own kind of fun i would also encourage you to check out...

Game Emulation via Neural Network (2022)

"now hold on!" you, the astute reader, might proclaim. "Ollin Boer Bohan's Game Emulation via Neural Network is just the same concept and technology as Oasis, but applied to Pokémon!" and you would be correct, were it not for the fact that GEvNN came first, and thus Oasis is just GEvNN's concept, as applied to Minecraft.

unlike Oasis, however, GEvNN's model comes in as a svelte 2.47MB, and thus fits entirely within the browser, so there's no video streaming component or time limit. you can wander the endless melting fields, bushes of tall grass, and lossily-cloned trees to your heart's content.

GEvNN hits the sweet spot excellently, being just coherent enough for some areas and aspects of the original to be recognizable -- houses, towns, caves, lakes, and Pokémon centers are clearly identifiable -- but also just broken enough that you can explore what a linear interpolation between "underground cave" and "wooded forest" looks like. it even features a kind of telephone-game version of spatial logic: walking down in any indoor area usually takes you outside a building, for instance, matching the south-facing doors typically found in the source material.

attached to the game is an article, which is deeply interesting in its own right. not on its technical or philisophical merits -- it waffles around and oversimplifies a bit on the first and completely fails at the second. but it is interesting for capturing the exact brainrot that AI boosters today demonstrate, three years ahead of time. Ollin trains his demo off someone else's game and immediately assumes that his toy frame generator will eventually replace all of the game rendering pipeline from there backwards, before proceeding to subsume game art, physics, logic, and presumably design itself. naturally, he is now working at NVIDIA on their attempts to make and patent self-driving cars.

during the course of writing this article, i discovered he created a spiritual sequel in April of 2025 called "World Emulation via Neural Network". it is far less interesting than the Pokémon demo, which is both rather disappointing and begrudgingly expected, in a landscape of "AI" products for which "improvement" seems to coincide with losing all of their interesting qualities and being reduced to polished white noise.

in WEvNN, it feels like there are only really three locations at most, fixed points from the "source" (Heron Loop Trail at Marymoor Park). one in the middle of the bridge on the Heron Loop Trail, one approaching the Lake Sammamish lookout point from the west, and a third on the lookout point, specifically facing the intersection. how one gets stuck looking in a specific direction in a game with full 360 camera controls seems like a contradiction, but even as i tried to deviate from these locations i inevitably found the image magnetized back into them.

try as you might to walk toward or away from the intersection in the left image, you will forever remain calcified in a spot so exact, i found it on Google Maps (right image).

the way the foliage melts into spider-leg tendrils is, at the very least, fascinating in that fractal-like DeepDream way. but speaking of fractals...

Yedoma Globula (2019)

there are a handful of graphics nerds who know what "signed distance field ray marching" is. for the uninitiated, it's a rendering technique that sacrifices extremely core concepts such as "3d models are made out of triangles", but enables efficient rendering of some types of geometry, such as infinitely-looping 3D space or fractals. Gregory Ivanov's Yedoma Globula is that, plus just enough atmosphere and implied narrative to use this to make one of the most captivating exploration-horror games i have ever played.

your old, rusted ship glugs and groans as you swim through the infinite space, reminding you that you are someplace far darker and deeper than you ought to be. there is a smattering of lights left by previous divers, guiding you along to what appear to be various research outposts. you have just barely enough to get around -- a jetpack lets you cross small gaps, climbing tools to escape from holes, a radar for your immediate surroundings.

most of the spaces you explore are both unfathomably large and uncomfortably claustrophobic at the same time. your drilling tool -- more of a portable blast miner -- lets you put holes in the terrain, but the squishy, fleshy walls heal just as fast as you can shoot through them. it's a reminder: this place is massive, it is alive, and as of this moment, you are deep in its body.

in one particular incident, i had traversed down and dug into a hole that seemed to get progressively smaller, eventually depositing me into a blobby torus-shaped cave with no great way out except back up the hole i had fallen into. as i walked along the walls, covered in what looked like scabs or pustules, i thought i saw them shift slightly, as if breathing. then faster, the walls and ceiling of the space began to move, shrinking, squeezing me in. death as a mechanic goes inimplemented in Yedoma Globula, but that heave in my gut as the ceiling met the floor and my vision going completely black has stuck with me more than any death in a video game has.

but as horrifying as the space is, it is also just as often beautiful. if you have the patience to explore, you can find some absolutely gorgeous vistas in the infinite space. the developer menu freecam hotkeys enable even more, as you can control the individual knobs of the entirely-parameterized fractal generator, or go into freecam to set up a wallpaper shot. it transforms the atmospheric horror into a kind of zen fractal generator, worthy of exploration in its own right.

i have lost many cumulative hours exploring the fractals this game generates, both preset ones (accessible from the debug menu) and ones i have "made" by randomly fiddling with the fractal parameters. it's a deeply rewarding art experience, even if doing so loses the horror atmosphere the game leads with. if the length of this section hasn't told you already, Yedoma Globula is my favorite game out of this list.

though, if a horror atmosphere doesn't sound like your cup of tea, i can introduce you instead to...

The Catacombs of Solaris (2021)

i knew of Ian MacLarty's The Catacombs of Solaris from a random one-off stream i had watched years ago. unfortunately, no combination or permutation of the words "trippy first person randomly generated halls projection reprojection image walking simulator" yielded any search results. perhaps this article could be the one to change that, assuming that the search indexes haven't already been wholly hijacked by slop content.

the "premise" here is dead simple, enough to be wholly described in a single sentence: anytime you stop moving, a screenshot of your view is taken and reprojected onto the walls of an infinite, randomly generated maze. sometimes it's the simplest prompts that result in the most fascinating art objects, and CoS is more than enough proof of that. (The tagline boasts: "The goal of this game is to find your favourite room in the catacombs.")

the Revisited edition allows you to use your own images as the "seed" for the catacombs, as well as introducing a couple neat modifiers you can apply to cause changes to that seed over time / with movement. i personally didn't find much interest in the modifiers, preferring instead to find interesting images to use. the original edition, however, is pay-what-you-want, so for those unable or unwilling to spend to experience it, i can still safely recommend that version. Revisited is still quite reasonable at (a minimum of) $12.

though that recommendation comes at a pretty big caveat: i'm fairly confident this game isn't for anyone that gets motion sickness easily, as the "up" axis isn't locked during shifts. it definitely isn't for anyone who has photosensitive epilepsy, as a lot of situations create unavoidable rapidly-flashing noise patterns on screen.

further reading

i have not gone out of my way to buy Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus, though it certainly sounds like it would belong on this list. a cursory glance revealed both AENTITY and RŌA by ARQUOIA, though i also got a bit lazy and hadn't tried these.

torcado's ◆ is a fantastic game that must be disqualified from this list on account of its world being constant (and mechanically having some more semblance of a directive/objective). but it gets an honorable mention here for giving me that same gut-wrenching sense of free-fall at the end of its first segment that all good exploration games with a solid sense of scale should give. highly recommend, it's also free!

if any of the titles above sparked your interest, do consider playing them! with the exceptions of LSD: Dream Emulator (being an out-of-production PS1 title), the latest-released builds of Yedoma Globula, and the Revisited edition of Catacombs of Solaris, all of these are freely available to download and play.