HALDANE-4
A procedural ASCII horror game: pilot a 1972 submersible beneath the Antarctic ice, everything rendered as ASCII on a fake CRT.
HALDANE-4 is a procedural ASCII horror game set in 1972. You are Dr. Harlan Webb, sealed inside the submersible HALDANE-4, descending into a subglacial cavity beneath the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. A surface assistant talks you down by radio. Your job: reach the deepest point, collect a sample, and climb back out before life support runs out. Something is waiting down there. Every pixel you see is a character. Caves, lighting, the submersible, the creatures and the HUD are all rendered as ASCII on a fake CRT — and all of it is procedural, including the music, the sound effects and the ambient horror stingers. The radio dialogue is recorded, then routed through a procedural filter chain that gets audibly sicker the deeper you go. Movement is slow and heavy: an inertial 3D world viewed as a 2D cross-section, WASD to thrust, Q/E to rotate the camera (some passages only reveal themselves from certain angles), the lamp the only thing holding the dark back — and the lamp is what the entity follows. Shift kills the engine and the light for silent hiding. Solo developer Denis Bondare built it with Cursor and Claude Code and open-sourced it explicitly "as an example of how far you can push that workflow on a one-person side project." It won Cursor's "Most Original" award at Vibe Jam 2026, the jam Pieter Levels runs, where judges noted this year's entries were approaching genuine production quality. There's a mobile build with a floating joystick, but desktop with headphones is the intended experience. Note: This project is curated by the VibeFix editors from public sources. All rights belong to the original creator.
