An engineered insect fungus jumped to humans at the Kersey Falls Cherry Festival—leaving the fruit fly's sensory connectome wired inside the host. Sample ripening strains upwind across 24 nights (Solo or 1–4 Co-op) while the mycelium adapts to your tactics over a 3-night rolling memory.
Full-frame 1600×900 gameplay captures and live combat footage—sodium flares, laser targeting, sporulating Cordyceps rings, and connectome-driven hordes hunting through the rain.
Holding back a pack of Lords and Walkers in the pouring rain with a sodium flare and laser-sighted pistol before navigating the cocooned Breeder in the festival park.
QUARANTINE // SPORE RING & MYCELIAL WEB
Inside the golden-green sporulation ring beside Cordon SAS 2: procedural Cordyceps clubs, bells, and radial mycelial hyphae bloom across the pavement as a black-coated Lord closes in.
COMBAT // PHOTOTACTIC FLARE & PACK SURGE
A burning sodium flare pins the heading compass of the pack on the wet asphalt while you line up a laser-sighted shot on four charging hosts with glowing compound eyes.
THE HIVE // COCOONED BREEDER & HORDE
Along the park perimeter fence, a white fungal Breeder anchors a web of hyphae and tall Cordyceps fruiting bodies as three alarmed hosts converge through the trees.
INSERTION // NIGHTFALL DRONE DROP
Rappelling from the lab's heavy quad-rotor transport drone onto the rain-slicked avenue at dusk—twenty-four nights to trace the wild type back to the Queen.
The mycelium across Kersey Falls is a single distributed organism. Every night at Ridge Base, it shifts its gene expression based on the tools you relied on over your last 3 nights.
If you repeatedly burn corpses and clear streets with fire, the strain thickens its chitinous crust and pressurizes its fruiting sacs.
Relying on constant flashlight sweeps and UV beacons selects for altered photoreceptor gain in the host's optic lobes.
Leaving trails of fresh corpses without rotating tactics accelerates fungal ripening speed and recruits high-synapse Lords.
They do not hate you. They do not plot. Their sensory organs feed directly into arthropod navigation circuits.
Townspeople whose motor cortex is slaved to phototaxis and upwind odor plumes. Drawn to muzzle flashes, streetlamps, and the scent of blood.
Each Lord runs an individual 15,037-neuron Drosophila connectome live. When a Lord locks onto you, nearby Walkers align with his heading.
Heavily colonized hosts that seed procedural mushroom rings across the pavement and pump toxic spore plumes into the night wind.
Aggressive fast-reflex vectors triggered by LC4 looming circuits, guarding the ancestral Wild Type strain deep inside the orchard and lab.
Every night in Kersey Falls is an expedition from Ridge Base. Bring back viable fungal vials to Dr. Marchetti's lab to reconstruct the phylogenetic tree and synthesize the counter-strain.
You cannot sample a living host. Wait for the fungus to ripen on a fallen body without burning it—then move upwind so your scent plume doesn't lead the swarm to your back.
Use your gas mask filter in spore zones, sweep with the UV lamp to reveal invisible mycelial traps, and optionally inoculate specimens with Marchetti's counter-strain.
Coordinate flares, power generators, radio relays, and sample extraction with up to 4 seekers. Split the swarm's compass ring with cross-directional light decoys.