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.
Real 1920×1080 Ultra in-engine close-ups and gameplay clips—heavy trucks and police cruisers crushing glowing Cordyceps mushrooms, volumetric mist chases, and the Queen at the quarantine gate.
Plowing through glowing Cordyceps patches and zombie hordes in a Police Cruiser, holding back a hunting pack in the volumetric mist with a laser-sighted pistol, and navigating the festival park hive.
HEAVY VEHICLE // TANKER TRUCK & CORDYCEPS
A multi-ton tanker truck barrels past an intersection in the volumetric mist, headlights cutting through bioluminescent Cordyceps stalks and radial mycelium.
MYCOLOGY MACRO // CORDYCEPS & HYPHAE
Street-level macro view of ripening fungal mats: tall golden-green Cordyceps clubs, translucent gills, and pulsing white-green mycelial veins colonizing the wet asphalt.
PURSUIT // LASER SIGHT & MIST HORDE
Caught in a street-level spore fog, the seeker fires her laser-sighted pistol into an incoming pack—every muzzle flash and gunshot drawing more infected out of the mist.
INTERCEPTOR // POLICE CRUISER IN THE FOG
Commandeering a Kersey Falls police cruiser to ram through infected roadblocks—its high-beam headlights and emergency strobes slicing through the night fog.
MOMENTUM // 11M CITY BUS RAMMING
Heavy vehicle physics in action: a city transit bus shoves wrecked sedans aside along a lantern-lit Chinatown street while glowing fungal patches spread across the lane.
APEX SIEGE // THE QUEEN AT THE CORDON
At the Night 25 quarantine checkpoint, the towering Queen—driven by the full Drosophila connectome—spreads her green-veined wings above the concrete barricades.
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.
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.
