Ray Chase, the voice of Cyclops in X-Men '97, has '1,000 freaking hours' in Slay the Spire and is running a 'smell build' in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2: ' I wear perfumes and walk into battle with my fancy boy outfit'

Disk Cleanup

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Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"

Ray Chase's first encounter with PC gaming was on an old DOS computer from his father's accounting job. He grew up on a digital diet of shareware demos from PC gaming's golden era. "My grandfather gave me this basket of shareware games, and we played them nonstop for years," Chase recalls. "There was Duke Nukem 1 and 2. There was Ken's Labyrinth. Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. There was Wolfenstein 3D, of course. Jack Pack was one of my favourites because it had a level editor."

A voice actor since the early 2000s, Chase has appeared in hundreds of games, films and TV shows. He played the lead character Noctis in Final Fantasy 15, and currently voices Cyclops in X-Men '97, which just aired season two and is in the process of recording season four: "The stuff that's going on in the seasons we're recording now, I guess we'll see in a couple of years, but it's really cool, man."

Chase is also the co-founder of Sassy Chap Games, developer of 2025's Date Everything. A dating sim where players can romance dozens of anthropomorphised household objects, Date Everything was designed to be a celebration of voice acting talent. "We just finished our big update for Date Everything and we are working hard on the next chapter of our story," Chase says. "We're in the pitching process for that now."

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Chase took a break from designing romanceable soft furnishings to show me around the hunk-strewn household of his Steam library. Gather round for a tale of perfumed peasants, disordered dungeons, and plane potatoes.

What game are you currently playing?

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I'm currently playing Deltarune Chapter 5, but not [for] super long. The other one that I have is Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It's the eternal game. I'm doing all of the things. It'll be a few hundred hours. But it's the perfect encapsulation of what a roleplaying game should be.

I played one [campaign] all the way through. The [most recent] one I've made, I'm doing a smell build where your character smells and looks so good and fancy that it actually works as armour. And so I wear perfumes and walk into battle with my fancy boy outfit. And my enemies are toostunned.

I'm always laundering my clothes. It's the best. I just fucking love that game.

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What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

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I played Mina the Hollower. I love that game, my God. Jay Kaufman's music is astounding. I played that one out of order because I saw you could do that, and I really liked the challenge. So I did the dungeons all in the wrong order. I really enjoyed the feeling of doing a really hard dungeon and then going back and then saying "Oh, this is now very easy" going through it.

I also love that [Mina is] middle aged like me, and after she completes a dungeon she goes to sleep. She takes a nap, which I think is great.

I'm not a secret ending kind of guy. I'm whatever my percentage is when I complete the game. That's what I live with, and that's it. I never go back and play games. [With] Disco Elysium, the best thing about it is the cryptozoologist thing, the cryptid comes at the end and says something incredible. But I [failed the roll]. And so I will never know what it is. I'm never going to go back and play it, and I won't look it up either.

I think that's part of the fun, living with the consequences.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

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I've got Brotato here. I have very little on my PC, that's the problem. I love Brotato. It's one of my favourites. It's because it's so lightweight. It's great for planes, and you don't need a controller to play. I end up playing on my laptop on planes more than anything.

Anything that's super lightweight, I'll always have [installed]. So it's going to be Brotato. I 100%-ed it before the newest DLC, which makes it really hard.

There's so many different potatoes you can be. There's so many different playstyles. I'll take whatever comes my way. It's never old. Same with Slay the Spire … there's always something different, always something new to learn, and I absolutely adore it.

Oh, maybe Slay the Spire is older than Brotato. So then, that's my answer.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

It's Slay the Spire for sure. It is something like 600 hours. But then I've got it on mobile too, and I also got all the way to the end with all characters.

I got into it very early on. I went to a gathering and some guy was like "There's this early access game named Slay the Spire, you should give it a shot." There was only Ironclad and Silent at the time. I don't know if it was [in] early access then, or if it was just a demo version. But I was there from almost the very, very beginning.

I'd never played a deckbuilder before, and it was the best. I played it all the way through to release to Watcher, 1,000 freaking hours in that thing. And it's easy to 100% that game. The achievements are not very difficult, but I do love Ascension, getting Ascension on all characters and then beating it on Ascension 20. That to me is the correct difficulty.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Brotato or Slay the Spire. They're just always there, for when I'm on the plane and I'll be able to give it a quick spin.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

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My voice recording software for sure. That's pretty simple.

I use Reaper and Audacity, [they] are my two favourites. And I absolutely could not live without voice recording software.

That would be impossible.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Extremely tidy. There's almost nothing on it. It's just the audio that I recorded this morning before coming into this interview, and then my Recycle Bin. And that's it, it's empty. I don't like having a bunch of stuff that I don't know where the hell it is.

[I'm a] one-screen guy. Sometimes I have my second screen up here when I'm recording, but today it's just my laptop and nothing else fancy. This laptop is the laptop I developed Date Everything on.