PLAYED BY EAR
From interactive podcasts to 3D RPGs: why the growing audiogame scene is demanding that you listen in
By Alex Spencer
Alexandra is surrounded. She waits for the right moment, then jabs right with her sword, finding her target just in time for another attack to come in from the left. She holds up the shield to take the impact, then counters. The sound of an opponent crumpling to the ground, and everything goes quiet again, except for the voice of a trusty companion guiding her through the wilderness, back to her rightful throne.
Archetypal stuff, no doubt. Except that Alexandra, your playercharacter in The Vale: Shadow Of The Crown, is blind – and accordingly, the screen in front of us is all but blank. A few coloured particles glimmer in the dark, like dust motes caught in a spotlight, the only visual indication of the level we’re moving through.
Last December, The Vale shared a category at The Game Awards with the likes of Far Cry and Forza Horizon, titles with considerably larger budgets and teams. “I think the nomination represents the sum of The Vale’s parts,” game director and Falling Squirrel founder Dave Evans reflects. “The fact that it’s a very big game, it’s a very ambitious game for the genre of all-audio. But there’s no one mechanic or thing we did that I could point to and say, ‘This is solely unique as a mechanic or innovation.’”
That might come as a surprise to anyone who has never played a game like this before – but the ambition part, at least, is clear. The Vale is a fully featured RPG, using sound to deliver everything you’d expect from the genre: weapon stats, NPCs, sidequests and, of course, combat. So how do you fight in the dark? At the most basic level, you listen for the rustle of armour and intake of breath that clue you into an incoming attack, then swing a thumbstick in that direction to strike. But The Vale builds on this with charged heavy attacks, parry windows and ranged combat that has us skewering far-off targets with our eyes closed.
It’s all made possible by binaural audio, using headphones to simulate the player’s natural ability to locate sounds in threedimensional space. Deployed perhaps most famously by Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, the technique is becoming more common across videogames. “It just means a lot more for our game,” Evans says, “because we have nothing else.”
Rather than the psychological effect Hellblade aimed for, here binaural audio allows you to navigate by the clucking of loose hens and the clink of metal on an anvil, getting closer or farther away with each step – or being drowned out by the cry of a market trader. Before long, you can build up enough of an impression of a place that it’s possible to head for the inn or smithy by memory.
THE ABSENCE OF VISUALS LOSES ANY DISTANCING EFFECT AND INSTEAD BEGINS TO ENVELOP US
Dave Evans, co-founder of Falling Squirrel and director of The Vale
HEAVY FOOTSTEPS
Working with the blind and low-vision community, Evans learned a lot about audiogame design. He gives the example of signalling the character’s walk cycle. “Visually, if when a character goes to walk forward or the screen starts to move, you get a sense of that exactly when movement starts. But there’s often not an audio cue attached to that, until the first footfall.” That means there’s no feedback on the player’s input until they’ve already committed to the movement; TheVale needed to let players know the game was responding to their commands instantly. Overall, though, Evans’ biggest realisation was that “I was probably going to over-design”, trying to reinvent basic concepts that the community had accepted long ago.