ars has a review here.
i think this is a really neat concept.
With touchscreens and motion controls, we're seeing a steady stream of incredibly creative and inventive games. Even still, an experience that almost entirely consists of audio is novel. And that's exactly what the team at Somethin' Else has created with Papa Sangre: a terrifying horror experience that is portrayed to the player solely through sound. In the iPhone game, only your ears can guide you as you explore a land covered in darkness and full of horrible monsters.
Ars spoke with Somethin' Else's Paul Bennun to learn just how hard it is to create a game made of sound.
"I've wanted to do a game using only sound for as long as I can remember," Bennun told Ars. "They say 'the pictures are better on radio,' and the team's suspicion was that we could create a world as detailed and carefully created as any console game with great art direction and game design—using sound alone. The broad ambition was for an environment as atmospheric as, say, Rapture or as smart and subtle as the Aperture Science labs."
The game drops players in the land of the dead, where they're tasked with not only staying alive, but also finding and saving lost souls. Chimes and other sounds effects help guide you along, and you need to listen closely to determine how close they are. Likewise, enemies will growl and snarl and chase you. You'll want to avoid them. Movement is controlled by the touchscreen, where you can simulate footsteps with your thumbs and turn to face the sounds. It works surprisingly well, and according to Bennun, was terribly hard to create.
Not only did the team—which consisted of a six-person core and around a dozen other contributors—have to build its own 3D audio engine, but they also had to design an experience without any visual cues. As you might expect, this wasn't easy.
"Creating a game that was 100 percent accessible to blind people was also a primary consideration for us, and this threw up some knotty issues," Bennun explained. "VoiceOver is very powerful, but as none of the development team were native users of the iPhone's accessibility functions we had a practical learning curve in how people used them, and required a special set of play-testers to assist us. In the end, VoiceOver couldn't do everything we needed, so we had to use some legal hacks and created an entirely separate game UI for VoiceOver users so they'd have fun playing the game.
"Some have called the game 'a game for blind people,' which is a totally wrong. It's a game for everyone. It's just that if we ever get around to a multiplayer version, don't play against someone that uses VoiceOver unless you do too. They'll kick your arse."
This also led to problems when it came to tuning the difficulty of the game. During play-testing some blind players managed to breeze through the game, while other players found even the opening areas very difficult. But while the development, which lasted around a year, was full of obstacles, it also allowed the team the ability to create a uniquely engrossing experience.
"We realised we had the opportunity to create what we call 'the ultimate first-person game,'" he told Ars. "The illusion provided from successful binaural audio is closer to immersive reality than anything a screen can provide. That is, when it truly works, you're actually there, getting a closer approximation to the information you'd get from a real space. So some people really find the game incredibly, unplayably, scary."
