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Sounds of Shadows asks you to use sound waves to guide a sightless maintenance robot through a dark, dangerous facility.
While the prospect of meandering through an underground lab in the dark doesn’t sound too promising, our robot buddy has the ability to ping the environment with sound waves to “see” what’s around them. It’s an effect that heavily reminds me of Perception, a horror title where you play as a blind woman working her way through an estate. Here, any time you send out a sound wave, you will see the world around you outlined with color, giving you a temporary vision of what’s all nearby.
The echolocation mechanic has the nice effect of making the game look sharp with these colorful outlines while conveying the same scary benefits of leaving you lost and alone in the dark. Well, not alone, naturally, as there is a creature stalking the lab. It’s killed almost all of the scientists here (save for one), and it can definitely hear you making all of that racket to help you see. So, any time you light things up to make yourself see, you’re potentially bringing a monster closer to you. It creates this fun tension where, if you want to see, you have to put yourself in danger. Should you blunder about or take the audio risk?
You do get SOME benefit from this audio effect, as the monster and other ambient things also create visual effects that let you see. As such, you get some freebies to help guide you around. If the monster is near, you’ll definitely hear (“see”) it, too. It creates this situation where the worst thing is when you can hear the monster but they’re somewhere out of sight. When you know they’re close, but not close enough to “see”, then you really start to feel that fear settle in and Sounds of Shadows really drags you in.
Sounds of Shadows is available now on itch.io.
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