As was reported a few weeks ago, Audiogames.net and The Vale were spotlighted in a feature on Edge Magazine. For those who are unaware, Edge is one of the leading magazines for anything video game related. A big thanks goes to Alex Spencer, who not only wrote the admirable ten-page article, but gave us full permission to post the cut here for all to see.

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.
Once this becomes second nature and we start playing with our eyes closed, as Evans recommends, the absence of visuals loses any distancing effect and instead begins to envelop us. It’s reminiscent of the promise of VR – an experience not contained by the usual bounds of a screen – and in some ways, at least, it beats the reality. “You don’t have a character model to scrutinise or a world that breaks apart a little bit when the production values or technology aren’t quite there,” Evans says. “Until we get photorealistic immersive VR, I think this is probably the most transformative experience.”
It’s also an approach that is totally accessible to blind and lowvision players, without requiring any tweaking of settings. But while the game might have found itself lauded for ‘Innovation In Accessibility’, that wasn’t the reason Evans initially landed on this project. Rather, he admits, he wanted to make a game that wouldn’t be constrained by his lack of art skills or budget. “The production concerns of: ‘Why would you add a desert if you’re not going to use it this much? Why would you add a dog – you realise how we’re going to have to animate this dog now?’ I just untethered myself from those things.”
“I wanted to be a purist initially about this game. I wanted it to be a black screen from the beginning,” Evan says. But working with the audiogame community, he realised that visual menus could help sighted players without having any cost for fully blind players
Swamp plays like a firstperson game, but its visual component – designed as an aid for partially sighted players – is presented from a topdown perspective
If this is the first you’re hearing of audiogames, then you’re far from alone. Evans admits that, at The Vale’s inception, he was in a similar position himself. Obviously that changed over development, as he worked with Canadian National Institute For The Blind (“I made some friends there, and they came along this journey with me”), but the real turning point was discovering community-run website AudioGames.net. “And then I realised there’s hundreds of these things out there. Really small hobbyist-built games with low production values – and then there are some standouts of, in particular, blind developers who have made really good games, and surprisingly advanced games.”
The site currently lists over 800 audiogames, the oldest dating back to 1987. Browsing its database, you’ll find audio-only variants of Pong and Pac-Man, Quake and Doom, Snake and Flappy Bird. Among those standout titles is Swamp, a firstperson multiplayer shooter about surviving the zombie apocalypse. Played on mouse and keyboard, it requires learning an arcane set of hotkeys. (“It’s impossible for me to play it,” Evans notes.)
EVERYONE MENTIONS THE LAST OF US PART II AS A PARTICULAR MILESTONE FOR BLIND PLAYERS
When Evans first visited AudioGames.net, the site had been active for 15 years. Its origins lie earlier still, in a 1999 project at Utrecht’s School Of The Arts in which Richard van Tol and Sander Huiberts found themselves involved. “It wasn’t really our project,” Van Tol says. “It was an interaction design student project, but we were involved as music technologists.” The project “failed miserably” but inspired the pair to make racing audiogame Sneller and its English followup, Drive. When Yahoo covered the latter, Van Tol remembers, “the school server got blown up because of the millions of downloads.”
During their research, the two students discovered what Evans would decades later: the audiogame development scene, albeit in a more nascent form. “It was really this really niche thing, with maybe 20 or 30 titles that we could find at the time, and maybe five homebrew and hobby developers, most of them visually impaired themselves.” When they launched AudioGames.net in 2002, it became a focal point for the community – in particular its forum, still thriving 20 years on. Today, Van Tol and Huiberts are founders of studio Creative Heroes and work at their old school as educators; as a result, they’ve mostly handed off the site. “Seven or eight years ago, we stopped adding content ourselves,” Van Tol explains. “The community really took over. So nowadays, the site is fully run by the visually impaired gamers themselves.”
There have been great steps forward in videogame accessibility in recent years, and everyone we talk to mentions The Last Of Us Part II as a particular milestone for blind players. In that context, then, the role of audiogames might be shifting, into something that can stand alongside videogames as its own medium, for players of all kinds. Evans estimates that sighted players make up around 90 percent of The Vale’s playerbase, and points to 2021’s Blind Drive –a comedy game where you drive head-on into traffic, blindfolded – as another minor crossover hit. “Maybe this niche genre should be less niche,” he says. Huiberts and Van Tol tell us they’ve been speaking to a number of indie developers who are reaching the same conclusion. “It’s a relatively good business model nowadays,” Van Tol says. Audiogames are relatively cheap to develop, Unreal and Unity make it easy to work with binaural audio and, he concludes, “You can draw a crowd, because audiogames are still novel.”
The time, it seems, is right. Audiences have been primed for these experiences, and the technology is in place. As Evans says, “With the quality of podcasts now, and Alexa and all these other platforms, I feel like there’s room to have audio be a bigger part of interactive experiences.” Huiberts mentions podcasts too, saying “an interactive audiobook” feels like the next logical step. They’re not the only ones thinking along these lines.
Richard van Tol and Sander Huiberts co-founders of Creative Heroes

ADMIN ACCESS

Jack Falejczyk is one of the admins who keeps AudioGames.net running. A blind player himself, he places The Vale (“a gateway drug into the world of audiogames”) within a larger movement, driven by “grassroots efforts”, including audiogame developers and the modders making games such as Hearthstone playable without visuals. When it comes to improving accessibility in mainstream videogames, he says, developers could benefit from a better understanding of the audiogame scene. “A point-and-shoot might sound revolutionary on paper, but we may have several iterations of that in audio form. Whereas an already ambitious game like The Last Of Us Part II becoming accessible is a major milestone, the likes of which has never been seen before.”
Blind Drive might be out to make you laugh, but the sound of incoming vehicles and blaring horns is enough to raise a sweat too. We challenge you not to wince at every head-on collision

“Welcome to the Maze. A place you have been conditioned to unsee, but it is all around you.”

These words, delivered with all the hammy theatrics of a good radio play, are layered atop a droning wash of music, and the low rumble of traffic outside our headphones. As we pass a corner shop, the voice beckons us closer to the glass, to peer inside – before changing its mind. There’s someone inside. A threat. Run. That this aligns perfectly with the opening of the shop’s door is, of course, coincidence, but it’s enough to set the heart racing as we scurry away and across the road.
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN DEVELOPMENT: NOT AUDIO OR LEVEL DESIGN, BUT MARKETING
The popularity of Pokémon Go has lent Biome Collective a reference point for how The Maze works, something it didn’t have for previous game Other
The Maze’s onscreen map highlights points of interest, but it’s best to put the phone in your pocket and go wandering wherever you like
The Maze is an experiment in a very different kind of audiogame design, one that does rely on visuals, but, aside from a simple map on the screen of your phone, doesn’t provide any of its own. Instead, the game borrows its graphical assets from the real world: the churches and monuments you walk past as you play. These points of interest, pulled from mapping data much like Niantic’s PokéStops and Gyms, allow you to progress the game and trigger a relevant snippet of narration.
It’s a simple but effective parlour trick, as you approach a crowded bus stop and the voice describes its Maze equivalent, crumbling and cobwebbed but still attracting lost souls with nowhere to go. (Even if this does feel a little unkind to the young family patiently awaiting the arrival of the 197.) Designer Malath Abbas isn’t wrong to call it “a moment of magic, when you realise the story is responding to your behaviour in real life”.
For now, though, this trick is about all The Maze has. What we’re playing is an early proof of concept made for a fraction of the planned budget. Biome Collective, the Scottish design group behind the game, originally pitched for a £50,000 prototype fund. Instead, it landed £10,000 from StoryFutures Academy. “We had to reconfigure the scope of the project to fit,”
Abbas says – something that was possible only because of the team’s experiences almost a decade earlier.
Malath Abbas and Tom deMajo, co-founders of Biome Collective
MOTION TRACKED
The Maze and Other represent an unusual kind of AR, one that doesn’t involve, as artist and designer Tom deMajo puts it, “QR codes and things hovering in the foreground.” Biome’s approach means you don’t have a screen acting as a constant intermediary. “We thought getting people to separate themselves from their environment by looking at their phone was the wrong way to go about it.” Instead, he thinks back to being a kid with a Walkman; the experience he’s interested in is like going for a walk with an album in your headphones and letting it soundtrack your surroundings.
“There was a project we did with the National Theatre Of Scotland, which in many ways was the starting point for The Maze,” Abbas explains. To help promote its 2012 adaption of vampire movie Let The Right One In at the Dundee Rep, Biome came up with Other, a geotagged walking game that used Dundee’s landscape as level design, tying certain spots and routes to sections of story or music. Abbas describes watching players reach a cemetery in the city centre, at which point the game tells them to avoid stepping on the circular stones in the path. “And it was fascinating to see so many people stop, and start hopping around, and just essentially become active agents in this narrative.”
The only problem was that Other was restricted to this one set of streets, somewhat limiting its potential playerbase. Hence The Maze, an attempt to apply the same idea to absolutely any space in the world, bringing fresh challenges but also opening up the scope of the project considerably. In theory, at least. Biome is on the hunt for funding to expand its concept – something that’s made challenging by the mobile gaming industry’s focus on free-to-play models, but also the difficulty of communicating the game’s appeal.
We’re reminded of Evans describing the biggest challenge in The Vale’s development: not audio or level design, but marketing. After all, consumers often make snap decisions based on screenshots and videos, and in that format these games don’t look like much at all. As Evans says: “Half the people are playing and watching things without sound on, so there’s this huge barrier to entry just to get the word out there.” Which might explain why the next two people we speak to have strayed from their project’s audio-only roots towards an approach that might be better described as audio-led.
It was while touring universities across the UK that the Oliver twins (industry veterans and creators of the Dizzy series) first started to consider audiogames. “We were telling the students, ‘Look at technologies that have come to fruition that aren’t being supported yet’,” says Philip Oliver, now CEO and co-founder of Panivox. “And of course, me and Andrew always ended up leaving those talks saying, ‘So what is original? What could be done? Is there a new genre out there?’” The pair considered the popularity of podcasts and the rise of voice-controlled virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa. “You can get them to play some music, set an alarm, call somebody,” Oliver says of virtual assistants. “But there’s no creativity, no entertainment value. It’s functional.”
Sherlock Holmes And The Eminent Explorer is one of the sample games made by RichCast, as it attempts to attract creatives and players to its platform
Their response is RichCast, a platform for building and distributing voice-controlled games. Think of it like an audio-focused Twine – its flowchart-style creator interface certainly looks similar, but with automated text-to-speech and voice input functionality built in. The interface has been designed with writers rather than programmers in mind, Oliver tells us, so that “anybody can create these stories where you can talk to characters and those characters can talk back.”
That’s a slightly generous description of the games currently available on RichCast’s platform, which are fairly basic affairs: a Sherlock Holmes mystery which describes a crime scene then gives you options of where to search for clues; another where you navigate dialogue trees as an emergency dispatcher screening 911 calls.
Tom Keane, creative director at Godolphin Games, and Philip Oliver, CEO and co-founder, Panivox
FOLEY AND FOLLY
When you’re making a game that puts sound front and centre, Keane says, “then the audio needs to be incredibly good, bespoke and unique and characterful”. Which is why, on Unknown Number, he’s working with music producer Easyfun. As a founding member of PC Music, Easyfun’s work is often characterised by emphasised artifice – but here, Keane says, “we spurned digital and premade sounds wherever possible”. Instead, the game’s foley was recorded in a cabin, “surrounded by weird old tools and big hunks of metal”. At one point, they even miked up and staged a hug “in an attempt to get some sort of audio authenticity”. The result was as subtle as you might expect. “Totally pointless,” Keane laughs.
Keane cites among Unknown Number’s influences Her Story, Return Of The Obra Dinn and, somewhat unexpectedly, Dota (specifically its audio – “it manages to make 500-plus sounds totally distinct”)
While the focus here is on voice, with most games accompanied by painted stills, Oliver emphasises that RichCast has expanded beyond the original concept of “playable podcasts”. Creators can already integrate video (“voice-controlled Bandersnatch” is perfectly possible using its tools, we’re told), and GPS functionality is on the to-do list, potentially opening up the platform to something more akin to Biome Collective’s experiments.
But most interesting is how far that core idea of a voice-controlled talking game can be pushed. For this, we have to look outside of RichCast’s platform, to the in-development ‘firstperson talker’ Unknown Number. The game presents you with a phone keypad and two environmental activists on the other end of the line, needing your help to survive a heist gone wrong. In the process of helping them you’ll need to shout, whisper, sing, change the pitch of your voice… As creative director Tom Keane puts it: “The game does almost represent an experimental copybook of all the things you can do with voice plus a phone UI.”
WHAT’S EXCITING ABOUT THESE GAMES IS PRECISELY THE RANGE OF APPROACHES THEY SUGGEST
Thinking back to The Vale, where we began, the two couldn’t be much further apart – but Unknown Number’s origins are rooted in a similar pragmatism. “I was working on a different project, and we lost our artist,” Keane says. “I was like, ‘Oh shit, what am I gonna do while we find another artist? Well, let’s make an audio-based game.’” That has changed over the course of development, though, with visuals becoming a key part of the design. The game squeezes as many puzzles out of “screwing with” the familiar phone interface as it does voice commands, turning the keypad into musical notation or a scrolling map through which you direct a partner with spoken instructions.
It’s far from the purity of an audiogame, then. But what’s exciting about these games taken together is precisely the range of approaches they suggest. Whether it’s navigating virtual space by sound alone or using it to augment real places, designed for sighted or blind players or both, they’re all trying different ways to mine mechanics from audio. Whether we’ll see the promised wave of games capitalising on the opportunity revealed by The Vale’s breakthrough success – playing in a design space that to most players seems like untrodden snow, but with the backing of decades of experimentation – we can’t predict for sure. But let’s find out together. It’s just a matter of listening closely.