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dkirschner's One Hand Clapping (PC)

[December 16, 2023 02:32:03 PM]

This one has a novel mechanic: using your voice. A freebie on Amazon one week, it looked too intriguing to pass up. It's a 2d platformer. Move your character with WASD, but solve puzzles by singing. It takes time to get used to, it takes some configuring to get your mic and speaker set up properly, and it is imperfect, but it is neat. I didn't quite finish--it kept losing my attention--but I was pretty close. It's okay if you suck at singing, like I do. You can't die, you aren't punished for failing, and it is somewhat forgiving.

Here's a basic example of how it works. You need to jump across a gap, but the gap is too wide. Hold a specific note to make a platform appear. Jump on the platform (keep holding the note) to the other side. Voila. If you go off key, the platform disappears. The rest of the game is basically a series of increasingly complicated variations on this one thing. Maybe there are three colors of platforms, and each color appears to the hum of a specific note. Maybe your voice moves the platforms back and forth. Etc., etc.

I said that the game is somewhat forgiving. True, you can make mistakes. But if you suck at singing (again, like I do), then you will make a lot of mistakes, and you will be retrying over and over and over. You aren't always told what you need to do, either, so you'll need to use your voice to experiment. See what different notes do. See how singing changes the environment. It can be frustrating. I was quite frustrated at the beginning, but this was partly because I hadn't taken the time to properly follow the games' audio calibration instructions. This is very important, and I didn't get it reliable enough to play until I pulled out my good quality external microphone, put in headphones, and made sure there wasn't background noise. There's no other way to play it!

The longer the game went on, the more creative it got, but also the more it was like, "there's more? really?" So yeah, neat game for sure, something different, but I did tire of it before the end. Now I need to go play Before Your Eyes and blink through a game.