Audiogames.net Monthly Digest - October 2022
Welcome to a scarily big edition of the audiogames.net digest, just in time for Halloween. If you were expecting some spooky new releases, you won’t be disappointed, but that’s not the only things you’ll find here. There have been a bunch of updates as well, plus a few other exciting happenings making the world of audiogames more mainstream! And as always if you don’t want to miss these digests in the future, you can sign up to have them emailed to you as soon as they come out!
New releases
They’ll Come from the Moon! (Windows, iOS)
A call-and-response rhythm game like Space Channel 5 or PaRappa the Rapper, but with zombies! Just in time for Halloween 2022! Start off with the Narrator’s tale about a boy who starts hearing a mysterious warning about the moon. Then, play rhythm gameplay to guide new heroes Zoe and Dennis against a zombie invasion. Can you help them save the day? This game is a Rhythm Short, shorter than your average game. But it’s priced appropriately and has some great original music, voice acting, and art. If you’re a rhythm game fan, I bet you’ll love it! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Features: - Normal, Hard, and Super Hard difficulty levels - Random Play Mode — play each difficulty with randomized rhythm cues - No-Fail Mode - Keyboard, gamepad, and mouse/touch controls are available - Blind accessible — includes SAPI and NVDA screen reader support
Stories of Blossom Demo (Windows on Steam, full version coming Spring 2023)
Join Clara as she brings to life a series of short tales told by her nurturing grandfather.
Explore storybook illustrations, befriend cute creatures in odd situations, and help solve their problems along the way.
A Disability Friendly Game Experience
Designed and tested to help minimise barriers for those with disabilities.
A Series of Colourful Worlds
Brought to life by the imagination of a young girl.
A Wholesome Narrative
Featuring lessons that help us take control of our own stories.
The game includes many accessibility features. Of particular interest to blind players, the game includes full text to speech for all menus and gameplay, audio description, as well as options to adjust various visual aspects like the text size.
1428: Shadows Over Silesia (now available for Windows on Steam)
Shadows over Silesia is a dark action adventure game with fantasy elements set in real medieval Europe. With true historical events in the background, you’ll be facing intricate puzzles, challenging battles and cunning stealth. You will come across possessed devil worshipers, sexual demons, and beasts from hell, as well as creatures well-known from European mythology.
Dark fantasy story Europe is in the middle of religious upheaval and many preachers predict that the end of the world is near. The year is 1428 and the Hussites have just set out on their Silesian campaign. These heretics appear to be the biggest threat in the kingless country. But true evil of a completely different kind is lurking nearby and it does not intend to engage in religious disputes.
You will experience everything from the point of view of the two main characters. Hynek, a grumpy Hussite hetman who doesn’t hesitate to swear or mess around with anything, and Lothar, a Hospitaller knight, a man of good education and manners who stands alongside his brethren in the front line of the Silesian defense. Each has their own motivations and views of the world around them, and different equipment and abilities. Their fates will soon become intertwined. Will they face one another, weapon in hand, or forge a fragile alliance to stand shoulder to shoulder against a far worse enemy?
Challenging puzzles The original puzzles you will come across on your dangerous journey will most definitely be tough. Classic adventure games of the 1990s were a big inspiration. You will have to take advantage of your surroundings, look for objects, obtain information, and solve puzzles or encoded messages. Some problems can be solved in multiple ways, or they can be cleverly worked around.
Sneaking in the shadows Sometimes you’ll have to blend into the shadows and sneak past enemies to avoid being detected. Following their patrol routes and habits will help you find the best path.
Tough combat The combat system is easy to understand but it takes practice to fully master it. Remember one thing: being outnumbered is a problem! If three or more opponents attack you at the same time, you will die! The key is to take advantage of their mistakes, wait for the right moment, and then attack. You will face not just knights, villagers, and robbers, but also various supernatural beings who are not to be underestimated.
THE GAME IS FULLY BLIND ACCESSIBLE. More information on the game’s website - https://blind.shadows1428.com.
Craftbound - an Idle MMO RPG for iOS
AS REPORTED BY Applevis:
Craftbound is an MMORPG idle/incremental game with a clean interface and charming pixel art. Featuring many skills, combined with a player based economy, and in-depth mechanics. Enjoy everything you love about your favorite MMORPGís ówithout the time investment. Craftbound is accessible to all players, with no pay-to-win or paywalled content. Rewarded video ads and in-app purchases are completely up-to you. FEATURES - Player based economy and trading market. - Advanced mechanics for idle veterans, and simple mode for casual players. - Travel across the beautifully crafted world map with unique locations. - Hundreds of items including rareís, epics and legendaries. - Customisable character with unlock-able cosmetics. - Cloud saving, fast native performance, real-time notifications, and so much more! Craftbound is still in early access, and will evolve as you play, and give feedback.† The app is fully accessible with VoiceOver and is easy to navigate and use.
Though all features appear to work with Voiceover, we’ve seen reports of a few minor issues
- There are some mostly decorative unlabelled images that don’t serve a purpose and clutter the interface
- By vertue of the number of screens and images, it is sometimes necessary to hunt for controls. Luckily the game does seem idle enough to the point that it might not matter as much as others of it’s type
- some buttons in lesser used sections of the game aren’t labelled, but their function should be viewable with screen recognition
The developers are hard at work making updates, so we actively await accessibility patches to address these.
Accessible multiword - a word game for Android
Four accessible brain games to exercise your mind to the fullest! Game with full accessibility for blind or low vision people. There is no need to disable the screen reader, as it is required to play the game. Contains 4 built-in word games. The hangman game is one of the classics. The player must guess a word. The cell phone will indicate how many letters this hidden word has. You have to risk letters to complete the game. The voice will tell us if the word contains that letter or not and we will listen to its position. As we hit several letters, we will be able to deduce which ones are missing. As we earn points, we will also earn coins to be able to access the other games. In the Mystery game, we will have to investigate a murder case. As we belong to the investigation department of the local police, we will be assigned a case that we will have to solve. We will have to go through the different rooms of the victim’s house to find evidence of the murderer’s DNA. Using clues, our task is to find the correct object to send to the forensic department. If we collect 100% of the clues, we will have to recognize the murderer among 6 possible suspects. The success or loss of employment will depend on our knowledge and our ingenuity. The third game is Word Search. We will find a jumble of letters and with our finger we will have to find the words that the phone asks us for. When finding the first letter, you have to double-click and we will begin to hear a beating sound. When finding the last letter of the searched word, we will do another double press again. The game room is called Letrix. We will have to form words of 4, 5 or 6 letters, with cubes that fall from the top of the screen to the bottom. Each cube has a letter written on the outside. We will have to place this cube in the right place. If the letter it brings doesn’t work for us, we can throw it in the dump. To move the cubes, we just press a single finger on the left or right side of the screen..
The tower of Orastre, text based dungeon crawl rpg (Web/Gblorb)
Description curtesy of Dark:
this was the first game produced by Corax, the same developer as Port Mondes. I’ve only scratched the surface of port Mondes so far, but enough to know that I enjoy this gentlmen’s work, and this is his first game Also note that like Port Mondes, the game is in French, so you’ll need something like the NVDA translate addon to play Tower of Orastre is a classic rpg dungeon crawler. Play as either Norio the collossus, a human (or at least humanoid), hired killer, or Couinard the mascot, a small mouse creature, previously a slave, and take on the challenge of the tower. What is really unique about this one, apart from the interesting world and nice (even translated), descriptions of the environment, is the management aspect. the ultimate aim of the game is to defeat the mirror guardian. You have an hour glass with 40 grains of sand. Actions such as entering a room on the tower floor use one grain of sand. Every room has either a fight, an obstacle course or a game, winning in a room awards you a key, with three keys needed to progress to the next floor, however on some floors are doors with golden locks, which award treasure spell-ups and other good things, but can only be opened with a fourth key. the more floors you go through, the harder things get, but the greater the rewards, including extra abilities, treasure to buy items etc, so it’s all a game of limited risk. there are even options to increase your popularity, ie your score, by either not raising stats upon levelling up, or by taking extra risky options, although I’ve not experimented with this so far. I also really like the way the two characters play differently, with norio being great in combat, but less good at obstacles or using magical items, while coinard is the reverse. I’ve been forgetting to save, so both my runs ended with a single death, though you certainly can save the game if you wish, and I believe there are game plus and other rewards should you win, which I will try to do. The interface is very nice, using a lot of numbers for different commands which makes life easier. The game can either be played online (though with no saving), or downloded and played with any if interpreter that can handle gblorb files such as Glulks, I also found that the online version didn’t auto output the text, so on the hole I’d recommend downloading the game myself.
The Klaxo Radio Hour (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac)
A perfectly safe radio that is not haunted! The Klaxo Radio Hour is an audio-based interactive narrative set in a 1940s radio! Pull up a chair and grab a friend for radio’s newest detective: Sandra McCall as Kat Keene, Investigator! Kat is a woman with a knack for finding trouble… and she’ll need your help to get out of it! You can navigate the branching story by tuning to different radio channels. Can you help Kat crack her case? Only true sleuths will discover what lurks on the ‘empty’ channels… and how to solve the radio’s curse! Now offering a rare chance to be a part of radio history! Presented by Klaxo effervescent tablets. If life’s got you down, you might as well be six feet under… without a Klaxo!
Coin collector (Windows)
Coin collector is an endless runner stile game, in which you are automatically moving forward and are trying to collect coins that spawn in front of you. In each level, you need to collect a minimum amount of coins to continue on to the next level, if you fail the game ends. There are also trees that you should avoid running into, or you will lose coins.
Game updates
- Linux Game Manager (LGM) got support for freedoom, freedoom2, and the Toby Mod Delux games
- Stardew Access has had an update to version 1.3.3. This release features many improvements and additions to static tiles, a tts toggle command, fixes to NPC speech bubbles, custom tile support, and a host of other improvements.
- Bop It Emulator updated to 3.1, adding new features and many undocumented eastereggs modelled after Hasbro Electronic Bop It’s. If you haven’t played before, this classic windows title aims to simulate Bop It original (almost all released models) and Extreme, 1998 and pen versions with some additional features sprinkled in for greater enjoyment
- Warsim got a positively massive update in version 0.8.5.3. Notably, the Adventurers system was completely overhauled with a purported 340 features including a rework to adventurer groups, quests, rerolls in debug mode, monster face-offs, slave rades, expanded recruitment, milestones and much much more. This is definitely one to check out for veteran and new players alike
- SoundRTS - Ancient War Mod saw a few additions to armor and base functions. Both Tang and Byzantine bases can now order mercenaries to fight. Also, as a base is upgraded, the number and duration of mercenaries will scale accordingly
- CrimeHunter got a few minor patches focused on fixing game crashes experienced by some players
- Thanks to Benf, there is now a full walkthrough guide for Text-based Path of Adventure
- October updates to Alter Aeon include fixes to some weapons that weren’t loading, more quarries for you to mine from, the ability to craft ribbons and medallions, as well as updates to spell damage. There’s also a Halloween event running until November 2nd which you may be able to participate in depending when you read this
Other news
- Manamon 2 was featured during RPG Limit Break 2022 - a high-profile yearly speed running marathon focusing on various RPG’s, raising money for charity. You can watch it here on the RPGLB channel
- 2MB Games have announced that all of their games, Mine Racer and Haunted House to name a few, have gone free. While you will have to go through the checkout process for now, you will not be charged anything for the games.
- Liam Erven will host his Annual marathon stream on November 19th. In addition to seeing some awesome games being played, by tuning in you’ll get the chance to win some exciting prizes as well! More details can be found here.