{"id":635,"date":"2009-11-10T10:24:24","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T15:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/635"},"modified":"2016-10-21T10:57:26","modified_gmt":"2016-10-21T17:57:26","slug":"the-king-of-shreds-and-patches-sound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/635","title":{"rendered":"The King of Shreds and Patches: Sound"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s talk for a moment about this game’s use of sound. There’s one puzzle in particular where you render a Bedlamite temporarily coherent by unscrambling some dismembered music. It’s not completely<\/em> essential to have sound — you get some textual feedback, but it’s subtle and requires a lot more trial-and-error if you can’t hear what you’re doing. And for a while, that’s how I tried to solve it. I had the sound turned off. I had forgotten about it. The in-game documentation said that there was occasional sound, and even warned me that there was a sound puzzle, but it also said that I’d know it when I came to it, and, well, I didn’t at first.<\/p>\n

I don’t normally turn sound off in games. I generally want the full experience intended by the author. I do find sound in text games a little weird, though. I find that playing IF, like reading a book, essentially puts the mind into a mode disconnected from direct sensory experience — one where you’re seeing through the mind’s eye, and, similarly, hearing through the mind’s ear, filtering out the real world. Illustrations interrupt this mode, but then, so do the command prompts, and you just get used to a certain rhythm of going into and out of reading mode. 1<\/sup><\/a>This is why it’s considered a good idea in IF to break up long text-dumps with command prompts, even when the player can’t actually affect anything: it preserves that rhythm. I’m starting to wonder if breaking up the text with illustrations would be just as effective.<\/span><\/span>