PLAYED BY EAR
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.
THE ABSENCE OF VISUALS LOSES ANY DISTANCING EFFECT AND INSTEAD BEGINS TO ENVELOP US
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. 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 builds on this with charged heavy attacks, parry windows and ranged combat that has us skewering far-off targets with our eyes closed.
