Sound Waves

Genre: Top-Down Puzzle / Stealth / Horror

Players: 1

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Review:

Sound Waves, released on the Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a Top-Down Puzzle game with Stealth elements and some light Horror elements. This game has players navigating pitch black areas, avoiding dangers and seeking out an exit using only sound and its echoes off of walls to guide you.

The presentation carries a lot of this game’s weight, and it does so very well, with a minimalistic style that suits it well. Your character, the monstrous enemies you’re evading, and the corridors of the place you’re in are all black, invisible. Only actions that create sound provide visibility, with your footsteps visible on the ground, but also each step creating a starburst of sound that stretches outward and ricochets off of walls, showing their borders.

These sounds are color-coded – white for the sounds you make and those of innocuous parts of the environment, red for monsters lurking the halls and other dangers, blue for dripping water, designating areas where sound will be amplified louder and stretch farther. And yellow for each level’s exit, the goal for each level.

At first, as players learn the ropes, this is simply a matter of finding the exit, learning how to read the environment and find out where to go. However, the game continually introduces new elements, challenging players both to be observant of their surroundings as well as to be resourceful and make use of what’s available to you to proceed.

Of course for a game like this that places an emphasis on sound, the sound needs to be the star, and this game does a good job highlighting its sound, with no music to distract players and instead putting the focus on environmental sounds as well as the sounds that various important parts of the environments make. I have to say I was particularly impressed by the rumblings and roars of the monsters, which did a good job being scary despite being represented on-screen only by red footprints and red sound waves.

As for the gameplay itself, I think the puzzles here are clever, and the game does a good job of keeping things changing so you’ll continually be looking at new challenges. However, I do have a few complaints. Firstly, the way the game will only allow analog control and the back-and-forth way that footsteps naturally move combine to make it hard to determine exactly which direction you’re walking at any given time. You almost get the feeling that your character is moving drunk. Also, movement in this game feels sluggish. While I understand that both of these would probably be a realistic result of trying to stumble your way forward in a pitch black room, it doesn’t change that moving around in this game still feels frustratingly inaccurate.

Still, that doesn’t change the fact that Sound Waves is a pretty original game on the eShop, and one that’s well-crafted, provides an original spin on both the character-based Puzzle genre and the Top-Down Stealth genre. The game features some good puzzle design, and while I can complain about controls and movement in this game, overall this is an excellent addition to the Nintendo Switch’s library, and one that’s well worth its $5 asking price.

tl;dr – Sound Waves is a Top-Down Puzzle game with Stealth and Horror elements where players must navigate environments, evade monsters, and find an exit by using sound in various ways. This is a clever take on this game’s genres, with some good puzzle design. I do have some complaints about the controls, but with this game selling for a mere $5, it’s an easy game to recommend for those looking for something a bit different.

Grade: B-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2021 Game Awards:

Winner:

Laziest Copycat – This is actually a good game (I gave it a B- in my review). But it is also about as close as you can get to outright thievery in the game industry without actually stealing anything. This game takes its concept, aesthetic, and virtually everything good it does directly from the PC game Dark Echo. Normally I make it a point to say I think copycats are okay as long as they’re a good copycat, but here we have a game that does so very little to build on the game it’s copying, and it’s not like it’s stealing from a major game company that can just brush this off, but from a small indie creator. Not cool, dude.

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