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The bottom of the screen displays a sort of resource bar to show that there may be a limit to how frequently you can use your echolocation to see, but either the bar recharged faster than it could be expended, or there was just never a reason to use it frequently enough to cause problems due to being able to take one’s sweet time.
#DEVIL S TUNING FORK HOW TO#
While this is something I love to have the opportunity to do, it also made it so I was never required to truly be impaired by echolocation, nor was I required to actually learn how to use it actively. I found myself instead taking my time to slowly be in awe of the visuals. The environments and sound design were definitely chilling, but there with no active antagonists there was also no sense of urgency. In this sense the altered/restricted perception was more useful as a horror aesthetic than it was as experiencing the world through different eyes.Įxcept even as a horror aesthetic it wasn’t utilized as well as it could have been. Playing the game was less about becoming fluent in echolocation and more about watching my feet as I walked slowly forward to make sure I didn’t encounter any pitfalls. To be honest however, I found this wasn’t a source of difficulty as much as it was a hindrance to speed. The simplicity of the platforming (ignoring the one triple-bounce puzzle) was offset by the difficulties created by having to walk in complete darkness until you activated a soundwave. While the essence of the game was a puzzle platformer, the core mechanic was instead dealing with altered perception. Bouncing a sound blast off of three mirrors in order to hit a gong just right is an maddeningly annoying task especially when you can’t see. However I did find one puzzle extremely frustrating because of how finicky the hit-detection seemed to be. The puzzles are frequently extremely straightforward and simple, but that isn’t a problem as the difficulty arises elsewhere in the design. The player is required to navigate jumps and pathways while also figuring out what actions are required to avoid pitfalls as well as open up the path to the end. But as it is with most things which I love, it isn’t perfect.Īt its core Devil’s Tuning Fork is a puzzle platformer. And you must do this while experiencing what it is like to be a bat (sorry, I swear I’ll stop referencing Nagel’s paper.) The overall tone of the game tickles my love of horror and the surreal. In order to escape what is eventually identified as a sort of dungeon you must rescue other children and traverse multiple platforming exercises/puzzles. The team was recruited among the graduate and undergraduate students at DePaul.Devil’s Tuning Fork is an interesting exploration in design which seeks to weigh in on the classic question, “What is it like to be a bat?” (don’t worry, this will remain a game review and not an exercise in philosophical discourse) The game places you in control of a child who has fallen into a mysterious coma who must now explore a strange dreamscape in order to awaken. Setup by five faculty members at DePaul University, DePaul Game Elites was formed in Summer of 2009 in order to make a game that could compete in the IGF Student Showcase.
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By way of the devil's tuning fork, a magical instrument that allows the player to perceive sound waves, the player must find all the children and successfully escape this alternate reality, thereby waking up from the coma. It is up to this child, the player, to determine the cause of the epidemic and save the other children trapped here. Escher’s classic optical illusion and the echolocation of dolphins, The Devil’s Tuning Fork allows the player to explore a new mode of perception through sound visualization.Īs a mysterious epidemic causes children everywhere to fall into comas, one child wakes up in an alternate reality. What if you saw the world with your ears? Devil's Tuning Fork is a first-person exploration/puzzle game in which the player must navigate an unknown world using visual sound waves.