A few weeks ago, playtesters kept telling me the same thing. They could hear a tape, but they couldn't tell which of the ten 1910s cabinets it belonged to, so they started guessing. A listening game where you guess isn't a listening game.
So I rebuilt the archive.
Ten cabinets you can hear. Old Time, Classical, Country, Funk, Hip-Hop, Holiday, Horror, Jazz, Rock and Video Game. You'll usually know the cabinet within a few seconds of play. The puzzle is the order.
164 recordings, 724 tapes. Old Time keeps 20 real Library of Congress records from about a hundred years ago, including the Ride of the Valkyries and the William Tell Overture. Everything else is real music by human artists under Creative Commons and similar licenses, credited in the game. Major shout out to Kevin Macleod if you know you know!
A Wordle-style check. Fill a row and it answers one slot at a time: green is right, yellow is the right recording in the wrong place, red doesn't belong. Take a tape off and the row goes quiet again until it's full.
A fact for every recording. Put one back together and you'll learn something about the song, the composer or the genre.
Mouse controls. Left click picks up and places. Right click drops.
In our first playtest of the new build, two players spent over two hours in the archive, and their verdict was simple: it's fun now and a lot more easier to categorize the songs.
The demo is updated too. It now has four cabinets (Old Time, Country, Rock and Video Game) and 14 recordings. Because the archive changed, saves from the old demo won't load. Sorry about that; it's a fresh start.
Hearsay launches November 3. If the new version sounds like your kind of game, a wishlist helps more than you'd think.
Ben, Chalk Creative