Echoic Memory (Playdate)
This little puzzle really got its teeth in to me over the past week or so. As mentioned in my earlier post, the goal is to match the sound you’re given to a specific sample on a board, with the catch that the samples are distorted and you have to tune that distortion to recognise the audio. There’s an unscripted pair-matching mode but the centre of this game is a really nicely pitched Story Mode, where you gradually learn about a rebellious group of AI speakers as you’re exposed to larger boards, trickier kinds of distortion and wider varieties of music.
There’s a nice discussion of how the level progression was designed in the corresponding episode of the Playdate podcast, but suffice to say it’s very well calibrated for difficulty. I was pleasantly surprised to realise that my own echoic memory - my ability to keep sounds in memory after hearing them - was improving as the game went on. I think the enjoyment factor actually peaks in the penultimate stage, where you’re getting the biggest variety of sample types and not just the hardest ones, but it gave the finale a bit of a victory-lap feel.
Throughout, it was quite nice to realise how audio can gain or lose musicality as it’s warped. Many of the samples actually had a particular melodic quality even with one or more different levels of distortion applied, like tuning in to different resonances of the sound. This is only possible because the Playdate actually has very capable audio circuitry. I think the sizes of the samples was pushing the console a little hard through. I ran in to a chain of crashes in the final couple of stages, and it’s one of the only games that had any real loading hiccups.
I’m going to enjoy revisiting this, probably through the actual story mode. It turns out that the game has procedural storytelling which should mix up the dialogue a bit while retaining that nice gameplay progression. A real-stand out and maybe my favourite in the Playdate library so far.