Stifled offers survival where sound is your eyes

Right before leaving L.A. we bumped into Justin Ng, an enthusiastic designer who wanted to tell us all about his peculiar game, Stifled. In this video interview the "Designer & Business Guy" tells us about this sound-based first-person survival experience.

"It's a mic-enabled sound-based survival thriller", explains Ng as a quick pitch. "So in the game you use sound to see, so what I mean by this that when you're walking, that's footsteps, footsteps create sound and sound creates like sound pulses that come out and then kind of light up the wall."

The problem is that, obviously, you can't make the noise you might want to in order to orientate yourself. "There are things that you try yourself and those things create sound as well", adds the designer. "So the more sound you create the more you see, but the kicker is that all the enemies in game actually hear sound, so there's a danger there. You've got to figure out where you want to go, but you can't make too much noise so that you get caught".

To support and complement this mechanic, the game uses a sound source that's not just found with items and in the environment in-game, as "we also have a unique thing which is the microphone input." As Justin puts it, this is used so "without making sound, you can talk into the game in real life. So we have these moments where the game is sketchy, you scream and the game actually hears it and they will come get you. So essentially the game is that you need to make a bunch of sounds to survive, but you can't make too much, so that's like a fun thing I think."

Stifled also tells an overarching narrative so that you can solve a mystery. In the interview we also talk about stealth and distract mechanics, visual design, enemies and level structure. The experience may last 3-5 hours, it's "pretty much done" by a team of six developers, and is currently looking to make some noise in order to get Steam Greenlight. The goal is to have Stifled to arrive on PC, PS4 and Xbox One in October.

If you want to get a clearer idea of how all this works, here's the first 10 minutes of gameplay from an earlier version of Stifled: