We recently came across a unique game in Purple Jam‘s Sounds of Eden which is billed as a game about finding your peace within a lush and blissful garden. There is one catch though: Sounds of Eden is an audio game only and that means exactly what it implies: This is a game without any visuals.
Hmm. How exactly does one play a game that doesn’t have any visuals? That’s the question that I asked myself and now I know, so keep reading.
Most of us are familiar with games which use procedural generation like Diablo or maybe (more recently) No Man’s Sky. Sounds of Eden uses a kind of procedural generation but with audio, so in effect you can wander around the soundscape (the garden) and listen to the sounds that are generated around you, which represent different types of plants, or water, or whatever they sound like to you. It’s all very organic and changing direction and moving around the garden will allow you to move towards (louder) or away (fainter) from sounds that you find either pleasing or perhaps more discordant. The point is to find a place that is peaceful, to you, within the garden.
Finding your peace
The sounds that are generated within the Sounds of Eden universe remind me a lot of ambient sound generators or even meditation/study music that rely on certain types of tones to create a relaxing audio experience. When playing Sounds of Eden, I recommend wearing a blindfold or just go with your eyes closed. This will make the experience much more immersive since exploring the garden can also be a meditative experience. This is all part of the journey to finding your peaceful happy place. In fact, just like in life, the experience for you may be a very different from someone else’s. It all depends on who is playing the game, and it will be different every time.
As a bit of a side note, since working from home these past months due to this pesky pandemic thing, I’ve recently taken to listening to white noise and meditation playlists to help me concentrate. Interestingly, Sounds of Eden kind of fits right into that genre and sort of came around at the right time.
For a deeper explanation as well as a walkthrough of how Sounds of Eden is played and experienced, check out the following video (audio only), or get Sounds of Eden from the links below:
Developer: Purple Jam LTD
Get Sounds of Eden for Android from Google Play
Get Sounds of Eden for MacOS or Windows