A review appears here only after a complete playthrough on headphones and a second partial pass on speakers, so that any claim about positional accuracy or mix balance holds for both.
The best positional audio we have heard this year, and the only game in our table we could navigate blind. Directional vagueness used as a design language rather than a limitation, with a 2.1 dB dialogue gap that never asks you to touch the volume.
The widest dynamic range in our table, achieved by trusting silence for minutes at a time. Superb on a quiet evening with headphones, and genuinely difficult to follow in a room with any background noise at all.
A city-builder with a genuinely beautiful ambient bed, interrupted by an alert every eleven seconds once the city grows. The sound design and the systems design are working against each other and the systems are winning.
An entire horror game built on one compression trick, which is frightening for two hours and mechanical for six. The idea deserves a game that varies it, and the subtitle implementation captions none of the effects the trick depends on.
Continuous wind for six hours, with almost no variation in texture or level. The one game in four that we finished with a headache, and the only one where turning the effects slider down improved our understanding of the story.
Perfect timing windows that depend on a transient speakers cannot reproduce cleanly. Excellent on headphones, close to unplayable without them, and nothing in the game or its options suggests this before you buy.
