SOUND

In SOUND you play a therapist helping a young woman, Orange, with her difficulties communicating. She stutters, suffers from a lack of confidence, and is very sensitive to particular sounds. Her treatment program includes working a succession of customer-service jobs, and you’re mostly interviewing her about how those went. The game is quite short — no more than 15 minutes or so.

None of the jobs appear to have gone particularly well. Orange doesn’t gain anything from them besides an increased dislike of customer service, nor does she ever get better at communicating. She also seems rather down about her experiences. She comes alive only when she’s describing particular sounds that affected her: the food in the restaurant, the coffee machines, the garden outside the dormitory.

At the end Orange seems to decide that there’s nothing wrong with her. Rather, she just has a different way of experiencing sound than everyone around her. In the end, she challenges you, the PC, on this point, and leaves therapy, saying that she needs to find the voice inside of her that allows herself to be “free, free of judgement, and free of restrains…” The game emphasizes this by a rather creative repeated insertion of the phrase “You embark to find that voice” in the last page of text. The result may be something like what Orange herself experiences, letting the player see the world through her eyes. It looks confusing to us, but it likely makes perfect sense to her.

SOUND aims at giving us the experience of someone accepting herself for who she is and trying to escape society’s expectations. But I never really identified enough with the PC to find her acceptance satisfying or her move to escape liberating. Some of that is due to the game being really short, and so we don’t have much time to settle into the PC’s shoes. Some of that is due to the therapy session jumping quickly from job to job, so we aren’t able to experience very deeply a specific event for Orange before moving on to discussing the next one. And some of that is that it’s just not where I am now: In middle age I value my freedom less, and my commitments more, than I used to. Perhaps others, who are closer to where Orange is in life, will have a better appreciation of SOUND.