Echoes Traveler

Echoes Traveler is an exploration game where music is your only guide. Listen to the environment to figure out where to go, and solve puzzles based on sounds. But most importantly, let yourself wander freely in a vast musical soundscape. Getting lost is part of your journey.

This game automatically saves your progress. Completing it can take between 20 and 30 minutes, but you can do it safely in multiple sessions.

Being a game based on music and sound, it is strongly advised to play Echoes Traveler with headphones.

Controls

• Arrow keys: Move
  
• Enter: Start game
  

Accessibility

Echoes Traveler is a game relying mostly on audio. This means that it can also be played without its visuals! The ideal way to play Echoes Traveler is to understand by yourself its mechanics. But if you have issues following the tutorial, or if you get stuck and can't figure out what to do, this section will will detail its rules and goals to help you.

Echoes Traveler is a game set in a 2D world that you can freely explore up, down, left and right. Besides the start screen, you won't be able to see the environment. However, there are musical clues placed everywhere to let you know where you are. The closer you are to them, the louder they'll sound. Thus pay close attention to your musical surrounding to navigate the lands!

Your goal is to find the 5 paths scattered around the world. One is at the very beginning of the game, you can't miss it! A path is made of 8 square tiles. When you walk on a tile, it emits a musical note. To complete and validate a path, you have to walk on its eight tiles in the correct order. This order is indicated by the notes played by the tiles. They play on a musical scale, each one with a different note. You must start from the lowest to the highest. You'll notice that the tiles make a loudest sound when you walk on them in the right order from the start. Once you complete a path, a bell sound will be heard, letting you know that you solved its puzzle.

The start screen will ask you to complete the first path before you can go any further (it  makes a beeping sound when you try to push against its borders). After completing the tutorial, you will have to search for the four other paths, hidden far away. They can be quite tricky to find if you don't know where to look! Fortunately, you have access to radios at the beginning of the game that give you audio hints on where those paths are. When you get close to them, they emit the sounds of instruments surrounding them. Memorize those sounds, and wander around the world to look for them. When you hear them, it means that a path in nearby! If you forget how the signals sounded, you can go back at the beginning of the game to listen to the radios again. The start screen is the one that has barely any instruments beside those radios!

You'll probably get lost on your journey, but that's okay. It is part of the intended experience. It is not the destination that counts, so above all, take time to enjoy the soundscape. Walking in any direction will always lead you somewhere. And if you need to rest, know that the game automatically save your progress when you complete a path. If you quit the game and come back, you'll be right at the start screen again, near the hint radios for the paths that you haven't found yet.

The game ends once you've found the fifth and last path. You'll certainly notice it when it happens!

Assets

• Pixel Art Top Down Basic, by Cainos
  
• Bamboo Chimes, by InspectorJ
  
• Adventurer, by Brian J Smith
  
• LdcBlackRound, by lagdotcom

Source

The game's source code and assets are available on Github. Feel free to check them out if you're curious to know how the game works!

Also note that the dynamic music is mostly handled by Orchestre-JS, a tool I made to manage layers of music in Typescript or Javascript.