Papa Sangre: don't look, just touch

It’s an audio game for smartphones: no pictures, no flashy CGI graphics. So novice gamers Paul Carter and Sunil Peck set out to discover whether the pictures really are better in sound

THE BLIND VIEW: SUNIL PECK

Horror games where you have to outwit monsters aren’t usually my thing. But I then bought the new Papa Sangre for my iPhone because I’d read a good number of glowing reports about it from other blind people.

I was hooked right away and then found I’d been immersed in my first game for some two hours.

You do need headphones and a quiet place to play. But the game is so accessible that once you’ve fired it up, you don’t need Apple’s screenreader VoiceOver.

There isn’t much of a plot beyond avoiding monsters and collecting musical notes in Papa Sangre’s palace. You swipe the top of the screen left or right to turn and you use your thumbs like feet to walk towards the musical notes.

But I found that the vivid images conjured up by the superb quality of the audio more than compen­sated for the lack of plot. You crunch over broken glass and bones, wade right through swamps and across fast-flowing rivers.

Although some levels took me longer to complete, I never felt that the game was getting harder as I got closer to Papa Sangre.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing but since I completed it a few weeks ago I’ve not been tempted to play it again. It had novelty value because there’s such a shortage of other audio games for Apple’s mobile devices.

But once you’ve played once and mastered the knack of collecting the musical notes and avoiding the bone-crushing monsters, there’s little else to challenge or surprise you.

THE SIGHTED VIEW: PAUL CARTER

Gaming on smart­phones is an area I am only slowly beginning to get familiar with.

Games such as Angry Birds are accessible to me because I can easily hold or balance the phone on one arm and use the other arm to operate the touch screen.

Some more complex games require both hands to operate, in which case I have to play them with the phone on a flat surface such as a table, which obviously reduces the level of portability.

I found that Papa Sangre falls somewhere between the two. The controls are relatively simple, requiring taps on the screen to replicate walking, in order to move through the levels.

I did find it possible to do this by tapping alternately with one arm, but found it awkward while out and about, and felt more comfortable when I could put the phone flat.

The game itself is certainly revolutionary. I found it totally immersive – the concept of using your mind’s eye to generate an environment rather than relying on visual stimulation is very powerful.

It’s also quite easy to become very absorbed. For this reason, I only played it once on public transport!

Whether there’s more of a market for games like this, or whether it fails to develop beyond being an impressive experiment remains to be seen.

However, for disabled gamers, it’s reassuring to know that developers are looking to exploit modern and emerging technologies to find new ways of creating entertainment.