Sounds in “Big Tower Tiny Square”

I admit I hadn’t played this game with the sound on before preparing for this assignment, and once I did it really changed my experience. The music and sound effects pull you into the game world and without even realizing you find yourself extremely involved in it, celebrating every checkpoint you cross and cursing every time you die. Just by 2 minutes of playing Big Tower Tiny Square I could tell how important sounds are to a game.

The game has very distinct sounds for all the movements, encounters and events. First, the background music is a very fast paced electro song that helps setting the mood of the game, making the audience want to play faster and reach the end of every level anxious about the next one. The sfx are equally as good. They all follow the same “robotic” style, and there are different sounds for when: you pass a checkpoint, you get hit by a serrated spinning wheel, you fall in the lava pools, you fall in the water pools, the gun shoots, you get hit by a bullet, you open a new “portal”, etc.

The only two things I noticed that don’t have any sound effect attached to them are when you jump, and when you hit the walls (like jumping “climbing” on them). Maybe the reason is because having sounds for that would be too confusing, since they both happen too frequently. So leaving them silent probably makes the audio in the game less “annoying”.