Hearsay

An archive nobody catalogued

Sub-level two holds 164 recordings, and every one of them has been cut into pieces. That makes 724 unlabeled cassettes, on the shelves, on the benches, and all over the floor.

There is no search. There are no titles. A tape tells you nothing until you play it.

What you get is ten cabinets, each with a sign over it: Old Time, Classical, Country, Funk, Hip-Hop, Holiday, Horror, Jazz, Rock and Video Game. And a deck to play tapes on.

The Old Time cabinet holds 20 real recordings from about a hundred years ago, public domain, out of the Library of Congress. Everything else is real music by human artists, used under Creative Commons and similar licenses and credited in the game.

Listen. Fill the row. Check.

Every recording has its own row on a shelf, one slot per piece. Put the tapes you think belong there in the order you think they go. When the last slot fills, the row checks itself, one slot at a time.

• Green means the right recording in the right place.
  
• Yellow means the right recording in the wrong place.
  
• Red means that tape does not belong in this row.

Take a tape back off and the whole row goes quiet again until it is full. Get a row right on its first check and you did it by ear.

A bench to be wrong on

The bench grades nothing. Lay tapes out, rearrange them, press play and hear that order end to end with nothing watching. Play two at once, hard left and hard right, and hear the difference instead of trying to remember it.

Nothing is timed

No fail state. Nothing missable. Nothing kills you. A wrong answer costs you a moment and tells you something true.

Restoring a recording pays you a splice. Splices buy 21 upgrades: scrub a tape by hand, loop its last two seconds, halve its speed, carry more at once, push a trolley, jump the crates, print labels, keep a ledger, recall a whole row. And for the moment you are truly stuck, a finding aid that tells you which cabinet a tape is filed under, once every ten minutes.

And then the whole thing plays

Get every piece of a recording in the right order and it plays through as one thing again, with a short fact about the music to go with it.

Old Time is where you will know some tunes before you have heard a whole one: the Ride of the Valkyries, the William Tell Overture, Pomp and Circumstance, the Blue Danube, the bridal chorus every wedding still uses.

Five tapes on the shelves are not part of the archive at all. They were left by whoever worked in this room last, and they turn up as the floor clears.

What's in the box

• 164 recordings, 724 tapes, ten cabinets
  
• 21 upgrades, every one of them buyable in a single playthrough
  
• A short fact about every recording you restore
  
• An optional run timer, for anyone who wants to race the archive
  
• Full controller support, and every keyboard control rebindable
  
• No network, no telemetry, no account, no data collected

Please read this before you buy

Hearsay is played by ear. The puzzle is not captioned and will not be, because a transcript of a piece is the answer to it. If you are deaf, this game's puzzle is not playable, and we would rather say so here than have you find out after paying. See the accessibility notes below.