Sourcebound

You only see what you hear.

The screen is black, and the dark is playing music. Every footstep, every sonar pulse, every click of a hunter is a note, in tune and in time with the score, and each one sends out a wave that paints the walls in neon before the dark takes them back. Move quietly and you see almost nothing. Make noise and everything down here hears you.

Music played by the dark

The soundtrack is composed live and follows your run: calm while you explore, tighter when they find you. Every sound of the level is part of it. Your steps, your sonar, the shards, the hunters' calls are played by an orchestra whose instruments follow the music: strings and horns, saws and acid bass, organ and bells. Every two levels a new ambiance brings its own ensemble. Open the studio to listen to it, or compose an ambiance of your own.

What hunts you

Blind things that click in red. They wander, they turn toward every noise, they come to look, and when they are close they chase. Deeper down you meet the sentinel that chants where it stands and howls to call the others, the tracker that follows your footprints, the prowler that makes no sound at all and only your sonar reveals, a guardian posted at the exit, and a colossus whose wave sweeps the whole level.

Listen

• Your sonar reveals everything around you, and every hunter hears it

• Sprint to break away, but sprinting is loud

• Sneak to go silent, at the price of being nearly blind

• Throw a pebble to send them looking somewhere else

Descend

Collect the golden shards to unseal the exit, then go one level deeper. The levels are generated fresh every run, and no descent goes the same way twice. Twenty levels down lies the Source of silence. Reach it, or keep going into the endless dark.

Grow stronger

Every shard you collect is banked forever. Spend it on Resonances: permanent upgrades to your breath, your reach, your memory of the walls, your quiet steps. Between levels, choose a Relic that lasts until you die, and one of two doors that changes the next level.

Also

• Made for headphones: every creature is placed by ear

• Eleven music ambiances, from Orchestral and Electro to Dub, Cathedral, Clockwork and Ritual, and a studio to shape your own

• Ten strata down to the Source, each with its own look and music: nine visual themes (Neon, Lidar, Chalk, Cyanotype, Segments, Vector, Lidar 3D, Dungeon, Cave)

• A daily challenge: the same descent for everyone, one attempt

• Keyboard and mouse, or a controller

• English and French

Every level and every bar of music in this game is generated as you play.