Voices Carry

Meditation can be helpful in a variety of scenarios, especially if you are leading a stressful lifestyle that requires you to be on high alert at all times. On top of that, there are also many techniques you can use to achieve mindfulness or just let go of your stress. One of them includes video games, since they can be designed to help you forget about your troubles.

Voices Carry is a 2D puzzle game with platformer elements in which you have to make your way further and further by jumping and building your road on the go. It’s actually much simpler than it sounds, because all you have to do is use poles to reach higher platforms, as well as go over gaps. On the other hand, even this concept can be expressed in many different ways.

Although you would expect some sort of physics engine to handle everything, the truth is that the game is much simpler than that, which kind of ruins the experience. As such, the poles you use do not even interact with anything but yourself, which means that you can get them through walls and put them in any position, since nothing causes them to fall over.

Every now and again you get to a dead end, and the only way to advance is to find the glowing orb that removes the wall. Sometimes these orbs are quite easy to find, while other times a bit of work is required to get to them. There are checkpoints that provide you with interesting quotes and questions, besides the fact that they save your progress.

As for the graphics, everything has been kept as simple as possible, given the fact that the game world is not even textured. However, the color scheme is quite nice, and there are some interesting contrasts along the way. Granted, it would have been a lot better to have some sort of artwork in there, but you can probably relax even in these conditions.

When it’s all said and done, Voices Carry is not exactly a good game, because it lacks many features, especially this day and age. However, given the fact that it was designed for a game jam in a very short time window, the concept and the execution are worthy of a mention.