Black Noise

Black Noise

 
 

 

Black Noise is an audio-only detective role-playing game, where players guide a blind detective through a labyrinth of conversation, deduction, and sound. You are acoustics expert Anthony Black, who knows a thousand secrets about  sound. Reputedly the world's foremost expert on silence, he is also a leading opponent of the "stereotype" that blind people have a heightened sense of hearing. But when his friend is murdered at a gathering of people who all possesses heightened senses, Dr. Black has to solve a social labyrinth of powerful people, and either trade secrets with them, or betray them. The "graphics" take the form of the audio presentation, but since Black is a genius of sound, you'll have plenty of tools to analyze, pick apart, and have sections of the audio replayed from different angles, and in different ways. 

Fiction doesn't have many blind protagonists, and precious few blind heroes. When the media does put a blind person center stage, the writers usually cheat, by making his hearing so acute, he can basically see--or, like Daredevil, sense the topography of the ink on paper, so that he can read with his finger tips. When creators do face this issue, they usually throw out super powers altogether. We don't think there's anything wrong with superpowers--even super hearing. I can't fly like Superman, but Superman doesn't offend me, even though he can do things I cannot. There's nothing offensive about super powers for a blind hero, even super hearing. But Dr. Black has more interesting abilities than just "sort-of seeing", which blind people cannot actually do. The powers in black noise are exaggerated, subtly at first, and expanding out to more epic and superheroic proportions later on. But these abilities are all grounded in real-life research into sound, and all the things it can do that few of us ever tap into.