Hearsay

Hearsay is a music-sorting game set in an uncatalogued archive. On sub-level two, 164 recordings have been cut into 724 unlabeled cassette pieces, scattered across shelves, benches and the floor. You play tapes on a deck to identify them; there is no search, and a tape has no title to identify it before you listen.

The archive

The archive has 10 cabinets, each marked with a genre: Old Time, Classical, Country, Funk, Hip-Hop, Holiday, Horror, Jazz, Rock or Video Game. Old Time contains 20 public-domain recordings from about a hundred years ago, sourced from the Library of Congress. The other cabinets contain real music by human artists, used under Creative Commons and similar licenses and credited in the game.

Five tapes are not part of the archive. They were left by whoever worked in the room before you, and appear as the floor clears.

Sort by listening

Each recording has a set on a shelf, with one slot for every piece. Place the tapes you think belong to that recording in the order you think they go. Once every slot is filled, the game checks the row one piece at a time: green marks a piece in the correct place, yellow marks one in the wrong place, and red means the tape does not belong in that row. Removing a tape resets the set until you fill the row again. Restoring a row on the first check means you solved it by ear.

The bench is a place to experiment without grading your choices. Lay out and rearrange tapes, then play the sequence from beginning to end. You can also play two tapes at once, panned hard left and hard right, to compare them by listening.

Progress and upgrades

There is no timer by default, no fail state and nothing missable. A wrong answer costs a moment and provides information. Restoring a recording earns a splice, which you can spend on 21 upgrades. These include scrubbing a tape by hand, looping its last two seconds, halving its speed, carrying more tapes, pushing a trolley, jumping crates, printing labels, keeping a ledger and recalling a whole row. A finding aid can reveal which cabinet holds a tape, once every two minutes.

Restored recordings

When you put every piece of a recording in the right order, it plays through as a complete piece, followed by a short fact about the music. Old Time includes familiar tunes such as the Ride of the Valkyries, the William Tell Overture, Pomp and Circumstance, the Blue Danube and the bridal chorus used at weddings.

All 21 upgrades can be bought in a single playthrough. An optional run timer lets you race the archive.