HearsayHearsay

An archive nobody catalogued

Sub-level two holds ninety-six real recordings, every one of them public domain, out of the Library of Congress. Eighty-four were cut on acoustic discs before 1926: brass bands, ragtime, opera, vaudeville, songs people sang in their own front rooms. The other twelve are New York street interviews from the 1950s and 60s, and they are filed under THE STREET, which is the one cabinet in this archive where people are simply talking.

Someone cut them into pieces. Four hundred and fifteen 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: The Stage, Marches & Bands, Ragtime & Dance, Voices From Abroad, The Concert Hall, Sweethearts, Home & Memory, Songs Of The Parlor, The Street, Popular Favorites. And a deck to play tapes on.

Listen. Decide. Commit.

Put a fragment on the shelf under the sign you think it belongs to, in the position you think it holds, and the slot answers you immediately.

• Green means right cabinet, right recording, right place.
  
• Yellow means right recording, wrong order.
  
• Red means wrong cabinet entirely.
  

No menus, no confirmation, no waiting. The answer is a colored chip on a shelf, and it is there the instant you let go.

A bench to be wrong on

Shelving a tape grades it, which means testing an order by shelving it hands you the answer. So there is a bench, and the bench grades nothing.

Lay six fragments 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 twenty-one 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, cross-reference the book against itself. 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 runs through as one thing for the first time in a century.

One cabinet is easier than the others on purpose. Popular Favorites holds the tunes you already know, off records made a hundred years ago: 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

• 96 real recordings, 415 fragments, ten cabinets
  
• 21 upgrades, every one of them buyable in a single playthrough
  
• An optional run timer, for anyone who wants to race the archive
  
• Full controller support, and every keyboard control rebindable
  
• Three graphics presets that are real changes, not labels
  
• 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 fragment 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.