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You are dead. The words ring out through the dank low corridors of Nottingham's galleries of justice, a historic courthouse, considered to be one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. We're here at midnight, a small huddled group of us, to try the iOS app Papa Sangre II, sequel to the spooky, sound-only iPhone game released in 2010. But at this fascinating little event, held as part of the GameCity festival, developer Somethin' Else wants to shake us up a bit first.
In groups of two and three we're led through the 15th century basements of the old gaol, past the tiny cells where condemned prisoners were locked before execution. The light, such as it is, comes from small candles placed along the route and while we're creeping through doorways and up stairwells, hidden speakers are playing sounds and dialogue from the game. The voice we hear is Sean Bean, the narrator. You are dead, he repeats in his gruff Yorkshire tones.
That is the starting point of this unsettling and interesting game. While the original Papa Sangre was a mission of mercy into the Mexican world of the dead, in the follow-up, it's you who has passed over. Suddenly you awake, confused and alone in a sort of halfway house between life and afterlife, and the themes of this new limbo world are much more British. "We think of Papa as someone otherworldly," says senior producer, Tom Green. "Is it a man, a woman or even human? We don't know and that allowed us to present a completely different setting. We wanted to give ourselves the freedom to try new sounds. Obviously our palette is limited to audio. If we stuck with the Mexican theme we'd be hamstrung. This one is a very English game."
Bean is your guide. He says he can get you out, back to the living, but in order to escape you have to listen to him and do what he says. "Close your eyes" he intones, slowly. "And don't open them, no matter what." This is a game of sound. So you close your eyes and you do what Bean says. It turns out that you have to locate and steal the memories of the dead. You do this by listening for the music these memories make and then heading toward it. In the first game, navigation involved stroking the iPad screen to move and change direction, but this time, Somethin' Else has been able to make use of the iPad's gyroscope, as well as a proprietary 3D binaural audio engine. You can point the iPad toward a sound to locate it in 3D space, then tap two feet icons on the screen to "walk" toward it.
The technology is impressive and accurate, but the artistic implementation really matters too, the choice of sounds and where they're placed in the audio environment. For this Somethin' Else worked with the sound designers Ben and Max Ringham. "It's been really useful," says Green. "They understand the relationship between the theatrical nature of games and how to bring sound design into narrative. One of the challenges with audio games is how to give the right feedback to players. Every action has to have very palpable feedback. They're really aware of that, because their work in theatre is about expressing things that happen off stage in a very easy to understand way."
The effect is incredibly immersive. This world is full of crackly, weird, unsettling noises, and all of them seem to be within reach. They're spooky, but you navigate by them. Bean tells us that we're in a sort of gaol of souls, and that these souls come from different eras. We stumble across the memories of people who died in 1920s disasters, and 1970s drownings. The music drags us back in time. "Writer Neil Bennun is obsessed with 1920s sound," says Green. "There are a lot of gramophones and other early sound technologies in the game."
So it's a game about navigation and memory, all within a sort of faux Victorian ghost story. Later, the souls are guarded by what sound like giant insects that can steal your own. You have to creep around them, walking slowly and quietly, keeping their horrible scuttling noises far to your left or right. Or you can clap, using the hand icons on screen, to distract them, before making off with yet another memory. You need a good pair of headphones to get the proper feedback, but once tuned into this dark world, you really do begin to "see" the noises, see the rooms. And Bean's voice is perfect, filled with menace and gravelly import.
Papa Sangre was a critical success three years ago, hinting at the expansive possibilities of smartphone and tablet gaming. It attracted a large audience of blind and visually-impaired players, who have largely been ignored or seriously sidelined by the video game industry. This game, with its mix of spatial audio and motion controls creates or simulates an understanding of the world that may well be familiar. For the rest of us, it is unsettling and testing, attempting to form a picture of a trap-filled dungeon in which bubbling pools of soul-sucking lava await if one careless foot is placed too close. If you do get caught by an enemy or a hazard, your character is brought back to "afterlife", but the game tells you this has cost you a memory. "You no longer remember your first school sports day," Bean dolefully states.
Ultimately, the effect is a sinister fairground haunted house ride, mixed with a well-narrated ghost story. With my useless in-ear headphones I sometimes found it difficult to locate whether a noise was in front or behind me, the subtleties got lost over my head somewhere, and in the more panicky moments this could get frustrating. But this is a game like all games. It rewards perseverence, it has a system and a set of skills to learn. It's just that here, you're using your ears and not a controller or a sequence of buttons.
Eventually, during the GameCity event, we were led into the Victorian courtroom and allowed to play the game for a couple of hours. The lights were off, and all that could be seen in the pitch darkness was the glow from a dozen iPad screens and the odd shuffling body. Whatever ghosts were in that room, they were receiving short shrift from its living occupants. The supernatural presence we cared about was in our hands, and in our heads.
• Papa Sangre II is available for iPad and iPhone on the Apple app store from today
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